The Capitol Ltd

Here are some notes I jotted down on my way to Chicago on the Capitol Ltd:

Until almost dusk we were still in Maryland. We basically took the MARC Brunswick Line out of the area, then transitioned onto CSX track. We passed MARC stations Point of Rocks, New Brunswick, and Perryville, and stopped at Amtrak station Rockville.

We made it to Pennsylvania by midnight. Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana show slick pavements in the light, indicating rain. By 3am, we were in Toledo, Ohio. We made up a lot of time powering ahead at 70 mph. At some point after that, the local timezone became CST. By 6am CST, we stopped in Southbend, Indiana. It's hazy. We hit a little bit of freight traffic. Then we passed through a LOT of farmland with haze sitting on it, with a maximum speed of 40 mph.

I finally got 1x CDMA internet access and an electrical outlet at about 6 CST. As we approach Chicago from the east, even in rural areas, download speeds have been increasing from 2 KB/s to 15 KB/s. The connection is finally stable. Once we left Maryland, I couldn't connect because another carrier owned the cell towers and Verizon didn't have pass-through service.

I'm not going to risk uploading pictures until we get to Chicago Union Station. Hopefully there, they have EvDO with over 5 times my current DL/UL bandwidth. At that time I will start to upload a few pictures to photobucket.