The Great Ballpark Tour - Day 2

June 26th, 2008 at 10:44pm Thomas V. Bona

Greetings from Pittsburgh, where I just saw two innings of fine baseball before the storms came. That, coupled with a long rain delay last night in Detroit that we couldn’t wait out, means we’ve seen less than seven innings in two days. Our train trip from Chicago to Detroit was longer than the baseball we’ve seen!

But this is a transportation blog, not a sports one, so here are some fun stories from the road so far:

• Union Station in Chicago is no Grand Central, but it’s a good enough facility with plenty of concession options, and the Amtrak folks get you through quickly. I look forward to the Blackhawk line returning, though, so we can get into the Amtrak system directly from Rockford.
• The train got to Detroit on time - thanks Norfolk Southern for not screwing with it! - but that just meant we had to wait longer in the Detroit station for our friend to pick us up. Unlike the once-grand Michigan Central Station it replaced, the current Amtrak station is small and simple. They keep it up well - only the bathrooms look 20 years old - but it’s basically a glorified bus station.
• Comerica Park, which replaced the venerable Tiger Stadium, is, on the other hand, a very nice facility with some great features (beautiful tiger statues everywhere, and statues of human Tiger greats like Hammerin Hank Greenberg as well). Yeah, it’s not the original, but it’s another in a line of great new ballparks.
• Here’s a tip. If your car shudders to a stop in the middle of downtown Detroit at night and you can’t restart it, don’t panic. Calmly check the shifter to see if the car happens to still be in drive. Amazing what happens when you put it in park before restarting (this happened to our friend, but I’ve had similar experiences before!).
• The Ohio Turnpike has the best rest stops I’ve seen with great brick facades, lots of nature light and quality eateries. It makes the otherwise boring drive bearable.
• Pittsburgh is an utterly beautiful city with an utterly beautiful ballpark. I would write more about it, but its weather patterns have totally thrown my schedule off and I have an early train to catch.

I’ll check in in a couple days.

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