Amtrak

October 30, 2014 | transit | travel | dc |

I took the Amtrak train for the first time from Philadelphia down to Washington DC this weekend and I was pleasantly surprised at how awesome it was! I spent a lot of time out on the road these past few years, so I have gotten used to the many annoyances of airline travel and mass transit. The last time that I was on a non-commuter train was in Ukraine when I was very young. It was certainly a very different experience to say the least! Here are my favorite parts about Amtrak:

You can get your tickets on your smart phone a few minutes before the train leaves. A very stress free experience!
Even with a lot of people riding the train the boarding process is smooth, quick, and painless.
There is usually a ton of room on board.
The seats are big and comfy, even in coach!
They have a power outlet at every seat.
They have free wifi.

Taking the train was so much better than driving down I-95 and dealing with the traffic. It was a very relaxing and enjoyable experience. It is a shame that the train system only seems to make sense on the East Coast (and perhaps the West Coast too). For example, in Cincinnati there is only one train that comes a few times a week at around 3:00 a.m. Most people in Cincinnati do not even know that the Amtrak comes there. I am not sure if we will ever get to experience an efficient high speed rail system in the US, but I am looking forward to a few more trips up and down the East Coast!

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Clicks Communicator from Chris Hannah
A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
[RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

6,000 curl stickers

I am heading to FOSDEM again at the end of January. I go there every year and I have learned that there is a really sticker-happy audience there. The last few times I have been there, I have given away several thousands of curl stickers. As I realized I d…

via daniel.haxx.se January 6, 2026

Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026)

Today's links Code is a liability (not an asset): AI psychosis, tech boss edition. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Coldplay CD DRM; Star Wars Wars; Digital manorialism vs neofeudalism; Transvaginal foetal sonic bombardment:…

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow January 6, 2026

KVM migration from intel to AMD fails with missing cmp_legacy feature (+ solution)

Context I'm running a virtualisation lab environment, with four Intel-based CPUs (i5-6500) and one AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 2200GE. When migrating virtual machines from one of the Intel hosts to the AMD host, the migration would fail with the following error: er…

via Louwrentius January 6, 2026

Generated by openring