Depends. How’s the Amtrak chess bot?

Underfunded and constantly side-tracked by cargo bots.

...and the Murderbots that have disabled their governor modules.

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

I think the Amtrak way is to bring a physical chess board and challenge human strangers over a nice cup of coffee in the observation car.

The Puget Sound ferries often have a partially-done jigsaw puzzle on one of the tables. You can't finish it in 30m, so people come and do their part and move on. Eventually someone will put in the last piece, I guess, I've never seen it happen.

My last visit to Seattle was in 1998 so I can't confirm this firsthand, but I would bet that when someone finishes the jigsaw, ferry staff bring out a new one.

Usually somebody just scrambles it again, but they are regularly rotated. I don’t have a precise measure, but I would guess every couple of weeks or so.

I love those. I have finished one (well it was missing a couple of pieces), between West-Seattle and Vashon, and what was better was that I contributed to the puzzle earlier on the way from Vashon.

Then stop for 56 hours to allow freight to go by.

I don’t have 5 days to travel across the country.

- it’s 3 days not 5 (e.g leaving NYC Wednesday morning arriving SF Saturday evening)

- the internet connection is excellent (even in most tunnels) so you can work, have video meetings, etc, not to mention play chess online

That's 4 days traveling. Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday. Arriving in the evening doesn't mean you didn't spend that day traveling.

- the internet connection is excellent

I mean, maybe you had a different experience. In my experience in the northeast , the internet service is about as reliable and consistent as the trains themselves (ie not consistent, garbage fire)

Let’s be realistic. I love long distance train journeys, but mainly for recreation. Being on a train for 3-5 days is pretty exhausting no matter how comfortable. I’ve done the 30 day Amtrak pass before and it was fantastic but I wouldn’t be looking forward to that if it was a work trip where I want to fly in and then get back to my family as fast as possible. There’s no way that can compare to a 5-6 hour flight+2 hours at the airport.

If you're not traveling between those specific destinations it can take far, far longer. Amtrak is a joke.

Amtrak is decent on very specific routes and still an absolute joke to anyone who has used trains in Europe, Japan, Taiwan, etc, and no personal experience but I'd imagine China too. My friend takes the Amtrak route up and down the Pacific coast precisely because she's stuck on a train for days and can't be disturbed while doing boring paperwork as an anti-procrastination strategy. Although the observation cars do have great views.

People who have used trains in Japan or Taiwan - islands have never used a train that is anything like Amtrak does and so have no comparison. Even in Europe long distance cross border rail is in most cases pretty bad as well.

However if you only compare the shorter distance rail in those places to what the US has some of the other trains are actually pretty good. Even then though Chicago's trains are a better comparison than anything Amtrak offers

I mean what do you consider long-distance? Inter-railing is a time honoured tradition for European Youth, and many of my generation alone would be very familiar with economy sleepers from e.g. Krakow to Prague or Budapest.

The ICE trains in particular are magnificent, and a worthy alternative to air travel.

https://int.bahn.de/en/trains/long-distance-trains

In Europe you need to cross a country line.

Yes people do it all the time in Europe. It mostly works. However if you follow the space at all you will see a lot of stories about things going wrong - far more than there should be. Amtrak is mostly fine in the US, but there are still far more problems than there should be.

I was rather disappointed by the internet connection on the Cascades line (going Seattle --> Portland and back). As far as I could tell, they use T-Mobile for backhaul. Who are headquartered in Seattle. Yet the connection barely seemed to work for about half of the journey

boo, it's in the middle of no where along part of the route. Tmobile coverage is mainly in urban areas and along free ways no matter what slingblade tells you on the tv commercial. I don't know if you'd get any coverage on parts of that route other than wired.

Just like how sometimes when you're flying over the rockies or into canada you just don't get internets. There's still middles of no where out there. Often not very far from the freeway.

Even tooling through places like Olympia it seemed to fizzle out

Railroads are a great place to run fiber lines, so it wouldn't be hard to set up some towers.

Also starlink.

I did this once from Seattle. It was a good experience, but the internet connection was nonexistent along large parts of the route.

Also one way cost like $1,200.

This wouldn’t bother me as much but it’s really like 5-7 days depending on freight use of the lines and they can’t tell you ahead of time what it’s going to be somehow?

Why not trei a holiday in Sweden this yër? See the loveli lakes.

Skill issue, imo.

Can’t bring your work with you?

That sucks.