First rule with Amtrak has to be to lower your expectations. Case in point; after 15 or so hours there were several serviceable bathrooms and several with toilet paper but precious few with both. But there were some highlights mostly found in the company we kept. Like playing poker with a trio of step cousins from the great northwest (we pretended wads of napkins were money and Henna more than held her own). We also swapped jokes with Grayson (a carpenter with a poet’s eye) and took note of the absurd like the Amish teenagers who snuck away from their families to surf the net a bit with a borrowed smart phone.  We even were able to sleep a bit.  All of this kind of made up for the hour and a half we were stuck in the middle of nowhere wondering if the engineer would ever get us going again. He did and we ended our day in Times Square happy to be on the road once more.