I rode AMTRAK for the first time in my life....last July. It was a 18-hour trip from DC to Birmingham. Got a cabin, and did the whole grand dining room tour episode. On a scale of one to ten....I’d give it a four. It was pleasant to note the landscape....but the track is unstable and you can’t sleep on any part of the railway in NC or Georgia. The food is marginal but free (because I got the cabin). And the cabin car felt like it was manufactured in the 1970s....with the toilet barely working and nothing really that clean.
So, to the European railway. I travel a good bit, and am very familiar with conditions. I won’t rate anything on the German railway system less than an ‘8’, except the toilet paper which is more like sandpaper. You could easily sleep on any train, and most will run forty to fifty mph. Drinks and food aren’t outrageous like Amtrak. And the train stations in Europe don’t make you feel like you just coasted into the worst part of Memphis on a Friday night.
Took the train to Seattle a few times from MN as a yute.
The only reason we could somewhat afford it was the half price discount for dad working for the railroad.
Hartford's Union Station is in an area if some bars and restaurants. Tampa is at the edge of downtown.
I've traveled by rail in Germany and France and definitely agree. It's a bit amusing, though, that a few miles outside of Paris you see the same sort of things you do near Memphis - abandoned industrial sites, auto salvage yards, etc.
Oddly, my last Amtrak experience (around ten years ago) was a trip to Memphis from New Orleans. In addition to the arrival experience that you described, I got there four hours behind schedule. All because Amtrak serves as sort of a public bus, stopping at every unmarked crossing to let one or two people board and pay a small fee to ride a few unmarked stops north. Actually, a bus would've been faster.