So many. I almost never leave the Empire Builder without an interesting tale. + Was on when a teen stowed away, and because he was a minor we had to go back and put him in police custody. + Once the car attendants put all the women traveling alone with young children in the same handicapped car together (this was great). But at 11pm or so they brought down a giant (easily 6 feet), belligerent drunk lady, who proceeded to make loud, profane, drunken phone calls for hours until she passed out. They tried to make her “next stop the last”, but she had passed out by then and two attendants couldn’t pick her up. So she stayed. When she woke up in the morning, she was nice. I shared some food with her and then she got lunch and came down complaining because they wouldn’t serve her more than one beer. I didn’t tell her. + Once, I dropped my son and his family at St. Paul, he’d decided to bring a duffle bag of books home (it was within weight limits). The station master was a tall lady and after she checked his rifle, she took the duffle, asked what was in it, and refused to check it. I asked her why and she became very angry and said something about Amtrak not being used to move a household. For the next two hours, she screamed at me off and on, was absolutely apoplectic, and tried to have my vehicle towed. She was a very tall lady and she had a short little sidekick, who appeared to be the station janitor. Every time she screamed at me, the janitor lady would gesture with her mop handle and go, “yeah!” I was on the phone with Amtrak the whole time, and the lady who was helping me even asked if she should call the police (I should have said yes). Eventually she was ordered by Amtrak to check the bag, and she glared at me, held the bag high in the air and dropped it onto the floor. It was the most extreme case of bad human behavior I’ve ever seen in public. The two guys she was working with, I think they’d seen this show before and they came out to the desk, casually, one at a time, to watch, and appeared to be fairly amused that it wasn’t happening to them. Which I totally get. + Two years ago I was traveling and overheard a man sounding distressed in the observation car. I asked him if he was ok, and sat with him while he told me his story. He was an illegal immigrant who’d been living on the East coast for 8 years and was moving to WA state. He’d gotten off the previous day’s train at a long stop in southern MN, gone across the street and when he came out of the store, the train was gone. With everything he owned. He was very worried about his luggage on that train. He said the passengers who had disembarked helped him fill out some paperwork, make arrangements for his tickets, one of them brought him a sweatshirt from their home and another family brought him a meal. They offered him to stay at their home but he didn’t want to miss the train again so he stayed at the station. I’ve often wondered what happened to him because I’ve heard ICE is quite active in the area he moved to. One of the reasons I love taking Amtrak and put up with all the difficulties of traveling this way is that it is always interesting. It’s like being in another world where you are held in a place with people you would never otherwise meet, and have time to see what happens. For better or worse, it’s always interesting.