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Hello everyone,

I missed this thread, sorry for that.

It would have been actually more appropriate to introduce myself before asking your help in my researches...

Age 37, soon 38. Married, 3 children, french (nobody's perfect :) ). I have been a train engineer at La SNCF since 1999.

I am a big fan of the US railroads, I just love your trains, locomotives and landscapes...with a special interest for the Amtrak trains and history.

Merci à vous.
 
We lived in your country for two years. Lived in Vaucresson and rode the SNCF to La Defence to get the Metro.

Our daughter rode the SNCF to St Cloud to school. Welcome to Amtrak Unlimited.
 
Then, it might be possible that I drove you at La Defense or Vaucresson during my first year in the company. Paris---St Nom-la-Bretèche is a line on which they assign "young engineers".

Do you remember them ? ;)

z6400_psl_1.jpg
 
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X996 said:
Hello everyone,

I missed this thread, sorry for that.

It would have been actually more appropriate to introduce myself before asking your help in my researches...

Age 37, soon 38. Married, 3 children, french (nobody's perfect :) ). I have been a train engineer at La SNCF since 1999.

I am a big fan of the US railroads, I just love your trains, locomotives and landscapes...with a special interest for the Amtrak trains and history.

Merci à vous.
Click to expand...
Welcome! I am an engineer in the US, if you have any questions about operating rules, US locomotives, etc, shoot me a PM.
 
Hello All. I've been enjoying this forum for a couple of years now but have not posted. I'm not a very good writer and even worse at typing, but I have a dream trip coming up and I think I will bust if I don't talk about it a bit.

About me/us: I'm 52, a project manager/designer/estimator married to a young 51 year old retired deaf education counselor. My first train trip was in 1971. Our Cub Scout troop did fund raising for three months in order to take a train trip from Dyersburg, TN to Fulton KY and back. I do not recall the name of the train but our trip was within a week of their last run before Amtrak took over and the passenger line was discontinued, hence the timing of our trip.

Next train trip 1992: The now wife and I eloped to New Orleans to get married along with about 15 family members (we were not very good at keeping secrets). On board the City of New Orleans we struck up a conversation with the conductor and when he learned that we were on our way to get married he upgraded us from coach to a bedroom .... free! From that moment on we were hooked. We go to New Orleans every other year via the City of New Orleans, only because the wife and daughter think they have to go to a beach every other year. Little did that conductor know what deal he was making for Amtrak. I wonder if a conductor could/would do that type of a thing today? Last year I took the CONO to Chicago and a train over to South Bend for a business trip. Limited vacation time typically prevents us from longer trips.

We have one daughter who will graduate this year - top of her class (just a little bragging there, sorry). Apparently intelligence in our family skips every other generation. We live in a rural town with a population of about 90 if you count a few pets. This requires a fifteen minute trip to get a gallon of milk, just to paint a picture. We are socially liberal (border line libertarian) and fiscally (common sense - not nut case) conservative. We support Amtrak at every opportunity, being in Tennessee that mostly involves informing people that Amtrak exists, and an occasional letter/email/post to an elected official.

Our Dream Trip - This summer after graduation the wife, daughter and I are booked for a trip using AGR points as follows:

NBN to CHI via CONO

5 hours in Chicago - Pan Pizza/Sears Tower/Navy Yard

CHI to SEA via EB

48 hours in Seattle - Site Seeing TBD

SEA to LAX via CS

23 hours in Los Angeles - Site Seeing TBD

LAX to FLG via SWC

15 hours at Grand Canyon

FLG to LAX via SWC

1 hour layover in LAX(US)

Lax to SFW via CS

55 hours in San Francisco - Site Seeing TBD

SFW to CHI via CZ

5 hours in Chicago - Site Seeing TBD

CHI to NBN via CONO

Arrive home 4:00am and at work at 7:00 am .... ok maybe 8:00am :(

We have two roomettes for each leg of the trip, as we can no longer book a bedroom for three. There went 140,000 points that took for ever to save up. The daughter will probably never want to even see a train again! The poor wife has no choice. :)

Thanks for all of your informative posts and for the opportunity to share the pleasure of train travel.
 
A belated welcome! :hi:

And I agree that 15 hours is a very rushed experience at the GC!

90 people in your town - and that's small? :huh: For me, that's huge! I could say that my town is so small it doesn't have a traffic light - but that's taken. :lol: So I'll say my town is so small that I live in the same building as the Post Office! (It's true - my apartment shares a wall with the Post Office.)
 
Thanks for the welcome guys.

I am taking 10 days of vacation, the most I have taken at one time in 25 years. With age sneaking up on me and a daughter in college I feel the need to have several vacation days in reserve. We will be taking a one day tour out of Flagstaff for the Grand Canyon. I would like to do more, but so much to do and the wife wants to spend some time in San Francisco, and I want to spend some time with her in San Francisco.

WOW you have a Post Office!
 
I'm 34, have been with NRPC for almost three years now and love my job, I find this forum very informative and interesting to people's points of view from the other side. I'm new to this site so I'm just exploring a little at the moment, I don't even know how to upload a picture and edit my profile.
 
Welcome aboard the AU Express! :)

To edit your profile, when signed into your account click on your name in the top right corner. Then click on "settings" and you can edit your profile. To include pictures to a post, one of the icons on top of the reply box is to include pictures. For some reason for me when using an iPad, I do not get the icons.
 
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I, too, have been visiting this forum for several years, but joined last year. I haven't posted much as I have been in "learning mode."

I am a retired Park Ranger who spent 33 years with the U.S. National Park Service, retiring from Shenandoah National Park. I still live in the Shenandoah Valley with my beautiful wife and (hopefully) soon to be employed grown children. I have my own business, teaching and consulting in incident, event and emergency management. I am also a volunteer in the Trails and Rails program, a partnership between Amtrak and the National Park Service.

As a kid, I grew up in New England, living in a small town on the coast of Cape Ann in Massachusetts. I loved going to the harbor and watching the yachts, lobster boats and TRAINS (the tracks ran across the harbor on a causeway with a drawbridge; was B&M at the time, now MBCR). In 2012, I had a contract on the west coast and had to travel between Los Angeles, Sacramento and Portland. I had a weekend to make each move, so I started taking Amtrak's Coast Starlight. Well, this re-ignited my interests in trains and I have been riding ever since (I even joined AGR and got an AGR credit card).

Hope to meet fellow AUers in the future!
 
:hi: Welcome Aboard! Hopefully you can make it to the Gathering in San Francisco in October and get to meet the Wild and Crazy Gang from AU! There are just enough "Regular" Members to keep the Rest of us on the Right Track! ^_^
 
I should go home, but I'll take some time to write in this thread instead :)

I'm a 24-year-old art teacher, from Lincoln, Nebraska now living in Pawnee City, Nebraska (Yes, childhood home of Larry the Cable Guy). I teach Art from Kindergarten all the way through high school in our small rural district. It's been a change moving to a small town by myself AND going through my first year of teaching (any teachers here that can relate? Hah!) but I love small town life.

I took the Zephyr to California when I was in college to visit my best friend, who lives near LA. It wasn't the perfect trip (Amtrak forgot to take my checked bag off the CZ when we got bustituted out of Sacramento because we were too late for me to make my connection to the San Joaquin...and I didn't get a notification about them finding my bag until it had returned to Chicago) but I was hooked anyway. I've always wanted to take another trip, but since I spent my summers as an activities facilitator at a summer camp, I never had time.

But I really needed something to look forward to this summer, as a kind of "hurrah!" to having completed my first teaching year. So I've booked another trip to California, this time planning a little more strategically so that I (hopefully) won't have to spend any time on a bus :)

Anyway, besides my profession and Amtrak plans, I'm into weird things like vintage motorcycles, ceramics, Japanese culture, videogames (although I haven't had time to play any since school began...I plan to pick up an MMO over the summer).

I'm really excited to bring my sketch book on the train this year, maybe if any of my drawings are half-decent I'll post them with my trip report!

I look forward to being a more active member and less of a lurker, although my knowledge of amtrak is slight. I'm more of a color commentary forum member.
 
Cina said:
Anyway, besides my profession and Amtrak plans, I'm into weird things like vintage motorcycles, ceramics, Japanese culture, videogames (although I haven't had time to play any since school began...I plan to pick up an MMO over the summer).
Click to expand...
My boyfriend and I met on World of Warcraft. ;) We've been together for four years.
 
That's awesome! I played Everquest and Everquest 2, might pick up eq2 again this summer; I'd try WoW but I'm not sure I wanna pay per month!
 
Cina said:
That's awesome! I played Everquest and Everquest 2, might pick up eq2 again this summer; I'd try WoW but I'm not sure I wanna pay per month!
Click to expand...
Evercrack is the reason he didn't go to grad school. ;) He was all set to apply, and then his friend got him hooked.
 
SarahZ said:
Cina said:
Anyway, besides my profession and Amtrak plans, I'm into weird things like vintage motorcycles, ceramics, Japanese culture, videogames (although I haven't had time to play any since school began...I plan to pick up an MMO over the summer).
Click to expand...
My boyfriend and I met on World of Warcraft. ;) We've been together for four years.
Click to expand...
Aloha

Have you attended WOW convention? 2 years ago I worked their Anaheim convention.
 
SarahZ said:
Cina said:
That's awesome! I played Everquest and Everquest 2, might pick up eq2 again this summer; I'd try WoW but I'm not sure I wanna pay per month!
Click to expand...
Evercrack is the reason he didn't go to grad school. ;) He was all set to apply, and then his friend got him hooked.
Click to expand...
Evercrack was the reason I became nocturnal and reclusive for an entire summer. So I understand! :lol:
 
GG-1 said:
Aloha

Have you attended WOW convention? 2 years ago I worked their Anaheim convention.
Click to expand...
No, we haven't. We're both terrified of crowds. We can sit in a Q&A, movie presentation, speech, and things like that, but when you have a ton of people just milling around and trying to walk to various displays, I start to get claustrophobic and panicky, and he just can't stand people in general. ;)

We do like checking out the costume contest winners, though. Some of those people put a TON of time into them, and the results are amazing.
 

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