June 6th 2008 Ride# 30 BOS-PHL

The ceiling and iron work at the 1st class waiting room seem to be from an age when the railroads had an amazing amount of money. They are so ornate and have so much hand work, I doubt they would ever be duplicated today.

My coupon worked. I went over to the 1st class attendant at exactly one hour before my train departed. 1st class is a little more than ½ full, so I probably would have been able to upgrade even if I had waited a little longer.

Half the train usually empties out at NYC, which means on the PHL-BOS trip, if I get a lousy seat, I can almost always get a better one when the train stops in NYC. I read some stats that something like 52% of Amtrak riders nationwide are from NYC. That would mean that a huge proportion of the Acela riders would be going to and from NYC.

On the BOS-PHL ride, it’s easy to get a good seat because the train originates in Boston. You just have to ask what track the train is on, then get in line at about 4:05pm. They’ll usually announce at about 4:10pm that the train is boarding.

I am in the 1st class handicap seat. I have plenty of room, and the table is big enough for me to use my mouse. To my left is a man reading a stapled paper with a large graph on the front the title is “Greed and Fear”. (No I’m not making this up.) He has a Perrier. There is a woman farther down reading the Wall Street Journal.

Last week when I couldn’t get an upgrade, as a consequence, I met the most interesting woman in business class. Her name was Janet, and she was a psycho linguist from NYC. I had one and only one psycholinguistics course in college. It was taught by Murray Myron, who tracked down criminals by clues in their communication. I recall seeing his picture in the New York Times after the cult fiasco in Waco Texas. He had predicted that the cult was looking forward to a bright future because they were negotiating a book deal with a publisher right up to the end.
Anyway, she wasn’t that kind of psycholinguist; she helped diagnose childhood diseases in the autism spectrum. She was also trained as an audiologist.

She was going up to Boston for a couple days to help her daughter who was going through a very difficult trial. Although her daughter was not in trouble, her worried look reminded me of the time I was in court to testify against a teenage boy who had stolen my car. He was late to arrive, and I will never forget that worried look that only a mother can have.