Mr. Conductor, I'm Not a Criminal!

After a great trip to visit my best friend in Albuquerque, I hopped the red-eye to Newark, New Jersey, and planned to take the Amtrak train home to Philadelphia. This was all part of Continental Airline's package-instead of changing planes, I was changing from plane to train. I thought it seemed a little weird, but I was looking for a good deal on the flight so I went with it. The flight itself was fine if a little bumpy. Once I claimed my baggage, I started looking around for signs for the Amtrak station.

A sign over baggage claim pointed me in the direction of the Air Train. I lugged my bags up the escalator, and found where I was supposed to go. I should have known things were going wrong when the Air Train door wouldn't shut, and then when it finally did, I was the only one riding it all the way to the Amtrak station. It was before daylight so I was a bit freaked and kept wishing someone-anyone-would appear.

When I got off I was relieved to see another passenger, a young man in a nice suit and fancy 1920s-style hat, get out of the next car over. We approached the machine that was supposed to give us our boarding passes to get on the Amtrak. We could not figure out how on earth to use the ATM-looking thing to give us our passes. I watched the bags while my new friend went to go find someone to help us. He came back with an annoyed woman who had even less of an idea of how the machine worked than we did. I put my credit card in, hoping it would read my information and tell me what to do. Then, the machine froze. Looking around, we noted that it was the only one of its kind in the area.

Not sure what to do, we picked up the red phone. The lady on the line told us not to worry. She gave us confirmation numbers and said that would be enough to get us on the train, so we sat down to wait. In the hour plus that we waited for our train (we were both headed to Philly), several Philadelphia-bound trains came and went, but for some reason unknown to us, Continental Airlines had given reservations on the 8:27 a.m. train, so we had to wait.