Hi guys welcome back, today I’m going to talk about my present for my 12th birthday, going on the Amtrak from Chicago to St. Louis!!! This present was from my parents for my 12th birthday! So first of all we didn’t have enough time to do it until spring break so I’ll talk about my experience! We actually took two trains to get to St. Louis, the Metra to get from my house to Joliet Union station, then a Amtrak Midwest train from there! The Metra train was fun and short but when we got to Joliet things got pretty fun. We had about 45 minutes in between when we got to the station and when our Amtrak train departed, so of course I had to go up to the Amtrak platform where you can see trains from Amtrak, BNSF Chillicothe division, and Union Pacifics North line. First I saw a BNSF intermodal but I didn’t get up to the platform in time to see the whole train but soon it wouldn’t matter because something better was coming! I waited for a little bit longer and than my waiting payed off when I saw a BNSF train headed by a two BNSF SD40-2s and one of them was a former Santa Fe unit which still had the famous Blue Bonnet paint scheme which used to worn by Santa Fe’s fast freight locomotives!
So as the train kept going on with endless amount of cars I was amazed to see a caboose at the end of the train which is pretty rare because most cabooses were replaced by EOTs. Ok so about 15 minutes later our Amtrak train showed up headed by Amtraks newer SC-44 locomotives which is usually the main power for most Amtrak Midwest trains. When the train came to a halt we decided to go into the new Amtrak Venture cars which Amtrak got in 2022 from Seimens. The cars were very nice but a little bit stiff but overall really nice cars for coach class. The line we were riding is the Amtrak Lincoln Service.
The ride took about three and a half hours and it was really fun with only 5 to 6 stops. We came into St. Louis Gateway station at around 10 pm. Now we’re gonna take break there and I’ll talk about the rest in part 2!!
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