FIRST, APOLOGIES ARE DUE to those who found Thursday's column still on the site's main page Friday morning. Our server supplier has had a few more glitches.

TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS: Who sez nothing really exciting ever happens in Seattle?

TO OUR LOCAL READERS: By all means, get thee on an Amtrak Cascades train as soon as feasible.

The train itself is fine enough. It's a spectacular-on-the-outside, comfy-on-the-inside long passenger vehicle. The passenger cars are like a modern airline cabin, only with legroom. The dining and snack-bar cars allow for pleasant stranger-meeting during the consumption of only slightly-overpriced foodstuffs and microbrews.

(The snack-bar car also features a luscious Northwest satellite map on its ceiling, with cities and towns denoted by fiber-optic points-O-light.)

The service is impeccible, too. Particularly the customs and immigration routines on the Seattle-Vancouver route. In Vancouver, the legal rigamarows are handled at the train station upon disembarking (like it's done on planes but not on buses). Heading south, the U.S. border cops do their interrogations on the moving train between Blaine and Bellingham, meaning no delays (except for those unfortunate travelers detained in B'ham for further investigation).

And there's entertainment, sorta, in the form of on-train movies. Some of them are dull recent big-studio "comedies" like you'd see in-flight. But on the first half of my round trip, they showed It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, considered something of a slapstick classic. (It also just so happens to be a movie in which bad things repeatedly happen to people in cars, trucks, and airplanes; i.e., not on trains.) Before and after the movie, the video monitors display regularly-updated status screens with the current time and temperature and a map of the route showing how far you've gone thus far.

But the real star of the two Amtrak Cascades routes (Seattle-Vancouver and Seattle-Portland-Eugene) is, natch, the scenery.

You don't just see more of the scenic PacNW beauty, up close, than you can by plane or car.

You see a vision of what North America was like before the Interstates and the subdivisions.

What you will see on Amtrak: