Watch as Stephen, Jess, and baby Hunter take a Silver Meteor family trip from New York City to Orlando. This video shows their adventures from NY Penn Station to Orlando, Florida, via Amtrak’s long-distance Silver Meteor.
The Australian family maintains a travel blog, Flying The Nest, where they detail their globe-trotting experiences, mostly out of a converted van. They’ve traveled throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
While traveling Amtrak, the family experiences the passengers’ lounge in New York. They stay in a bedroom on a Viewliner II car, eat breakfast in bed, shower on the train, and share their enthusiasm for U.S. rail travel.
Amtrak’s Silver Meteor is one of two legacy overnight trains between New York and Florida that Amtrak has kept on its timetables. The other is the Silver Star. Major stops on the Silver Meteor include New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Savannah, Jacksonville, Orlando, and Miami.
The Silver Meteor originally began as a premier passenger train for the former Seaboard Air Line Railroad.
In an article for Classic Trains, Larry Goolsby writes: “The railroad’s interest in streamlining and diesels led to semi-streamlined rail motor cars and semi-lightweight “American Flyer” coaches in the mid-1930s and to Electro-Motive E4 diesels for the Orange Blossom Special in 1938. Seaboard later unveiled a new lightweight streamliner, the seven-car New York–Miami Silver Meteor. SAL quickly went back to EMD and Budd for more equipment and by 1941, the railroad was daily running 14-car trains to Miami and Tampa.”
For other tips on riding overnight Amtrak trains, see Bob Johnston’s recommendations at Trains.com.
Stephen, Jess, and Hunter’s Silver Meteor Family trip video on YouTube is embedded with permission and available free of charge.
If Trains.com becomes a website linking me to free YouTube videos, I won’t be paying for a new membership. I expect better.
My concern was that the child was free to run and I feared for her. I sense that she would stop if her parents told her to stop but I would hate to see a child hurt by things such as the gap between the platform and the cars.
This is a cute video although by the end I had enough of the bouncy baby. The unfortunate thing is that those who do not have experience with Amtrak long distance trains may think that their trip will be like the one shown in the video. I suppose that some people experience flawless trips like this one. (There was no mention of timekeeping of the train in the video.) But anyone who has taken more than one or two Amtrak long distance train trips knows that all are not the happy story that this one turned out to be. I have ridden every Amtrak long distance train. And to be honest some of them were quite enjoyable but the majority always seem to have something go wrong. Either long delays, middle of the night bus rides, lack of food in the diner, unruly passengers, rude service and other things that make you wonder why you put yourself through this. After all, you would have been there by now if you had flown. But it was good to see that someone had enjoyed their Amtrak trip.