Greg “Klobasnek” Narro: Welcome back to our Amtrak Adepticon Adventure, where Andrew “Hero of Team Imperium” and I attempt to jam as much gaming into our Adepticon weekend by playing Necromunda en route. Last time we sped through our experiences at Adepticon itself. Now it’s time to start our thousand miles journey home to Houston.

It’s 106 Miles to Chicago, It’s Raining, and We’re Hauling Army Cases

Sunday morning we pack up our stuff, and then do one last swing through the convention. I head by the 40k Flex tables to where Craig “MasterSlowpoke” Sniffen is playing. The Adepticon swag bags this year included Tenfold Dungeon nesting cardboard roleplaying terrain from Gale Force 9, and I suspect it might be ideal Ham Train terrain. Craig isn’t planning on keeping his, so he volunteered it to the Ham Train experiment.

On Saturday Milwaukee was sunny and 72° F, but this morning it is 34° F and lightly raining. In a perfect world we’d take the skywalks from the Hyatt through the Baird Center to the Hilton to stay out of the weather as long as possible on the way to the Amtrak station, but the Baird Center has security with bag checks and we don’t want to drag all our luggage through that line. Besides, it’s not raining very hard, and the forecast has the rain ending soon.

Naturally, as we’re a block and a half from the Amtrak station, the skies open up and it starts raining really hard. I was smart and packed an umbrella, but I was extra dumb and forgot that I wouldn’t have a hand free to use it while lugging my bag and army case. We dash to the station and get pretty wet.

Don’t be like us, just get a rideshare or hotel shuttle.

Andrew: On the other hand, it was very funny running with my case being dragged along in one hand and trying to hold the umbrella in the other while blocking maybe 10% of the rain. Plus we  got to work off some of the many pounds of meat and dairy we had consumed that week.  

Greg: God, so much meat and dairy.

The good news is that this Hiawatha departure is scheduled to use the new Venture cars and not the apparently rusted into oblivion Horizon cars, so we get to ride a train to Chicago instead of another replacement bus. The seats aren’t as nice as the older cars, but it’s new and clean and has bigger windows, USB charging sockets, and all the amenities you’d expect for more modern rolling stock.

There’s no opportunity for Ham Train on this leg of the trip. It’s only an hour and a half to Chicago, and there’s no lounge car. There’s not much to see out the windows either, as the weather has shifted into pea soup fog, turning this into the express train to Silent Hill. Still, beats the hell out of the bus, and we get into Chicago Union Station pretty much on time.

Our layover in Chicago is a little over an hour, so we quickly drop our bags in the Metropolitan Lounge (a perk of traveling in a sleeper car), and head over to to food court to grab lunch. The Chicago Union Station Jimmy John’s staff must be some of the busiest people I’ve seen in years, but they get us our lunches just in time for us to grab our bags and hop back on the Texas Eagle.

Back Aboard the Ham Train

Our chariot for the ride back to Marshall is pretty similar to what we had on the ride up, except this time our roomette is in a Superliner 1 instead of a Superliner 2. Besides being about 45 years old instead of 30, the only noticeable difference is that the downstairs area trades one of the bathrooms for a bigger shower area. Such luxury.

Our first order of business is to unwrap the Tenfold Dungeon set that Craig donated to us. The box claims no assembly time, but that isn’t quite true; besides popping out some cardboard from frames, you also have to assemble the staircases. There aren’t any instructions given for this, but it’s not too hard to figure out. Assembling them is fiddly, and would probably benefit from a little PVA glue to keep everything really solid, but the friction fit was tight enough that we didn’t have any issues using them as is.

The concept of this stuff is that you can use them with the open part up to represent a series of connected rooms and hallways, or you can flip them over to put the open part down to represent a bunch of buildings. There are a bunch of themes to choose from, spanning both fantasy/D&D applications and sci-fi. Craig’s swag bag had the Cyberpunk City set. It’s maybe not the ideal set for the Necromunda aesthetic (Daedelus Station seems to have been aimed at the Necromunda audience), but it’ll work in a pinch and the art is both vivid and has some humorous touches that I appreciated.

Andrew: I was honestly pretty impressed with the terrain set up. There’s a ton of room for mixing up your set up to get a bunch of different battlefields to push plastic around on and it’s decently sturdy.  Plus each flipped over room is a makeshift dice box, perfect for not losing dice on a train which we all know is a common problem in this hobby.

Greg: You definitely want a dice tray on a train. Some sticky tack to keep the Necromunda barricades from tipping over wouldn’t have gone amiss too. Those things tip over easily on a fully stationary table, the Train Life is not easy for them.

Game 1: Sector Mechanicus-esque

Having played nothing but 2d games on the way up, we decided to set the terrain up in a 3d configuration first. Necromunda is just better when you’re making initiative checks to see if you fall down a staircase. The Tenfold Dungeon boxes worked fine for this, although it’s worth noting that it didn’t come with much in the way of barricades and scatter terrain obstacles. Not a big deal for us since I had packed some of mine, but worth mentioning.

We decide to do a sort of king-of-the-hill mission, the fight for the incriminating records at the cyberpunk records shop. Nobody ever accused either of our gangs of having good reading comprehension.

As is now tradition, Andrew’s Enforcers fight long and hard, and pin the Goliaths repeatedly, but just can’t land a knockout punch. Periwinkle the sumpkroc repeatedly fails initiative checks and falls down the staircase. Eventually Mickey the renderizer champ manages to land a charge and it’s lights out for Andrew’s leader.

Andrew: I think I uttered the phrase “Yeah I’m just gonna put this blast template here and pray” at least 4 times. And usually the gods rewarded my boldness, as seen below when my leader shot a concussion carbine point blank to buy himself a turn. Unfortunately, victory was not to be found in boldness. But I stand by there is nothing funnier in Necromunda than rolling and failing initiative check after initiative check down a set of stairs.  It’s just wonderfully silly.

Greg: Dinner time is approaching, so we pack up the setup to leave the table for any coach passengers who might want to eat at it. The whole Tenfold Dungeon set nests within itself, even with the staircases fully assembled, so it’s nice and compact as we hike four cars back to our roomette to stow it.

Our appointed dinner time comes, and we make our way to the dining car. Lunch and dinner for sleeper car passengers come with salads and rolls, an entrée of your choice, and a dessert. For dinner, you also get one alcoholic drink of your choice: wine, beer, or a couple of mixed drinks. We both go for the train wine, because we are classy, erudite, and discerning first class travelers.

I get the beef paprikash with my red wine. I figured it would be a bit tough, but it turns out to be perfectly serviceable. Andrew pairs red wine with Atlantic salmon, the absolute heathen. I get the brownie for dessert. It’s good, but not quite as good as the butter cake. Andrew doesn’t hesitate for a minute getting the butter cake again. He takes a picture of the wrapper so he knows where to buy some later. The man has tasted the nectar of the gods and cannot return to his normal life without the life-changing Amtrak butter cake.

Andrew: Yeah I pair red wine and fish, I spit on the pairings set out for us by the landed elite and forge my own path. But all the food and drink is just to get me to the sweet butter cake. Amtrak please sponsor me and pay me in butter cakes, I’ll shill whatever you want just name it. The rest of the meal was pretty solid. I figured one of us had to try the fish to round out our sampling of the menu, but it was actually the best meal I had. 

Greg: I’m pretty sure part of the goal of Amtrak’s dinner menus is to make sure you’re good and sleepy for when it gets to 10 pm quiet hours. Sleeping on a moving train is tricky, but eating a roll, pasta, beef, a brownie, and two glasses of red wine sure gets you a head start on it.

Game 2: Zone Mortalis-ish

But there is no time for sleep yet, it’s time for one last game of Necromunda. We’ve got to try out the Tenfold Dungeon stuff in indoors mode.

The design of this is pretty clever. To attach two rooms, you use a plastic door clip and two cardboard door inserts. The room-boxes get sandwiched snugly between the door inserts, keeping everything in place. If you want to open or close the doors, you pull the clip off and flip the door inserts around to the appropriate side. It’s pretty elegant.

The parts that worked as catwalks and gangways in the first game can be used as internal dividing walls on the inside of boxes using the included T and L clips. Since the boxes come in a bunch of different sizes, you’re fairly limited in which walls can go in which rooms, but it’s still a nice option to have.

There are two downsides to the setup as a whole, though, at least as it pertains to Necromunda:

• The doors are just pieces of cardboard with printed door shapes on them, so you cannot actually see minis through them. It’s a perfectly reasonable tradeoff for the flexibility and storage benefits, but it means you’re going to have to be on the same page as your opponent on whether models have soft or hard cover.
• The room sizes are picked to maximize packing efficiency when storing the set, so they don’t necessarily tessellate very well. It’s easy to set this up as a bunch of dead end rooms coming off of corridors, but Necromunda works best when there are multiple ways to get from point A to point B. The setup below is effectively a circle with a bunch of rooms branching off of it, which is workable, but it would probably be best in a scenario where you need to open loot crates or are otherwise incentivized to enter the side rooms.

I didn’t pack anything to use for loot crates, so this ends up as one last royal rumble. After an initial shootout where Andrew takes full advantage of firing frag grenades down tight narrow corridors at my bunched up Goliaths, attrition takes the Enforcers down to just Jim, the Bolter patrolman, and Subjugator A-1 “The Sauce” with a shield and stub gun.

Jim and The Sauce barricade themselves in a dead end room and manage to hold out for quite a while, taking turns furiously punching the “door close” button while Mickey and Periwinkle attempt to hit them from the hallway. Periwinkle, bless ‘em, lacks both the intelligence and finger dexterity to open the door, so Mickey keeps opening the door in time for Periwinkle to get one round of chomping in against The Sauce’s riot shield before the door shuts again. Eventually Periwinkle finally manages to get a hit through past The Sauce’s armor, and chases down the poor out of ammo Jim.

Andrew: The beauty of Necromunda is it elegantly combines two very different tones. The first is the gritty combat atmosphere you might see in something like Saving Private Ryan, with the The Sauce desperately holding his shield into the door way while genetically enhanced monstrosities and a sewer monster rage and batter at his faltering defense. To his side Jim lies with his back against the wall, checking his boltgun only to realize he’s out of ammo and he knows from how much blood he’s lost that he’s not making it back to base. Two brothers in arms fighting until the end. And then while all that’s going on you’ve Mickey and Jim both pushing the door button as fast as they can like a Looney Toons cartoon. Necromunda contains multitudes.

Greg: After that, a little south of St Louis, we decide to call it a night. The Necromunda stuff gets packed up for the last time and we make sure we have all of our stuff ready to go at 7:15 the next morning when we’re scheduled to arrive back in Marshall.

Monday: The Road Home

Neither of us sleep quite as well this time as we did northbound, for whatever reason. I wake up at 3 AM during our station stop at Little Rock, Arkansas, but I manage to get back to sleep and sleep until 6 AM, with us a little north of Texarkana. I take another moving train shower before breakfast in the dining car.

Andrew: Yeah the train ride up I was out like a light and woke up a little later than I hoped. But this ride was fits of sleep the whole way. None living know why.

Greg: We head to the dining car as soon as it’s open and eat some omelettes. While we’re leaving, I let the conductor know that we’re planning to get off at Marshall, since our tickets technically still say we’re getting off at Longview. The platform at Marshall is too short for the whole train to fit, so we want to be darn sure that the train is going to do the second stop to give the back of the train a chance to disembark. The train is running about half an hour late, so we end up having a bit of time to kill in our roomette before Marshall.

The Texas Eagle pulls into the Marshall station, and we pile out after tipping our sleeper car attendant. The train pulls away within ten seconds of us stepping off of it. Got to make up that 30 minute delay, I guess. We watch it leave before hiking over to the parking lot and Andrew’s car.

Andrew: There’s always something bittersweet about watching a train leave without you. It leaves an ache in your heart, connections never made that now never will be. A story dropping you off at the end of a chapter, when there’s still so many pages left to go. A shelf of butter cakes that I won’t get to eat getting further and further away. Don’t go…

Greg: Andrew’s Accord is there to greet us in all its expired registration glory. We pack up our stuff and head to a gas station to fill it up and squeegee all the bug guts off of his windshield from our hectic evening arrival in Marshall six days ago. Andrew’s tire pressure warning light comes on, but apparently that’s just a faulty sensor. We double check that the tires are full and hit US 59 South. It’s 9 AM, and it should be a three and a half hour drive from Marshall to Houston. Piece of cake. Looking forward to eating lunch with my wife.

Goddammit, Andrew.

Andrew: Sometime in life, changes happen.  Sometimes these are good changes. The last couple months have seen me move into a new house, started dating a nice lady, and getting a promotion at work. Great stuff, I’m unstoppable and the line can only go up. What I had failed to account for in all my greatness is that I’m driving way more and further than I ever used to. The drive to Marshall further exacerbated this and maaaaybe I should have checked my oil before the trip. MAYBE. As with all tales of human greatness, I was cast down for my hubris. But what those tales don’t have that I do is the ability to rise even stronger and better than before, with more oil.  

Greg: Remember in Part 1, when Andrew got pulled over and said his charm always got him out of hot water? That’s what he’s doing now, on us, and it’s working. It always works.

Mercifully Andrew’s Accursed Accord made it almost to New Caney before it decided we needed to get really acquainted with the closest Valero Circle K. That’s 45 miles from Houston, but this is Houston, baby, that means we’re already in the exurbs (that’s the suburbs of the suburbs, for those of you who don’t speak unsustainable urban sprawl). My parents happen to live in the northern exurbs not that far away, so as Andrew rides off into the sunset in the cab of a tow truck, I load my stuff into my dad’s Tacoma and bum a ride back to my house.

At the start of this series I said that this trip was “a great and foolproof plan, except for all the ways it could go wrong.” I have to admit, I would not in a million years have guessed that the part that would consistently trip us up would be driving a Honda through East Texas. Life makes fools of us all.

Is the Hamtrak Life for You?

Greg: This trip was a lot of fun. Maybe it’s not the most practical way of getting to and from Adepticon, but it was fun and whimsical, and whimsy tends to be in terribly short supply these days.

Andrew: Agreed, this trip was well worth it. It turns out being able to just hang out and game with a buddy during your travel makes a much more fun journey. Plus you can stand up, stretch, and walk around whenever you want. And free shitty coffee on demand. Blessings abound on a train.

Greg: So, would I recommend you, our esteemed reader, take a Ham Train to your next convention? Maybe, that depends mainly on your situation and attitude.

Are you a type A person who gets stressed out if you’re late or plans change? Well, Amtrak is probably not for you, to be honest.

Are you carrying a giant display board for the Team Tournament? Yeah, probably best to drive.

Do you live east of the Mississippi River? Due to tight tunnels going into New York City and Baltimore, all but one* of Amtrak’s Eastern routes use single level cars. That means no lounge car in which to ham. Sure, there’s the dining car, but those tables are always reserved, either for meals or as the semi-official staff break area. You’re out of luck, unless you are an eccentric millionaire who feels like chartering some private cars to get towed by the Lakeshore Limited, in which case, please be my friend, I promise I am very cool.

*The exception to this is the Auto Train, which you could feasibly take to NOVA if you happen to live in Florida and want to skip I-95.

Does the thought of strangers asking you what you’re doing make you uncomfortable? Well, that’s definitely gonna be part of the experience. I can say that over about a dozen such encounters the reactions from the other passengers ranged from mild amusement to an enthusiastic “hell yeah, that rules.”

Do you happen to live in St Louis, Kansas City, or Minneapolis/St Paul? Not only can you take a Ham Train to Adepticon, I’d go so far as to say it’s your best option! You can hop on the train in the morning and ham it up for a day to Milwaukee for just the cost of a coach ticket. No need to worry about the logistics and cost of overnight train travel. Same deal heading back home afterwards. Grab a friend and your Necromunda, Kill Team, or Warhammer Underworlds stuff and live it up!

If you live elsewhere in the western half of the country, the answer really depends on how you feel about the prospect of sleeping on a train. Driving is gonna be cheaper, and flying is going to be much faster and possibly still cheaper. The Ham Train only makes sense if taking a long, overnight train trip is something you’ve always been kind of curious about doing anyway and you just need an excuse to justify it.

If you’re in that boat, I encourage you to try it. Maybe you’ll love it, maybe you’ll sleep like shit and decide to never do it again, but you’ll definitely have a life experience and a story. Give it a shot while you still have the option.

In another 10 years the western double decker Superliner fleet is due to be replaced, including those great lounge cars. We don’t know what the replacements will be like. That’s even assuming Amtrak as we know it makes it that long; the powers that be right now seem more interested in supersonic sardine tins, to the extent they care at all. Who knows what the future holds for traditional train travel. If this trip sounded fun to you, do it while you can.

I had a great time doing this trip, and if I have the opportunity to do it again I absolutely will.

Next time, though, we’re taking my car to the station, Andrew.

Andrew: And miss out on all the fun side quests?! Yeah, probably smart. But seriously, I would do this again in a heartbeat. Take the trip when you can, readers, and always remember to check the oil in your car before a long trip if you’re a nerd who fears danger and adventure.

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