Amtrak: New Orleans ➡️ Tucson 7.5 & 8.5

*We did New Orleans to Tucson (opposite direction)*

I don’t quite know why we thought that it would be better to travel 35h by train (more precisely: a train that is hardly ever on time and sometimes is delayed up to 9 hours) than flying. 🤔 I truly can’t remember. But anyway, that’s what we did. Oh boy, oh boy… It was an experience I wouldn’t want to miss. But I probably also wouldn’t want to do it again…

Oh wait a minute we actually need to do it again ..😂 San Francisco to Seattle. But that’s a short one, that’s only 24h. We’ll manage. 😅🙃

Ok, first of all, the trains are huge and there’s lots of regularly cleaned toilets, a café/diner and a board restaurant.

You definitely do have more space than in a Railjet as there’s a healthy distance between seats and you can also slide the seats back in order to sleep (Correction: try to sleep)

One thing that’s definitely worth copying (ÖBB & DB, this one’s for you!) is the observation deck:

Ok now for the downsides: The trains go really, really slow, they frequently need to stop in order to either let other trains (only cargo trains, there are no other passenger trains) pass or for a trillion other reasons. When leaving New Orleans we already stopped right after taking off and it took us about 50 minutes to get out of new Orleans due to frequent stops and a very slow pace.

*This is the food they offer when you book the cheap seats we had. So glad we took at least some food with us..*.

... for the rest of the journey we had to live on snacks and frozen food.

Unfortunately the restaurant was not open to all passengers but only welcomed those who booked a “roomette” or a category above that but not for 3rd class passengers like ourselves 😤

Vegan Tamale with hot sauce was probably the best thing on the menu. They charged 6,5$. We saw the very same product in a supermarket for 2,5$… 🙄

The only thing from the menu that was really worth its money was the coffee! ☕

*Spending time at the observation deck. We met some very nice and interesting people there!*

Arrived in Tucson after 36 or 37 hours being only one or two hours delayed! According to other passengers this is basically “on time” for Amtrak standards, as most Amtrak trains are usually delayed by several hours:

We met two really nice men on the train. The older one, Bob, a 82-year old Vietnam veteran and veterinarian, told us that he had travelled from New York to New Orleans. His train was delayed by 9 hours, so he arrived at three in the morning. Yet, he also caught our train in NOLA the very next morning and continued to L.A. there he will spend another night and will then continue for Seattle. I take my hat off to this man, aged 82!!

I must say I totally understand now why Americans prefer flying: the distances are humongous, it’s very expensive and the offer is so limited: there’s only very few lines, they sometimes don’t even operate on a daily basis (if they do, it’s just that one train per day which means that you might arrive at your destination at 3 am for example. And there’s no other option, take it or leave it).