My husband hates traveling by plane,
so sometimes we do these crazy things,
like traveling very long distances by train.
And today we're going from Miami (or should I say, Hollywood, Florida)
to New York by train, and I'll show you everything.
This will be our accommodation for the next 27 hours.
Here...
a small toilet.
A bed and a bunk bed above.
That's exactly what you heard: this trip would take 3 hours by plane, but it takes
27 hours by train.
As you can see in this map, this train departs from Miami and goes all the way to
New York.
This company, Amtrak, that operates the trains here in the United States,
is quasi-public, it receives subsidies from the federal government
and from the state governments, but it struggles to be profitable,
because as you probably know,
not a lot of people travel by train in the United States.
And that's because after World War II,
the car and oil companies lobbied
the government. The government built the highway network here in the United States,
all those huge highways,
so people started to use their cars more than the trains.
The trains were abandoned. And it's very hard to re-establish train travel because people here are
so used to traveling by car
and the trains are not very modern and they don't go
fast like the ones in Europe, China or Japan.
Here I am, up here
in the bunk bed.
We left Miami at 8am, and it's almost 8pm now,
so we've been here on this train for 12 hours,
and we still have a long way to go.
Now with the two beds made: one above and one below.
Now it's 10:40
in the morning,
and we're almost there.
We've finally arrived :)