CHARLOTTESVILLE: Train Troubles

THIS IS SOMETHING YOU DON'T want to hear when you're riding Amtrak:

We're going 10 miles an hour over this stretch because Amtrak sold this track and the contractor won't maintain it.

That's according to one of my old college newspaper colleagues who has been blogging about his global travels, which most recently took him from Charlottesville, Va., to Washington, D.C., via Amtrak ... behind schedule, of course.

(I actually didn't know that Charlottesville was served by Amtrak, but according to route maps, the city is served by the Crescent Line between New York and New Orleans, via Washington and Atlanta.)

WHILE THE QUOTATION ABOVE is certainly a classic overheard-on-Amtrak type of quote, I still think the broken door situation on my train trip from Washington to Chicago two summers ago takes the cake:

The only thing I’m worried about is the sewage from the next car.

Oh, where have the glory days of travel gone? I feel that our increasing transportation ailments will stir up a thousand Charles Dickens-type dispatches of our daily pains of getting from point A to point B.

>>"Better Train Service in China and Bangladesh" [A Backpack and a Keyboard]
>> "Door No. 31543 and the 17-Hour Journey Across Six States" [The Washington Oculus]
>> "Omnibuses" [The Charles Dickens Page]