On the Acela from Boston to Washington

At the South Station

For now, though, I'm in Boston's South station, which has a rather odd dicotomy: The entrance hall looks like a medium-size, 21st century shopping mall, albeit with an unusual amount of consumer stress-less seating. If, on the other hand, you manage to find the trains (it's not all trivial; try the hatch below the right end of the huge ad at the back wall), you are back in rather less glitzy times:

Don't get me wrong: I like it less glitzy. Still, the contrast is striking, coming from the lofty, bright mall to the platforms with their low, dark ceiling. What is particularly odd about it is that the diesel exhaust fumes are emitted towards the low ceilings, not the high ones.

Coming back to the glitzy part of the station, it was the wifi that again sent me back about 15 years. You see, back then most everyone operating a public wifi access point obsessed about which ports to block, starting with port 25, which was a spammers' favourite. Fortunately, that is by and large over. It's been a while since I last encountered a network that would block port 22 (ssh; that's the one I care about the most) outgoing.

Well, that is until today in Boston's South Station. Amtrack's wifi only lets out http and https for all I can see; I couldn't even fetch mail via pop3, let alone phone home via SIP/RTP. Slightly incredulous, I switched to a network provided by the big CVS (a chain of chemist's stores) here in the station. About the same thing. Then there's an open MassIT-public network, the captive portal of which redirects to a page that's a 404.

Eventually, I ended up typing some e-mail address into the captive portal of the network of the Tavern in the Square. That, finally, was reasonably unencumbered. Hmpf. Dear Amtrak, please just do like (almost) everyone else has in the past 15 years and cut out the stilly port blocks.

On the Train

[11:40] Time bubble: the Acela is a bit like the TEE of the 1960ies in that it claims to not have a “normal” seating area, just “business class” and “first class”. This is of course 100% silly marketing. Sure, you have, by European standards, legroom galore, but that's no different from the coach class I travelled in to Chicago; the seats feel very much the same all around.

On the plus side, the Acela windows are much larger than in Amtrak's Amfleet and Superliner cars I rode in in 2023. But – for reasons I cannot begin to fathom – Amtrak quite clearly still is trying to imitate air travel's look and feel. They actually have overhead baggage compartments with doors:

Given the regular occurrence of turbulences, I can totally understand why airlines have the complicated baggage stores they have. But on a train? In many tens of thousands of kilometers of riding in passenger cars with open racks for storing baggage, I cannot remember a single instance of when a piece of baggage came loose. No: I'm sure someone wanted this to look like you are in a plane. Which would suggest that there are actually people feeling good about air travel. Odd.

And talking about creature comforts, air conditioning in this train is a nightmare; they refrigerate the car to something like 18 degrees centigrade. So, don't forget blankets if you ride the Acela in summer.

Talking about air: just now [12:05] it started to smell of brakes and diesel or kerosene or whatever in the car, and the train came to a stop in the midst of nowhere, perhaps 20 minutes out of Providence, RI. And then ventilation started up big time. Hm. Some sort of announcement of what's going on would be good service, I have to say. [12:10] Ah, the announcement came, but I did not understand the explanation given (there was something about “power cord“ and “inspecting the train“, but that wasn't enough for me to form a theory). The signal to noise ratio for announcements while the blowers are still running on high is rather on the low side.

[added a bit later] As a matter of fact, Amtrack also sent emails to the passengers they knew about. Here's what that said:

Mechanical Assessment: As of 12:21 PM ET, �Acela 2253 is currently experiencing a delay west of Providence (PVD) while the crew conducts a mechanical assessment. Our crew is working diligently to resume your travel as quickly as possible; your patience is greatly appreciated. We are dedicated to providing updates to you as soon as it becomes available.�

Is that useful? Hm. It certainly feels more useful than the mails I've got from Deutsche Bahn.

Oh, and allow me to briefly continue my saga on Amtrak's Wifi. On the train, they don't have badly encumbering port blocking. But they have something exceedingly odd that I've never seen anywhere else before: Their captive portal said, when I tried to click away their “agree to terms and conditions” annoyance:

This request appears to be coming from a non-supported user-agent, or from a known non-browser based application. Please retry your request from a web browser.

I'm not too surprised because my normal browser identifies as a Lynx (so I can keep using Google's search in a pinch without Javascript; I'm not making this up). But why would they do this? User agent sniffing… Well, it's a day of odd time bubbles bursting.

Passenger Information in Connecticut

[12:50] We are somehere in Connecticut by now, and outside of the window there are occasional settlements and in between stretches rather wind-swept water:

Is it the Atlantic ocean? I suspect that much, but regrettably the only piece of passenger information is a LED display at each end of the cabin saying, maximally unhelpfully, “SERVICE TO Washington” (incidentally, also while approaching stations):

This is something of a reminder that I am in rolling stock Amtrak has bought in 2000 and has probably never really touched since then. Mind you, I am absolutely no friend of flickering ad space in trains, and just boasting about unsustainable speeds certainly is not useful either (this image from an ICE in 2016):

But I like the maps they now regularly show on the cabin displays of modern ICEs and that they serve on Deutsche Bahn's on-board wifi (there, it happened: I said something positive about Deutsch Bahn!). Fortunately, I can sync with my own renderng of the Open Street Map now and then. And thus I can tell you that the following photo shows the impressive Gold Star Memorial Bridge (carrying the Interstate 95) spanning the (Connecticut) Thames River near (how fitting!) New London – right in front of the train window:

As I'm writing this, we are passing through large salt marshes… Beautiful. My advice: if you ride the Acela and like the ocean, make sure you have daylight.

Towards New York

[14:30] We have just left in Stamford, CT, where I had a few glimpses of the town's glass palaces through electrical wiring that appeared characteristically improvised:

The symptoms are clear: we are approaching New York. I hence wish the Acela were one of the trains in which passengers get to have a look through the front window: I suspect one should start to see New York's skyline just about now.

But then it is about as exciting to see another electric train pulling out of the station displaying “Grand Central” as its destination. That's the funny thing about travelling near the major metro areas of the USA: there's always something that seems to jump right out of a movie.

[14:50] Yup, now it's New York all right. It's just a bit of a shame they didn't clean the train window:

Going a bit further, I got my view of the New York skyline, extra pictureseque with some bridge (and regrettably I got lost on the map and so I can't tell you which it is) in the foreground; in that sense, that's better than having been on the engine:

[15:15] Uh, again, we're standing. The train crew now announces that what happened near Providence was an “issue” with one of the pantographs that they needed to inspect from the outside. And now some team of technicians needs to come out here and inspect the pantographs again before we are allowed to enter the subway tunnels, where some failure might be harder to fix. So: We're standing again. This gives me time for zooming in on what, given its shape, must be the Empire State Building; but aren't there lots of other skyscrapers around it in the King Kong movie?

[15:45] After covering a substantial distance underground, we have stopped in New York's Penn Station, and it seems almost everyone gets off the train.

The Displays Awake

[17:30] A few hours ago I have mildly complained about the unhelpful static text on the displays above the cabin doors. This turns out to have been unwise. They can show other text, and some time after New York they have started to do just that.

This results in a deluge of useless messages of the type “close the baggage compartment doors”, “buy a first class upgrade”, “if you see something, say something”. And that deluge continued while we were approaching Wilmington, Delaware, where an extra visual information might have been a useful complement to the announcements. Against that, does someone honestly believe flashing messages advertising bonus programs is a good service to anyone? I will give you that many other traffic operators also waste valuable pixel space on attempts to sell their customers things they have not asked for.

Let me qualify that statement by saying that “the cafe is open” might be useful occasionally. I have just tried the “vegan BBQ burger” there, by the way; it was acceptable, but from what I have seen the “cafe” is not an establishment of upscale travelling or whatever Amtrak wants to position the Acela as by having “Business” and “First Class” only. From the limited experience I had, I'd place the Acela catering slightly below what you get in German ICEs and far below ÖBB's dining cars.

Meanwhile, we have just crossed the Susquehanna River. It is quite a view with several bridges and an island. Bonus: The town on the western bank has the pretty name Havre de Grace. The little details you miss when you just fly over the land…

Scary Thoughts

[18:20] I knew I had heard the name Susquehanna River before: it has received a certain international fame – or rather, notoriety – because it provided the cooling water to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor that had had a partial core meltdown in 1979; some radioactive material was also dumped into the River.

Similarly creepy is the large bay in the sun that looked so nice out of the sea-side window (the photos regrettably focused on the window, sorry) What I saw was probably the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a military facility. And if military wasn't creepy enough by itself, in there they also had a reactor go berserk, they used to store chemical weapons on that site and conducted low-dose experiments on humans with them. Oh my.

Well: At least the sun is shining down here.

Washington

Due to the pantograph trouble, we were one hour late in Washington. Ah well. Amtrak has apologised and sent me a $75 coupon for a future Acela trip. It will expire in June 2026, so there's no plausible way I will ever redeem it. I don't know whether it is transferable, but it's probably worth a shot. Send me a mail if you want to try it; I'll give it to you for free[1].

In Washington Union, I had a bit of a hard time finding the entrance to the Metro (the sign is at the very end of the transfer level), but then I was fairly impressed with the density of trains on a Saturday evening, the rolling stock (which feels rather modern compared to Boston's MBTA system) and even the design of the subway stations:

The cutest part of the Washington subway, as far as I am concerned, was the nice singing of the voice asking you to stand back as the doors are closing. It always sounded to me as if the train was actually looking forward to departing:

[1]	Incidentally, by German passenger rights you'd be refunded 25% of the ticket price in cash in such a situation. I wonder if similar regulations in the US and Amtrak just didn't tell me…