Anyone know this train? Well I have rode on this one two times before. So this one goes first from Los Angeles formed with the tri-weekly Sunset Limited to San Antonio where it begins its daily service from there to Fort Worth where it meets up with another Texas Eagle that is ready to head on a southbound journey to San Antonio. The northbound Texas Eagle keeps going to when it reaches St. Louis, where an additional Superliner is connected to it for the rest of the way to Chicago. If you don't know what the formation, well here it is for San Antonio to St. Louis. It is one cafe car, one sleeper car, and only TWO coach class cars. Because of this, the train will get PACKED. Every singular seat will be taken up for the entire train. That includes the rooms too. I will always recommend you to book your tickets one week before departure. This train doesn't even have a traditional diner car or an observation car. I remember back when this train was longer, like 7 or 8 Superliners and a baggage car. That was also when the long distance trains didn't have the newer seats. Now for my second train ride, I went between the two exact same cities like on my first ride, but this time it was during what the Texas Eagle is today with the shortened formation. I was going between Temple, Texas and Cleburne, Texas, and it was a pretty nice ride in my opinion, despite how much track swaying there was, because Texas land is not as flat. I believe the max speed you'll reach on it is 70 miles per hour, but still beating some of I-35's traffic. We were late to Cleburne due to a malfunctioning on a siding switch and a problem on one of the signals, so the conductor had to fix that. Still a nice ride. But yeah. While on the train, look at the vestibule between the cars and you'll see how bumpy it is. I liked that because it made me relax in the seat. Yes, that is my style of train riding, very bumpy it is. Now if you were to go between San Antonio and Dallas it will be an 8 hour ride through I think around 300 miles of land. Now say if you were to go from Houston to Dallas, it would actually take maybe a day or two because of having to wait for the Sunset Limited to go from Houston to San Antonio. After that you might have to wait a while for the Texas Eagle to go to Dallas. I wouldn't mind that though, as it means more time on the train for me. All before the HSR is brought to life between Houston and Dallas along I-45 with only one stop, making it just a 90 minute journey through 240 miles of land going over 200mph on a Japanese bullet train.
It's a crime, really, that Amtrak doesn't bother fixing all that damaged Superliner equipment sitting in Beech Grove. Apparently someone in Congress was railing against Amtrak senior management, telling them that if they simply added an extra couple of coaches and sleepers to their transcon trains that they could double their revenue and not incur any additional expenses. But Amtrak management aren't operating with either passengers, taxpayers, or Congress in mind. If they were, they'd bother cleaning the cars and not going out of their way to make the trains an inhospitable as possible. They wouldn't be giving themselves bonuses when they had their worst performance ever.
