Since Nene was going to be in town for her high school reunion, she thought it’d be a good opportunity to try Amtrak’s Sunset Limited train from Los Angeles to New Orleans. And she invited me! So the day after her reunion we met up in Loma Linda, and she drove us out to Los Angeles Union Station.

This is the front of Union Station. Prior to opening in May of 1939, Los Angeles had one station for each train line (Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, and Union Pacific). Union Station was designed by the same folks who architected Los Angeles City Hall, and it is one of the city’s landmark buildings.
The original ticket lobby with its 62-foot-high ceilings. We got there early, which turned out to be a good thing since we ran into one of the craziest rental car situations I’ve ever heard of. The Hertz website will let you book a car return at Union Station … but there is no Hertz at Union Station. There is an Avis counter, there is a Budget counter, and there’s a third counter that is empty (and looks like it has been for a while). So Nene ended up spending hours on the phone (I have this same photo three hours later), talking to five different people (she had to explain to each one that if we returned the car to a real Hertz location like LAX then we’d be stranded with no way to get to our train).

Some Hertz employees thought she should leave the car at Union Station with the keys locked inside (with the warning that Hertz would charge her for both the Union Station parking bill and the cost of breaking into the car to get the keys). Finally she found someone who saw the danger of leaving the car (she’d be liable if something happened), and who HIRED A TOW TRUCK to get the car from Union Station and take it to a real Hertz location. So we waited with the car until the tow truck showed up, handed off the keys, and then went to catch our train (marveling at our good luck to be at Union Station hours ahead of time–there was no way we would have made our train if the timing had been different).

The incompetence, the neglect, the entire situation baffles me. As I type this, Hertz’s website still lists Union Station as option number 16 for the Los Angeles area. I love Hertz for the Mustang GT-H, but I think I’m going to go with LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE next time I rent a car.
While Nene was on the phone, I had a lovely afternoon exploring Union Station, finding the Amtrak lounge, and enjoying a vegan brat from Homebound Brew Haus (located in what used to be Union Station’s Fred Harvey restaurant, Fred Harvey being the guy who basically invented train food/hospitality). It was a delicious brat.
Since the trip to New Orleans takes two days, we booked a roomette in the sleeper car (a roomette is the cheapest sleeper option), and since we booked a roomette, we got access to the Amtrak lounge at Union Station. In addition to a delightful selection of free snacks, sodas, coffee, and tea, the lounge has its own restrooms, and it offers free luggage storage in case you get there early and want to explore Los Angeles without your roller bag. So we took advantage of all of the above. (Nene surprised me with the green suitcase for this trip! It is way better than the drag-the-bag-behind-you style. And it’s pretty.)

Booking the sleeper car also gives you access to Amtrak’s red hat service, which means a red cap-wearing employee loads you and your luggage into a golf cart and drives you to the train. (You load up directly from the Amtrak lounge, take the back way through a gate, and get to the train earlier than the coach class.) With the anticipation of your upcoming train ride and the cool California evening air, it’s not unlike the tram trip at Disneyland.
The roomette is small, basically a bunk bed with a sliding glass door. (Our luggage wouldn’t fit in the room, so we stored it in the luggage rack in the hallway). During the day you can push the top bunk up and lock it into the ceiling. Then the lower bunk slides apart to become two lounge chairs. There’s also a small table that pulls out between the two chairs that has the imprint of a chess/checker board on it. When we boarded the train, our sleeper car attendant had the bunks made up for us (she did the conversion to/from bunks twice a day, plus took care of anything else we might want like bringing a cup of coffee).

There’s a narrow (maybe one puffer jacket sleeve-wide) closet with some hangers, a box of tissues, two bottles of water (the water spigots on the train didn’t really work, so they have cases of water bottles available for drinking water), and one blanket and pillow set for each bunk (the internet recommended brining a second pillow from home, which we didn’t do). There’s some great reading lights (bright to the reader and nearly invisible to your bunkmate), an overhead light, and climate control (a fan in the ceiling for cool air, and a radiator along the window for heat). The air conditioning sort of worked, but the first day was broiling and the second day was too cold (the staff tried to make adjustments but never got it quite right, and it became such an issue that even the passengers in coach had heard about it). And although there is a door to the roomette, it doesn’t cut down on noise, and you can clearly hear crew and passengers getting on the train at 4 am (the first night was a boisterous group of male crewmembers who seemed to be thinking, “If we have to be up this early, everyone is going to be up this early!”)

But despite iffy climate control and thoughtless men, I loved our roomette. There’s a big window. It’s like you have a private front-row seat to the stunning Southwest. I kept thinking, “This is so much less stressful than driving. This is so much more comfortable than flying.” We had a good location next to our luggage and the bathrooms/shower, so even though everything was shared, it was as close as it would have been in a hotel room. (The bathrooms were basically airplane bathrooms. The shower was roomier and had plenty of towels/soap bars/shampoo, but the water doesn’t stay on very long and you have to keep pressing the button, but it works well overall.) Our roomette was far enough away from the train whistle that it wasn’t loud enough to wake us up (the internet said to watch out for that). For its massive two-story size, the train was remarkably smooth starting and stopping, like unless you were looking out the window you wouldn’t feel it until it got up to speed.

We were tucking into our bunks as the train left Union Station, and the train chugged through the night so that we woke up to the pink pre-dawn light of Maricopa, Arizona. The next post is about life on the train …
By