You can drink a beer at your seat and not even see the ripples in the glass.
When my son was about 7 or 8 (about 20 years ago), we were visiting my folks in Chester County, PA. We took the train to downtown Philly, grabbed the train to NYC, and switched to the subway at Grand Central Station. He didn’t know that I had bought NY Yankees tickets. When we came up out of the subway and he saw Yankee Stadium I thought he was just going to die! It was pre-Acela, but still a nice train ride. Lot of fun doing a day trip to NYC for a Yankees game!
I was born in ‘47. My Dad worked on the New York Central Railroad, and we could ride on the train for free. We didn’t own a car, so it was a treat to be able to ride the train every so often with our parents. We lived in Rochester, New York, and the farthest west we ever went was to Niagara Falls, and then New York City on the other end of the State. My oldest son worked as a dispatcher for Conrail for about 8 years before deciding the job was just too stressful to deal with. By then, Conrail had joined with CSX and Norfolk-Southern, and the area he had to cover was far larger than before. Conrail had good benefits, but if you bid and won a job on a specific shift, anyone else with more time could bump you off of it, and then you’d end back up on the crappy shift. I worked for New York State, and we bid our jobs as well, but once you won the job, it was yours to keep until you retired, died, or bid another job.
I’ll have to find some pretext to check that out. It sounds impossible. Wife and I recently took the Auto Train from Sanford, FL to Lorton, VA. The accomodations onboard were OK, but the trackage was so rough and bad and jarring, I swore they’d never get me on it again.