But the experience of having to line up in the morning with a hundred other people to board the train & then unload at night to go to a mediocre hotel for a few hours just to repeat the line up the next morning was unpleasant. I much preferred sleeping on the train.
This is good feedback. I might rethink my plans. How were the views? I've considered the Canadian Rockies route just because you sleep through so much on Via.
We did Via from Toronto to Jasper & then took a tour down to Banff & the Rocky Mountaineer from Banff to Vancouver. I'm glad we tried the RM, because Via doesn't go to Banff & we'd never have gone that route otherwise.
But someday we're planning to take Via between Vancouver & Jasper to catch what we missed the first time, and we'd happily repeat the rest of that route on Via, but we have no interest in doing any other RM ever again.
I should also disclose that we were Premier class on Via, which was expensive, but we thought worth the money. RM was similarly priced, but we didn't feel was as worth that price for us.
(Whole package of Via from Windsor, Ontario to Toronto to Jasper, a few nights each in Jasper & Banff, and then RM to Vancouver came to just over US$20k for 2 people in 2022.)
For me a big part of the fun was going to sleep and waking up somewhere new!
I love sleeper trains so much
One of my favorite Amtrak routes is the Texas Eagle from Chicago to LA via San Antonio. (I've only ever taken it as far as Tucson.)
Technically, the TE ends in SA, but you can book a ticket that continues west, and in SA, they drop the train cars continuing west from the TE locomotive & put you on the back of the Sunset Limited going from New Orleans to LA & you continue on with them.
The switch happens overnight, so you go to sleep attached to one train with one layout & wake up to another one. It's trippy.
Soft spot for the SW Chief because that's what we took to see the grandparents in California.
Oh, if you are trying to get from Chicago to LA, SWC is a far better route for sure. I was trying to get to Tucson, so my choices were to SWC to LA & then go east on Sunset Limited to Tucson, or, City of New Orleans to NO & west on the Sunset to Tucson. Or this Texas Eagle hack.
I'm in Portland now, so my choice here is which direction I want for my beautiful views.
I'm in Detroit, which means luckily for me, I am on one of the best regional routes to Chicago (the Wolverine goes between Chicago & Detroit 6 times a day & gets up to 120 mph), for easy access to most long distance Amtrak routes. The downside is they are all long & thus expensive & time consuming.
we were thinking about taking Amtrak from chicago to visit friends outside Detroit but the logistics (and necessity, with little kids) of getting a rental car at the end really makes it hard to justify not just driving
The lack of transit here in Detroit does suck. I'm going in reverse. Not having a car in Chicago is a feature, not having to deal with parking or traffic. If you stick to the central business district in Detroit, you can get away without a car & only stick to the pathetic light rail.