Once the trip was planned I went to www.amtrak.com to book it. It's easy to use but watch out for a few snags that will get you if you're not carefull. click below for details
The Amtrak website is really easy to use but you need to watch out for a few things. I clicked the Multi-City Trip option, entered CHI to PDX and a date, PDX to EMY and date, and then EMY to NPV and a date. This is where it gets a little tricky. Amtrak will often offer several options (if available) between locations. Some are options in name only and others are just sort of strange.
Here’s an examples of “What’s in a name?”. Train 27 goes from Chicago to Portland. Train 7 goes from Chicago to Spokane and from there you can catch train 27 on in to Portland. Trains 7 and 27 are the same train from Chicago to Spokane. In Spokane Amtrak splits the train. The front part of it (train 7) goes to Seattle, and the rear part (train 27) goes to Portland. If you book your trip to ride train 7 and then 27, depending on which coach you were on, you might have to get off the train in Spokane to move to the other part of the train. You can book that segment of the trip either way, it’s the same train.
Now for some examples of “What were they thinking?” Lets look at the Emeryville to Naperville segment. Amtrak offered several options. The most direct option was on train 6 that left Emeryville at 9:15AM and arrived at Naperville at 1:47PM two days later. Option two, leave an hour and twenty minutes earlier and go to Sacramento, wait there for 90 minutes to catch train 6, the same one you could catch at Emeryville and not have to transfer. Option three, catch train 712 at 7:40AM and ride to Bakersfield. At Bakersfield, take the bus for 2 hours to Los Angeles. At LA, catch train 4 to arrive two days later at Naperville at 2:14PM, two days later. Or, option four. Take train 6 from Emeryville to Chicago (past Naperville), wait 2 hours and 30 minutes and catch train 347 back to Naperville, arriving at 6:30PM. The first option makes the most sense unless maybe you want some extra miles under you seat or maybe you need to meet someone for 10 minutes at Sacramento or Los Angeles. Most of the options will cost the same but sometimes the less direct routes will cost more. Take a look at all of the options before making your final choice.
We booked our travel for the first day my nephew would be out of school. As it turned out, by booking it that early we got the non-peak period rates. A week later would have cost us over $100 more. I opted to pickup the tickets in Chicago. I wouldn’t have to worry about loosing them that way. I paid for them in advance with a credit card. By doing that you can go to the kiosk in the ticketing area, using the same credit card you used to pay for the tickets, put that card in the machine and the machine prints out your tickets
I got busy after that. I obtained state highway maps of all of the states that we would be traveling through. Most had major railroad on the maps. I highlighted the routes on the maps. Then I copied the timetables for each route into a spreadsheet. Then I got the Route Guides for each route, viewed other people’s travelogues and notes, radio frequency references, and incorporated all of that on the spreadsheet. When it was all put together I had the timetable with times, miles, locations with notes, host railroad, and radio channel used in that segment. I ended up with a few errors and some missing links, mostly with the radio information. A few times we would pass into a division where the crew changed channels and I didn’t have any info on where the change took place. It turned out to be a great way to track our progress.