In this miniseries we’re following the adventures of Greg “Klobasnek” Narro and Andrew “Hero of Team Imperium” Corban as they take the train up to Adepticon from Texas, playing Necromunda the whole way.
Greg “Klobasnek” Narro: Welcome back to our attempt to ride Amtrak to Adepticon in Milwaukee, playing Necromunda along the way. Last time Amtrak threw us our first curveball by replacing the first hour of our trip with a bus due to track work.
Tuesday: No Sleep ‘Til Lufkin
Riding a bus is not really what we’re here to do, so the new plan is to just catch the train to and from Marshall instead of Longview. The driving time is still around 4 hours, but now we’re aiming to catch the train at 9:15 PM instead of 6:15. We decide to leave at 3:00 so we have plenty of time to avoid Houston’s hellish rush hour traffic and eat dinner on the way. Foolproof plan.
Andrew Corban: I am too powerful a fool for such plans. I made the cunning decision to leave my Adepticon badge back at my house to keep the trip adventurous and so Greg could see my new house. I’m such a good friend.
Greg: If Amtrak ends up with better timetable keeping on this trip than you, I am never going to let you live this down.
Andrew: Reasonable and understandable.
Greg: After a slight 1.5 hour detour via the 5th-most congested stretch of interstate in the entire country, we manage to escape central Houston. Dinner is going to have to be short, but that’s fine.
We stop to eat in Lufkin. Plan A was to stop and eat something vaguely healthy before the onslaught of con food, but we don’t have a lot of spare time now, so a 15 minute burger stop it is. Back on the road, and we should arrive at the station 30 minutes before departure.
Except we get pulled over leaving the parking lot. Unbeknownst to at least one of us, Andrew’s registration is expired. The officer is thoroughly confused as to why we are driving from Houston to Marshall to catch a train, but at least it’s only a warning, and it only eats up 15 minutes, so we should still make it to our station in time.
Andrew: Fortunately, when faced with consequences I can always fall back on my charm and sex appeal to see me through. In this case though explaining what a Warhammer is and why I’d hitch a cross-country train ride to play with my dolls seemed to baffle them enough to let me off with a warning.
Greg: We took Andrew’s car because mine is electric, and East Texas is still a bit of a charging desert. In fact, there’s only one place between north Houston and Marshall to charge: the Hyundai dealership in Lufkin, just feet from where we ate and then got pulled over. Irony of ironies.
We barrel on through the evening, cognizant that if we drive too slowly we’ll miss our train and if we drive too fast and get pulled over we’ll miss our train and get ticketed. After a pretty nervous drive, we make it to the Marshall, TX station just in time. The station staff ask us if we are their “missing sleepers” as we arrive, hustlng us directly to our car. The platform at Marshall is too short to board the sleeper cars and coach cars at once, so they need to get us on board so they can move the train to board the coach passengers.
We are booked in a roomette, which in nighttime configuration is basically a bunk bed with a door. It’s not glamorous, but it’s a bed, it’s private, and by booking a sleeper car we guarantee we’ll have hot meals and a shower. Our Superliner 2 car is about 30 years old, but at least it’s received the recent updates to the upholstery.
After getting our stuff set up in the room, we go scout out the lounge car. It’s unsurprisingly pretty empty at 9:45 PM. If we’d had a more relaxing drive up, maybe I’d be tempted to go ahead and break out the Necromunda stuff, but I’m ready to just exhale for a little while.
We pass a cell tower and I get an email from Amtrak. Our connection from Chicago to Milwaukee is cancelled due to equipment issues and they are going to replace it with a bus. Dread it, run from it, the rail replacement bus arrives just the same. Whatever, that’s tomorrow’s problem. An hour and a half ago I wasn’t sure we’d make it at all, so it’s hard to complain.
Somewhere past Hope, Arkansas, we turn in for the night.
Wednesday: All Aboard the Ham Train
I wake up in Arcadia Valley, Missouri, right around 6:15 AM. Six-ish hours of sleep on a moving train is a win in my book. The train is still running on time; we’ve averaged almost 60 mph while we slept. I head to the lower level of the car and take a shower while the train bounces along at 75 mph, which is exactly as undignified as you’re imagining. It’s great. Andrew refuses to attempt the Train Shower, which is uncharacteristic cowardice on his part.
Andrew: If you think about it, it’s actually braver to not shower. I will not be clarifying further.
Greg: I am going to try very hard not to think about that, actually.
Time for breakfast. The Texas Eagle has the “Flexible Dining” menu, which is a euphemism for “microwave meals instituted during the pandemic as a cost-cutting measure.” My omelette and Andrew’s continental breakfast are fine, but I’ve been on trains with the “Traditional Dining” menu and it’s hands down better.
Andrew: I honestly slept pretty well, although who can say if that’s exhaustion or the raw power of Train Bed lulling me to sleep. I woke up a bit later than I planned and slammed some coffee into my bloodstream to wake up (inside). Having no point of comparison, the train food was Acceptable; no real complaints.
Greg: As we pull into St Louis, it is at last time for the nominal justification for this wacky itinerary: Warhammer on a train. We get out the tiles and the minis. A guy with a laptop asks us if we’re playing Warhammer. He turns out to be Adepticon’s Star Wars: Armada TO. A curious Mennonite couple asks what we’re doing. All of my usual pop culture analogues for this aren’t going to mean anything to them, so I go with “playing a game with dice and rulers to pass the time.”
Game 1: Clandestine Rendezvous
Greg: The mission conceit here is supposed to be that one gang is meeting with a corrupt Enforcer when another gang ambushes them and they have to escort the Enforcer off the table. Andrew’s enforcers ended up running their own ghast operation in a campaign a few years ago, so I guess my target must have really gone above and beyond the dereliction of duty.
Andrew: I’m simply trying to make a living in this wacky world. So I gotta take a ton of bribes and smoke a lotta psychoshrooms to get by, who can blame me? No one, because I’m the Law, move along hive scum.
Greg: I’ve brought my Goliaths, who are themed after early 1900’s circus strongmen and wrestlers, complete with greenstuff handlebar moustaches. I want to try out Ash Wastes at Adepticon, and they’re the only gang I have with 400 creds of painted vehicles.
Andrew and I lob grenades back and forth trying to pin and slow each other. Andrew decides, probably correctly, that his best escape route is past The Great Gama, my grenade launcher specialist. The rest of his corrupt crew nobly (?) sacrifice themselves against the melee Goliaths to give the VIP a chance to get to the board edge. Gama charges him with his bare fists, but fails to take him down, and in an incredible upset the extra corrupt Enforcer lays The Great Gama low with a single swing of his baton, escaping the board.
During this game the train pulls out of St Louis and crosses the Mississippi to East St Louis. East St Louis, and later the stretch between Joliet and downtown Chicago, have a lot of derelict industrial sites and refineries that really kinda set the Necromunda mood.
Game 2: Bar Brawl
Greg: Bar Brawl rules. Your models can’t use guns or two-handed melee weapons, they start out drunk, and there are random other bar patrons who occasionally pelt you with beer cans. You’d expect this to really favor the Goliaths, but the Enforcers have good armor and my gang doesn’t have many weapons that are legal to carry into the bar.
That said, this one swings my way hard. Tommy sets up shop next to a stack of kegs and wrecks shop, one hit killing two Enforcers in a row with his single damage no AP spud jacker. Andrew’s saves were abysmal and my injury rolls were vicious.
Andrew: Can’t a corrupt cop have a drink in peace after selling out his brothers and sisters in arms? I swear you get no respect in the hives. But I learned my lesson this game: a drunk Goliath has dibs on the bar.
Greg: After the bar Brawl we pack up the tiles, stow them in the roomette, and grab lunch in the diner. I have butter chicken and Andrew has chicken alfredo. It’s pretty decent for what it is, and the novelty of eating a sit down meal while zooming through an Illinois corn field counts for a lot. The butter cake for dessert tastes like it’s 1000 calories all on its own.
Andrew: That butter cake was pretty damn good honestly, but yeah it for sure had more calories than the rest of our meals combined.
Greg: Between St Louis and Chicago the state of Illinois paid to upgrade the freight tracks to allow 110 mph speeds for large sections, and I clock us hitting 103 in our giant double decker Superliner. Hell yeah.
Game 3: Clandestine Rendezvous, part Deux
Greg: We have hit a snag in my Necromunda plan: The remaining Gang Raids missions use more than a 2×2 tile grid and would be difficult to fit on the lounge car table. We end up deciding to replay Clandestine Rendezvous with the sides flipped. The “corrupt Enforcer” is now my Sumpkroc, Periwinkle, who has been accused of mauling a scummer and is wanted by the law.
I initially try to exfiltrate Periwinkle to the left side of the board, but Andrew foils me through the gratuitous use of frag grenades. Mickey the champion with a renderizer manages to clear an escape route to the right, and Periwinkle scurries out of the center, with The Great Gama holding the rear.
Tommy, the hero of the bar fight, seems to be having a hangover. He charges Larry the Subjugator, but fails to do any damage over two rounds of combat before a strike from a riot shield triggers Knockback and he fails his initiative check, falling to his room down a ventilation shaft.
Game 4: Ad Lib
Greg: We’ve got time for one more round of Necromunda before we need to pack our bags and transfer in Chicago, so we just toss out the missions and do a straight shoot ‘em up. We flip all the tiles over to the sides with extra hazards, and we give the Enforcers an extra ganger to try to even the odds.
The Goliaths absolutely roll in the mid game and take out everyone but Andrew’s bolter patrolman, Jim. Jim then has a last stand for the ages, taking out a Goliath with his bolter, which runs out of ammo, then winging another with his backup stub pistol, causing him to fall into a pool of acid. Finally his stub pistol runs out of ammo too and the last two Goliaths crush him into a fine paste.
Andrew: Raise a dusty glass of Wild Snake in Jim’s name. The Emperor forgot to put the give up in when he fashioned him alongside the Primarchs.
On the Road Again
Greg: Our train has been running on time all the way into the Chicago suburbs, but we run into a delay just outside of Union Station and end up arriving 30 minutes late. No big deal, and we are able to make our connection.
That connection is now a bus, because the 35 year-old cars used on our connecting train have developed severe corrosion and have been taken out of service immediately and indefinitely. The 2021 infrastructure bill funded the replacements for these cars, but some of the old ones were still in service, and our scheduled train happened to be made of them. Infrastructure Week came a couple years too late for the Horizon coaches, I guess. The station staff herd a train’s-worth of people onto three buses, and off we go.
For the second time on this trip, we are in one of the largest metro areas in the US trying to drive out during peak rush hour. It’s exactly as slow and tedious as you’d imagine. The train would have taken an unremarkable hour and a half, which isn’t amazing, but the bus ends up taking an entire hour longer. Oof.
This is still less delay than Andrew forgetting his badge, though.
Andrew: All I’m hearing is that my numbers are bigger than a whole company. I cannot be stopped.
Greg: I can’t feel smug for too long, because it’s a 15 minute walk from the station to the Hyatt, and I’m lugging my full-size Tablewar tower case. When fully loaded with minis and books, it’s about as heavy as a small moon, and it doesn’t have any wheels. My arms are burning by the time we get to the hotel. Note to self: do not put your books in this thing. It’s a trap.
After checking in to the Hyatt and dropping our stuff off in our 13th floor room, we grab a late dinner at Old German Bier Hall and read the Adepticon preview details on Warhammer Community. In what’s going to be an ongoing theme for this trip, the food and beer is great and the menu is entirely devoid of vegetables.
Andrew: Milwaukee fucking gets it. It’s got all the major food groups accounted for without any foolish healthy things taking up stomach space that could instead be more beer, meat, and dairy. Honestly shoutout to Greg for lugging that case. I picked it up briefly at the hotel to get on the elevator and that beast is HEAVY. Me on the other hand, I was a smart guy and had a rolling case that I could sit my clothes bag on top of.
Greg: You’ve got me there for sure.
Next Time: The Event
Thanks for reading. Join us next time for a recap of our Adepticon antics and the ride home.
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