Our train started on time; rather, it started before the time of 5 pm departure that we were aware of. I am assuming that all cars and owners/occupants were accounted for and so we got the green signal. Unlike in other countries, my understanding is that Amtrak schedules are governed by the freight trains and their companies and most of the route - at least through Florida - is single tracked.

Therefore, as long as there is no other train ahead for the foreseeable distance and none coming from the other side, we would get a green. Elsewhere of course, there have to be many other factors weighed into consideration; merging of different routes, random trains coming from all all directions, etc. Here, until Jacksonville at least, we were going to be masters of our own single line lol.

One unique aspect of the Auto train which caught my fancy was that it goes nonstop from origin to destination - at least from the commercial standpoint, in that passengers don't get on or get off until the final destination. And that makes perfect sense as it would be a pain to load cars on and (especially) off at multiple intermediate locations. As soon as we got underway, we learned through announcements that we would have a stop overnight in Florence for crew change, and but for that, we would be stopping only at our destination of Lorton.

Another thing that caught my attention was that these coaches were al uniformly different from the regular Amtrak I was used to - the northeast corridor. These "superliner" coaches were all double deckers and had restrooms (toilets) at the lower level for convenience of the folks travelling on the lower level (some of whom were on wheelchair and needed more space as well). Son had previously travelled on such coaches before when he did a cross country trip on Amtrak a few years ago, but it was the first time for me.

We also learned from the announcements that the train could have up to fifty coaches to transport cars and had a capacity of 300 cars and about 600 people (I might need to amend that once I listen to the announcement - which I recorded - once more). Ours was relatively empty and left a few of the car coaches back in Sanford. But it was still long enough; easily the longest train I have travelled in. Though I had heard about super long freight trains in Arizona, etc I had been wondering about how the acceleration and braking would be on this long train, given that it was still driven by only two locomotives.

I need not have worried. The journey was quite comfortable and we hit speeds of about 70-80 mph (per my memory) at least during a good part of the trip. Obviously, it was balanced by slow running through cities such as Jacksonville, Richmond and especially when we got close to Lorton the next morning, because - I assume - they didn't want to get the train there before the station was staffed up to offload all the cars.

Overall - as a biased train fan - I liked the journey. Needless to say it was a bit uncomfortable (and cold, as they ran the air conditioning very good lol), but we got what we paid for lol. We hadn't splurged on a sleeper coach which there were a couple of, up front, and had to be in a sitting position for the journey. But what I didn't like was the windows. The panes appeared not to have been cleaned regularly and so were quite grimy and so many of my world class photos reflect this :-( In the morning, everyone got to pick up food from the food car and while the selection for vegetarians was sparse, it was better than I expected and there was more than enough to go around. I helped myself to a couple of individually wrapped crumb cakes and a banana and got hot tea with milk. For the night, I had gotten some to go food from my favourite fast food joint aka Taco Bell :-)

Also, and this is key based on what we hear on the news reports usually, this train was way ahead of schedule (like I alluded to earlier) and even after going very slow into Lorton, we got there about 30 minutes ahead of schedule. The loading and offloading of the cars was quite quick and even though we hadn't paid extra for priority offloading, we got our car within about half an hour of alighting from the train. It gave us some time to take in the slightly more refreshing (but still quite warm) air of Virginia and walk around and do more railfanning and watching the cars being offloaded.

I will add more comments on the photos as I add them, as they will help me add some more context.