Over many years I’ve commuted on trains for work – the light rail Metra in Chicago in the suburbs and the “L” tracks in the CTA in Chicago. However, I’ve never taken the Amtrak trains so I was excited to take the opportunity to travel between Portland and Seattle and avoid the horrendous traffic that I’ve heard plagues Seattle. Plus, you can have a drink along the way, which is frowned upon nowadays while driving (good for a Friday evening).
You can buy your train ticket online, but you don’t get seats for coach class. When you get to the train station, there is a line that forms before the train departs and you physically stand in the line to get your ticket. At that point they assign you a seat on the train, and if you buy two tickets in the same online purchase, they will plan to seat you together. This is the ticket that they manually wrote out for us coming back from Seattle to Portland on Sunday.
Not very high tech, I’d say. But the experience on the train was fine. You get all kinds of folks on the train, from families with kids to people who look like they can’t afford a plane. The Amtrak personnel were all very friendly and seemed to know what they were doing.