> for example the Empire Builder stops at East Glacier in Montana from spring to fall - extremely small town with wonderful hiking, etc.

The southern border of Glacier NP is the railroad.

https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/education/railway.htm

So, in 1891, the continental divide finally was crossed and the rail barrons were trying to get people to use the railroad. They saw people taking steamships out from NYC to Europe to go see the Alps, and, well, they knew a thing or two about mountains, now too.

So the Great Northern Railroad petitioned Congress to make a park in the area that the trains would service.

In addition to the park proper, a number Swiss style chalets were built through the park that were approximately 1 day horse ride apart from each other. With this setup, you could take the train to East Glacier or West Glacier, go hose back riding through the mountains, and then get back on the train on the other side and go home.

While many of these chalets have been lost to time, some still exist and are maintained - https://www.nplas.org/sperry.html https://www.mtpr.org/montana-news/2018-06-06/funding-secured...

> you could take the train to East Glacier or West Glacier

Be careful with this idea; East Glacier train station is not actually in the park, and services at that station are limited (West Glacier even more so). It's possible to rent a car at East Glacier, but I expect it would be expensive. You can walk from the train station to a hotel, then be based out of there, but you will be dependent on the shuttle and bus services to explore the park. Some good details about the current situation in this thread; note that services have changed a lot around COVID, and any information from pre-2019 should be considered as out of date, and not reliable:

https://www.amtraktrains.com/threads/need-advice-for-short-e...

If you like hiking, you can technically hike from town into the park - I've done it even with snow still on the ground.

But depending on what you want to do in the area, you will want to plan ahead.

> While many of these chalets have been lost to time

How can you loose something, less than 200 years old, to time ?!

Three years of no maintenance in the 40s.

> The hotels and chalets were closed for three seasons during World War II. The hotels recovered from the lack of use and upkeep, but most of the chalets suffered irreparable damage. The only two remaining chalets, Sperry and Granite Park, continued to operate, offering overnight accommodations.

As to the weather... I'm going to point out that we're in June now and https://www.nps.gov/applications/glac/roadstatus/roadstatus.... is the current road status.

> Spring plowing has begun. On the west side, the hiker/biker closure is at Logan Creek comfort station, approximately 3 miles past the vehicle closure when road crew is working and at The Loop when the road crew is not working.

Last year, the road was plowed and opened June 27th. https://www.ktvq.com/glacier-national-parks-iconic-road-now-...

Here's video of them plowing it from '08: https://youtu.be/M-9l1PojA6Q

Buildings in the area need constant maintenance.

https://www.nplas.org/goingtothesun.html

> Going-to-the-Sun Chalets stock had dropped considerably among Great Northern executives by the start of World War II. The structures had taken a beating from 30 years of harsh Montana winters. They required endless maintenance and repairs, and weren't considered even remotely historic or significant at the time. Unfortunately the designs were viewed as tired and obsolete in 1940. It was comparable to the way we would view an aging motel built during the 1970s: Very few people would clamor for preservation.

> As troublesome as the chalet complex was in the early 1940s, there were still a few in management who pointed to growth and profit in the recent past, but all that did was stave off demolition for a couple years. The Going-to-the-Sun Chalets stood empty after the war, and were ultimately razed in 1948. Sun Point has been returned to a (sort of) natural state; it takes an archaeologist's eye to recognize the traces of the Chalets.

My family has property in western Montana. There are cabins there that were built in the 1920s that are almost completely disintegrated. And that is just 100 years. This is an area that typically gets an enormous amount of snow in the winter (like 6-7 meters deep) that will completely crush a building if someone is not maintaining it all winter.

I think if something is from a recent as 1920 it’s just been poorly maintained, not ‘lost to time’.

This is a ridiculous distinction. Both examples are highly idiomatic language, with no fixed definition that's even remotely close to what you claim. The original statement was perfectly understandable, and it's obnoxious behavior for you to try to pass your preference off as a "correction".

I don't understand the distinction. If anything is now gone and wasn't destroyed in an unpreventable disaster or purposefully, it was "poorly maintained." Doesn't matter if it is 100 years old or 10,000 years old.

…because if it’s only a 100 years old then there’s hardly any time involved, so not lost to time, just lost.

If you bought an ice cream and drop it it’s not ‘lost to time’ because you can grab another any time. If you drop a Ming vase then you can’t replace that.

Well, there is no reason to maintain most of these structures. They were mining cabins, but the gold mines were closed up long ago. The “time” when these structures were needed has passed, so they are not maintained and are rapidly returning to nature. Soon all that will be left to mark them will be some square iron nails.

It's incredibly easy for an all-wood structure built in 1920 to be completely gone in a hundred years, especially in a harsh climate.

Sure there may be wreckage of it, but it's lost to time.

The 2015 fire in GNP destroyed some buildings and uncovered some historical artifacts too - https://www.nps.gov/gis/storymaps/cascade/v1/index.html?appi...

Weather does wonders on buildings - see the list of Missions in Baja California - many are just barely a foundation, some are absolutely nothing at all left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_missions_in_Baja_Calif...

And that's even without major winter snow storms. I'm sure you could find ruins of the chalets (many of which might have been very rustic by our standards), but not much more.

Weather in the area isn’t a walk in the park, and I would assume the cabins are wood.

So does 'original' swiss chalets, yet, many of them are much older than that.

Many of those weren't abandoned for half a decade in the 40s.

How do you take a cross country train and stop at Montana to do hiking ? Won’t your train and all your stuff on the train have left by the time you finished your hike ?

I imagine the train only stops for half an hour or so for long breaks…

> Won’t your train and all your stuff on the train

…well you take your luggage off the train. Is that really what you were asking?

This is a "I've thought about this"...

Take the Empire Builder to Essex. https://www.amtrak.com/stations/esm.html

At Essex (7:41 pm), disembark, get a room at the Izaak Walton Inn - https://www.google.com/maps/@48.2787345,-113.6113756,3a,75y,...

Spend the following day hiking ( https://www.google.com/maps/dir/48.2784604,-113.6118791/48.3... )

Return to the town, have dinner, get on the train (at 7:41 pm) and continue on.

This becomes much easier with a rail pass: https://media.amtrak.com/2022/03/for-a-limited-time-amtrak-o... / https://www.amtrak.com/USARailPass

1. Disembark with your stuff

2. Hike (leave extra stuff in storage)

3. Take the next train

No different from flying: you disembark and then catch a later train, likely a few days later.

Yeah, some of the most scenic landscape can be found crossing the Rockies.

The Empire Builder actually has a park ranger get on the train and do nature lessons/wildlife sightings from a viewing car. It’s pretty great.

> you can break the trip up into "daytime travel", stay in a city like Chicago for a few days, and then "overnight" to the next city

My limited experience with Amtrak in the West or Midwest is that it's impossible to reliably plan like this. Amtrak is renting access to rails owned by freight carriers and constantly gets delayed or blocked by freight trains with higher priority.

Their "schedule" is an absolute best-case scenario that never actually happens. The trains usually arrive somewhere between 2-8 hours after the scheduled time, and occasionally it just doesn't show until the next day. They have an app that's supposed to give the "accurate" arrival time is often wildly off as well.

Chicago is the exception here, though. It's the core hub of the entire system, and there are no trains that pass through Chicago. A Chicago train will nearly always leave on-time, unless there are equipment issues.

Similarly in the eastern corridor or at least all the major cities between Boston and Richmond, VA.

Air travel has become such a nightmare that I'd rather take a 7 hour train ride than a 1-2 hour flight.

I'm not too familiar with airline ticketing systems, if you don't mind could you clarify what you mean by your 70's ticketing system comment?

The 70s ticketing system ran off of "buckets" where availability of fares at various prices wouldn't appear until previous buckets were emptied, or time ran out. I don't remember the details (my only sleeper car trip was paid with Amtrak miles) but if you studied it and worked it you could predict when new buckets would become available, or when a bucket was about to "expire" and the price might drop. If I remember right there was a sweet spot about six months before, and another very shortly before (and if you wanted to be risky, and knew the line, you could get a coach ticket and ask the conductor to pay to upgrade on the train - that is the cheapest of all if there is space available as it basically ends up being the cost of the meals).

It's also a bit weird in that if you know some of the limitations, you can do things like get a sleeper for overnight only (from the stop around 5PM to the stop around 8 AM say) and then get a coach ticket from then on - which if scheduled right would end up being the sleeper for the whole trip as there's no point in resetting the room.

You could also book "insane trips" that the system wouldn't let you do but were perfectly doable, because it wouldn't correctly recognize that you could make the layover, etc. People would also try to trick it into letting you book trips that wouldn't make sense unless you're trying to ride the train for as long as you can (sleeper car mile purchases were "zoned" in the past - so anything in "Zone 1" would be a fixed amount of miles). They've since changed that to the more standard "miles are just pennies against a normal fair" type of reward.

This is much less doable now than it was some years ago. Amtrak's revenue management has gotten a lot better, and most long distance routes start at the highest bucket pricing, and only drop down into lower buckets if demand sags. Demand is also higher than it was pre-COVID, and I don't think you can predict when buckets will expire.

> It's also a bit weird in that if you know some of the limitations, you can do things like get a sleeper for overnight only (from the stop around 5PM to the stop around 8 AM say) and then get a coach ticket from then on - which if scheduled right would end up being the sleeper for the whole trip as there's no point in resetting the room.

This is also risky, as it depends on the largess of the conductor, who is totally within their rights to kick you out of the sleeper and down into coach at the appropriate time. You also would not get the included meals during your coach segment, and would have to pay for them in the cafe car.

> if you wanted to be risky, and knew the line, you could get a coach ticket and ask the conductor to pay to upgrade on the train - that is the cheapest of all if there is space available as it basically ends up being the cost of the meals

Amtrak has also introduced a pre-train bidding system for empty sleeper car upgrades, so its very rare for a popular train to have empty sleeper car berths that can be purchased from the conductor.

> You could also book "insane trips" that the system wouldn't let you do but were perfectly doable, because it wouldn't correctly recognize that you could make the layover, etc.

Making any Amtrak trip dependent on tight layovers is a mistake, in my opinion; multi-hour train delays are somewhat common, and unless you are booked on a single ticket, Amtrak will not hold a train for you, nor will they reschedule you on a future train if you miss your "connection" between two separately ticketed trains due to their delay. My advice has always been to put an hotel overnight between any connection involving two unrelated trains; it makes your whole trip a lot less stressful.

Yeah, the usual "layover it won't let you book as a single segment" that I would look at were the ones where the system deemed it too long and wanted to count it as two separate trips.

I enjoy Amtrak even for short distances.

In my younger days I traveled a fair amount across the midwest. Greyhound would get me there pretty cheaply and fairly comfortably; but it was boring and many of the bus stations were sketchy (although fellow passengers were always great). My preference was strongly for Amtrak, though. More room, the ability to walk around, order food and drinks, and also to see parts of the country that aren't immediately off the interstate. Compared to flying, the travel time is longer (but you gain some of that back by not having to hang out at an airport for so long), but it's a lot less hassle, there's more room, and it's just ... relaxing.

Realistically how hard is it to just wing it? Like say I book one long trek to start - can I just wing it as I go along or is it a much better idea to plan the whole thing out train by train beforehand?

Depends on what you're willing to do - the worst case scenario may be getting stuck in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere for a day or two waiting for the next train.

But they do have the rail pass: https://www.amtrak.com/tickets/departure-rail-pass.html $500 for ten segments over a month, isn't bad.

I’ve only ridden when that$500 was discounted to $300. Amazing for the price.

Is it true that Amtrak will ship your car for you? I thought about doing a cross country trip and the idea of having my car with me on the other side seemed like a solid plan.

I've done it. It was pleasant. It felt like a throwback, because they had a dinner service where you dined with three other guests (or two if you're with someone). If you have the opportunity, I'd recommend it.

There is a car train, but it runs along the eastern seaboard. Useful if you live in New York and want to visit/move to Florida for the winter.

To clarify, there is only one route in the US that has an auto train. It goes from Lorton, VA (about 30 minutes south of DC on I95) to Sanford, FL (a suburb of Orlando), and in the other direction. It has sleeper berths or regular coach class seats, leaves at 4pm and arrives at 9 am, and is generally full of "snowbird" retirees and families going to Disney.

The fares for this route have historically been dirt cheap, something like $95 one way was common. Adding your car was like $250. I moved from Florida to DC this way with all my possessions crammed into my car. It was pretty fun when they still had a dining car, had some great conversations with other passengers.

I used to work for a shipping company, they did a lot of business shipping cars back and forth to Florida for baseball players doing spring training.

I've heard similar stories from a friend working at a major freight logistics broker here in Midwest, he also arranges the moving of parts for the pair of Boeing jets belongs to the New England Patriots NFL franchise.

It's not something that sits at the front of your mind, but it makes total sense: logistics for professional sports teams must be a whole industry all on its own.

When I worked for the Chicago Bears, I had the pleasure of driving the smallest of the moving trucks to training camps. A max length box truck. Followed by 3 semis _just of equipment_ - clothing, gear, weights that the college didn't have.

It is a circus production every year.

Bummer. Seemed like a great option to travel coast to coast if it was available.

You could arrange to have your car shipped separately, but the costs associated would be large enough that I'd just rent (unless you were moving).

What is the general quaillotynofbthe cars and passengers.

I’ve thought about taking it a few times, just to go somewhere random, but for some reason, my mind always wonders to bad experiences greyhound busses. I’m also in the south, so it’s rare I find an interesting looking route/destination that’s much cheaper than just flying.

Unless it's a short hop (and often even then), even modestly long Amtrak routes will often cost more than flying--and even more if you book a sleeping compartment. There are only a few long distance routes I'd consider--all out West. And I'd pretty much only take them on the western part of their routes.

I only really have experience in the eastern half of the U.S., but on some routes I've found Amtrak significantly cheaper (in coach) than flying, so I consider it if I'm not in a hurry and it's a day train under ~8 hours (not sure if that qualifies as "modestly long"!). The price difference is especially large in Amtrak's favor if you're doing a one-way trip, or to/from smaller cities that don't have much airline competition.

For example, to pick Richmond, VA as a city I know about. Amtrak's Richmond to NYC service is about 6 hours 15 mins, and as low as $32 each way if you buy in advance. Flying is only around 1.5 hours but typically $150 one-way or $200 round-trip. Going the other way, Richmond to Charleston, SC is typically $68 one-way and 7 hours, 15 mins, versus about 3.5 hours and $200 to fly one-way.

I have had zero bad passenger interactions on any long-distance train I've ever been on; part of that may be the cost keeps out the riff-raff, but there's a certain group that travels by train and everyone gets along quite well in my experience.