I recently tried out the new Amtrak service, the Borealis. The Borealis is a daily train service from St Paul to Chicago. I chose to only go as far as Milwaukee.

Train 1340, east bound, departs St Paul Union Depot (SPUD) at 11:50am and arrives, if on schedule into Milwaukee at 5:40pm. On my trip, it was actually 5 minutes early into Milwaukee.

I chose a business class seat on this segment of the trip. Business class tickets generally are double the cost of coach. In this case, around $100. The few business class seats are available in the Amfleet cafe car. Business class seats probably are the same as coach seats, but are a bit isolated from the rest of the coach cars. Business class also entitles you to 1 free non-alcoholic drink.

Cafe car service is similar to other Amtrak routes. If I had any complaint about the service, at least for the first day of my trip, was low stock on food items. I was able to get something but it seemed to me by the time we got to the middle of Wisconsin there were not many food items left to choose from.

Saturday seems to be a very popular travel day and the train was close 150 passengers on my trip.

While older, single level equipment, heritage and Amfleet cars are used, they seem to be fairly well maintained. At least for now.

I did not experience any delay, but I did hear about a 2.5 hour delay the previous day out of Chicago which required the swapping of power. Starting out, all Genesis P42 power was being used, but one of the engines was swapped for an older B32-8WH. Power is arranged push-pull.

On my return, train 1333 west bound was a bit less crowded as the previous day. I opted for coach this time. I did try to get a last minute upgrade to business class but was unsuccessful. If I knew a train was going to be fairly crowded I’d definitely opt for the upgrade if available.

I captured alot of video on the trip and will try to put together a good YouTube video. The views along the Mississippi river in Minnesota were quite memorable.