Besides being late, things are starting to break. Important things like the restrooms and the airconditioning.
Train 8 / 28 originating on July 18 has turned out to be the train from Hell. Seems like anything that can go wrong, has gone wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t say that yet. We haven’t got to Chicago yet. We’re just pulling into the Twin Cities area.
Mid morning today the vacuum system that make the restroom facilities work failed on our coach. That’s not a major problem. There are four or five other coaches on the train and we just have to walk to the next coach to take care of business. Things got a little worse this afternoon. The restrooms in the coach behind us broke down also. The good news for us is they shut the restrooms in our coach as soon as there was a problem. In the coach behind us they apparently didn’t catch the problem so quickly. The coach smells like a restroom. Most of the people have evacuated the area. So, now we have to go through that coach, through the observation car, through a sleeper, and then to the restroom. Oh, by the way, that sleeper has a problem also. The air conditioner on one end has broken down. I guess the old saying “When it rains, it pours” is true for this train..
We are about to pull into the Minneapolis-St. Paul station. They are supposed to have a maintenance crew meet the train to try and resolve the restroom problem in the coach behind us. They are also picking up another sleeper. I don’t know if they are going to move passengers from the sleeper with the air conditioning problem to that sleeper or if that sleeper was full of passengers boarding in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
7/20 5:30
Posted by john at July 20, 2006 05:37 PM