For the most part, the coach seats are pretty quiet. People tend to chat in the sightseer’s lounge and the dining car. Otherwise, the coach car is effectively a bedroom just with many beds in it. Mostly people don’t sit next to each other, so there is one person to every pair of seats. Those who are traveling together tend to opt for the proper rooms in the sleeper car. They are sold per room (not per person), and they sleep two to three, so it’s possible but expensive for a solo traveler. The fanciest ones have private bathrooms with showers! Occasionally, there will be a phone conversation in coach, but most of the route has no cellular service – once outside of California, it was mostly only available in the towns where the train stops.

Here’s the crowd going to Reno in the sightseer’s lounge

I believe this is the most basic sleeper room – there’s a bunk bed that folds down from the top.

So the challenge with sleeping in coach is mostly not about noise but physical configuration across the two coach seats. The seats are wide though (like first class airplane seats), with no arm rest between them. They recline to about 45 degrees, and there is a living-room-style adjustable leg rest that is a bit short and came to my calves. There is a good amount of leg room between seats, but it was just short of allowing me to stretch my legs straight in front of me. I could achieve straight legs when situated diagonally though, and this was an okay sleeping position. Once I got sore from that, I could go into a horizontal fetal position across the seats. I was able to get a not great but okay amount and quality of sleep.

This is meant to show my towel drying setup, but one can also get a sense of the size of the coach seats.

However, the last day of this 2.5 day train ride involved the conductor repeatedly yelling “Omaha, Omaha!” around 3 am in order to wake up the guy behind me when we arrived there. I anticipated this the evening before when I saw Omaha on his seat marker, and the same thing happened in the middle of the previous night when we got into Salt Lake City. The conductors do keep track of where people are departing and make a point to wake them all up, which is nice unless you are trying to sleep nearby. Then somewhere in Nebraska or Iowa while I was still trying to sleep at about 7:30 am, some loudmouth old wise man came on and sat behind me and began yammering on about rail trivia to the younger guy who was accompanying him. He also tried to geek out with the conductor about something, and when the conductor went away, the guy said to his friend, “eh, he doesn’t know anything. It’s just a job to him.” As I recalled, the rule was that quiet hours were in place on all cars except the Sightseer’s Lounge between 10pm and 8am, so I considered asking him to take the conversation somewhere else, but I thought the situation would prevent me from being able to fall asleep afterwards anyhow. The guy had heard about an oil train derailment on the route that he was taking to Boston later (which was the same route I was going to take next), so he was talking to an Amtrak phone support rep to re-route him, and the guy asked to be put on other train lines that he knew of course. He required some kind of mobility assistance, so the phone rep asked about red cap service in Chicago, and the guy made a point to say, “yes, out of the three you have left there, I could use a red cap in Chicago.” He and his companion conveniently left for breakfast, so I was able to get about one and a half more Zs before they came back and he started telling stories and trivia about everything we passed. Even in a spot that looked like absolutely nothing aside from wide open fields of hay, he had something to say about it. We went alongside a one-lane road with no traffic lights, and he told a story about how he saw a traffic accident when he was driving there. When the train slowed down, he was trying to guess the speed and noted the reason why that section of track required that speed. When the train lurched, he called out the engineer on poor form. When the train was going at a normal speed, he recalled the time when that section of track was in worse shape and required a slower speed. In another context, he would have been fine. Heck, he would have been an interesting tour guide – I just wasn’t there for the narrated tour.

In order to avert any potential problems from said derailment on the upcoming line, I called Amtrak and had the usual miscommunication with Julie, the automated support agent and then talked with a human who confirmed that yes, there was a freight train derailment around 1 am, but it shouldn’t affect the trains I would continue on to. So I kept my reservation as it was, and I was glad to know that the narrator would not be sharing it with me.

The snack car attendant, who was in her post for the entire trip, announced that she was going to be closed for the last hour and a half or so of the ride. Not sure if that was supposed to be the schedule, but I got the sense that it was more about being done with it.

The train arrived early about 50 minutes early into Chicago, so the crew turned the train around to back it into the station. This involved passengers being asked to remain in their seats so that conductors were free to traverse the train. One opened the back door of the rear car and blew a whistle to alert anyone around the tracks.

A decidedly one-direction-at-a-time stairway was the only non-emergency way to get down to the platform. I followed the line down, and when I was right near the bottom some belligerent and probably drunk guy tried to push past me to get up the stairs, which was not really possible with bags on each of our shoulders. He said he had forgotten something in his seat. I told him to let me down first. Behind me was a conductor who was the last in line, and the conductor had an altercation with the guy and asked if he had been drinking. Inside the station, the same guy had another altercation in the baggage claim / rental locker area. I mostly missed it because I was planning what to do in Chicago before I met up with a friend for a much needed shower and a quick dinner. But the guy shouted something including “nigger” and then walked off, and I noticed that everyone in the room was watching in shock.

I had some good times on the train (more on that later), and I’m glad I took that trip. But at this point, it was nice to be off a train for a few hours.