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Sunday, February 02, 2003

By Jan Ackerman Kleiser, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

As Amtrak's Southwest Chief pulled out of the station in Gallup, N.M., a new passenger, Gerald Pinto, a Navajo guide, joined the train to entertain Amtrak passengers with tales of Indian history.

For the next few hours, Pinto gave passengers of the Chicago-to-Los Angeles train a tour of the life and times of the Native Americans who live in the sparsely populated Indian reservations spread between the red, sandstone mesas of northwestern New Mexico.

His presentation, part history and part geography, emphasized the advanced civilization that Native Americans developed in places such as Chaco Canyon, N.M., long before Europeans discovered the New World. It also served as a sort of infomercial for the train's next stop -- Albuquerque, N.M., about 138 miles east of Gallup.

That's where the Southwest Chief makes a short rest stop and where Native Americans, including Pinto, sell handmade silver jewelry from the train platform.

As the train pulled into Albuquerque, the conductor glibly told passengers that the train would be at the station for less than an hour and the Southwest Chief waits for no one.

"If you miss it, there will be another train by here at the same time tomorrow," he announced.

There's no getting around it, Amtrak's Southwest Chief has a certain charm.

And traveling by Amtrak during the off-season can be dirt cheap, thanks to the special rates that Amtrak offers on the Rail Sale portion of its Internet Web site.

In November, my husband, Rich, and I paid a total of only $260 for two round-trip tickets on Amtrak from Pittsburgh to Flagstaff, Ariz., as part of a 13-day trip to visit relatives near Palm Springs, Calif.

Karina Van Veen, Amtrak spokeswoman, said the offers change weekly and are available only on the Internet. Many long-distance trains are on sale in the fall and winter, except during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

		If you go ... Amtrak Reductions of up to 25 percent in many coach fares were recently announced by Amtrak. Although the actual fares fluctuate weekly, here's a recent sampling. Between New York and Atlanta, for example, the new fare is $84, down from $110; from Miami to New York, it's $66 (previously $88); Seattle to San Francisco is $76 ($101). And as part of Amtrak's Winter Promotion, there is a free companion fare along those same routes, making the New York-Atlanta fare equal to $42 a person for two passengers. If you don't have a companion, Amtrak will still take another 25 percent off the already-discounted fares as part of its winter special. The Winter Promotion portion of the discounts applies for travel through Aug. 28. Tickets must be purchased by Feb. 15. None of the price cuts apply to Northeast Corridor trains. Fares are nonrefundable and other restrictions apply. Also, according to Karina Van Veen, an Amtrak spokeswoman, eBay has other inexpensive deals under Amtrak Auctions. "There are deals out there if people are willing to look for them," she said. Information: 1-800-872-7245 or www.amtrak.com. -- Jan Ackerman Kleiser

"We make tickets available on trains where we have extra seats available. Some of those rail sales are 90 percent off," she said.

By clicking on "Rail Sale" on Amtrak's Internet site, we booked coach fare on the overnight train from Pittsburgh to Chicago for an unbelievable price of $11 each way. The fare from Chicago to Flagstaff was $54 each way. Regular fares would have cost more than $1,000.

Eligible trains and travel dates can change without notice.

En route to the West, we chose to spend a day and a half in downtown Chicago, staying in a hotel where a room was almost as expensive as our entire train trip. The break was welcome. Once we boarded the Southwest Chief, we were on the train for 33 hours.

Almost as soon as I ordered the nonrefundable tickets, a nonspecific terrorism threat was issued for railroads. Naturally, fear of terrorism was never out of my mind.

The railroad was exercising its own kind of caution. When we stopped in Albuquerque, plainclothes police officers got on our car to try to identify a piece of luggage that appeared to be unclaimed. The police flashed their badges as they walked through the car interrogating passengers until the owners of the bag appeared to claim it.

Effective Jan. 16, Amtrak instituted several new security measures. Passengers are required to produce valid identification, a photo driver's license, passport or other photo ID, when purchasing tickets or checking baggage.

Besides being nonrefundable, these bargain rate tickets had other downsides. At these prices, we had to travel by coach, which was a little like camping.

Amtrak provided small pillows, but we carried stadium blankets, water bottles, flashlights, playing cards, books we had been meaning to read for years, toothbrushes and a flask for those times when we didn't think we could stand another minute on the train.

Some of our young, hip traveling companions brought laptop computers and games and portable compact disc players. One young woman was knitting. The fellow sitting across from us for much of the way seemed intent on draining the train's beer supply, even at $4 a bottle.

In addition to the Navajo guide tour, Amtrak provided movies in the observation and lounge cars -- "Spider-Man" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."

We found that there was ample leg room, and since the train wasn't crowded, we were each able to claim a double seat with foot rests. Even with all that space, sleeping was an art form that involved elaborate contortions.

All told, we spent about 85 hours on Amtrak trains on our round-trip journey, sometimes speeding and sometimes creeping across 10 states. We chugged across the endless farms of Kansas, stopped in train stations at 3 a.m. in Dodge City to pick up passengers and passed through Galesburg, Ill., site of the Abraham Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates.

During the trip from Chicago to Flagstaff, we had just two opportunities to get off the train and stretch our legs. One was the jewelry stop in Albuquerque. The second was in La Junta, Colo., about 182 miles southwest of Denver, a tiny town with a long history as a servicing area for the old Santa Fe Railroad.

The train had one breakdown when one of its engines developed a problem coming through the mountains of New Mexico, which left us sitting cold on the tracks after dark. It felt downright eerie.

"I hope the other trains know we are here," said a fellow passenger.

The engineers eventually resolved the problem, but we arrived in Flagstaff after midnight, an hour and a half late. Fortunately, I had booked a room at the Flagstaff Holiday Inn, which has a relationship with Amtrak and expects the late arrivals. The motel paid for a cab to pick us up and had a car rental service, which made for easy arrangements for our next leg of the trip, a drive across the desert in California.

The dining car on the Southwest Chief was pleasant, with cloth tablecloths and a limited menu that ranged from filet mignon at $18.50 to vegetable lasagna for $11. A basic breakfast, of French toast, pancakes or eggs, with coffee, cost between $7 and $8 and was quite good. All overnight trains accommodate smokers.

In booking the tickets over the Internet, I never talked to a human being. It's hard to reach one at Amtrak, where most telephone calls involve an automated female voice who calls herself "Julie" and sounds much too chipper to be working for a train system that is losing enormous amounts of money and is threatened with extinction.

In fact, the most difficult part of the entire trip was trying to summon a cab at Pittsburgh's Amtrak Station on a Saturday afternoon. We called and called for a cab, but none arrived. After rejecting the services of a half-dozen jitney drivers, we finally hauled our luggage across Liberty Avenue to the Greyhound Bus Station, where we were able to hail a cab.

This was my second Amtrak vacation across America. It was far superior to a journey in the 1980s, an experience that I mainly remember as being long on delays and short on service.

My husband said he would definitely like to take a long train trip on Amtrak again, "in another 25 years or so." I would like to do it again much sooner, but only if the price is right and I have a lot of time to meander across America.