Hi,
I should perhaps have mentioned that the post title comes from a Woody Guthrie song, I am not sure how widely known his music is these days!
I feel sure that one could pass through every station on the Amtrak pdf map in a month, but I am not after any mileage records this trip. There is however a record for visiting every London Underground (aka tube/metro) station:
"The record for visiting all the stations in one day is currently held by Jack Wellsby, a young man of 25 who writes captions for the deaf on BBC television programmes. His record stands at 19 hours, 18 minutes and 45 seconds, set in April 2002. Jack grew up in Nottingham, and became fascinated by the Tube during visits to his grandmother in Northolt. He was particularly interested in the Tube map, which he would stare at for hours, trying to work out the most efficient order in which to visit the stations. "It was a problem that interested me as a mathematician," says Jack, who has a degree in maths. It took him six months to work out a route, so it's not surprising he won't divulge it, except to say that he started at Heathrow Terminal Four at 5.04am and finished at Amersham at 25 past midnight. In his sandwiches, aspirants to the record might like to know, was ham. His toilet breaks were carefully planned. There's a gents, for example, but no ladies, at Mill Hill East. (At mention of this, I told Jack that during my time in East London, there'd been a ladies but no gents at Leytonstone, and his planet-sized brain was set whirring: "I wonder if it balances out across the network ... ) "
Back to topic, I have just reserved the first train so far, taking me 2,438 miles from Chicago to the "golden west". I had better get organised, only 9 more days before I become an inhabitant of that twilight world, known as the Amtrak system..
Ed B)
