Thanks letank! I bought the Jeep back in August so some of this is just going over the beginnings and I have sorted a few things out since what I am writing about in the "story" part. I bought a headlight switch off a member here which fixed up my headlights/parking lights all beautifully. Well, except for the one rear tail light wiring that was cut into for a cob job trailer hitch wiring but I just fixed that up nicely last week. Trans fluid level is good but I have not changed it, and the T-Case was nearly dry when I got it and that was flushed and filled before my attempted trip home.
Back to the saga of getting this thing up north...
So it's Labor Day weekend (Friday night/Saturday morning) and I have few options for getting this guy and myself home in a reasonable time frame. I looked into shipping, but with a 1 way rental car or plane ticket over the holiday weekend we were at close to $1000 there. Plane tickets dropped significantly by Tuesday but I did not want to be away for basically 4 more days at this point. So I had 2 real viable options. Have my buddy with his Cummins and car trailer head south down 95 while I headed north and *hoepfully* meet somewhere in the middle (very risky option and I probably would have been waiting for him on the side of the highway somewhere in Georgia) or take the Auto Train. The Auto Train was actually totally shut down from Thursday to Sunday, so Sunday morning was my first opportunity to get out on that. Thankfully I secured a ticket just in time for a sold out train to VA.
As I mentioned earlier, I should have just done the Auto Train from the get-go, or jumped a flight back to PA and had a shipper pick it up at my Friend's house in FL. The Auto Train was only about $370 for me and the Jeep and it was only about 175 miles from Lorton to home. I was trying not to spend that money and have myself a little road trip adventure though (haha). So Sunday morning I drove down to Sanford which was about an hour south of my friend's house. This is when I fully realized how foolish I would have been to try and drive this thing 1000 miles north with a hurricane hovering over me the whole time. The carb was so bad and poorly tuned it was acting like it was running out of fuel on the highway. I basically had to keep it at 55 the whole way to Sanford. I made it though, giving my keys to the attendant made me pretty nervous that something was going to happen and they wouldn't be able to get it loaded on the train. The attendant LOVED the Jeep and chatted with me about it for a few minutes. I went and sat in the stuffed waiting area for about 2 hours before we could board the train.
If you've never been on a long Amtrak ride like this, you definitely should sometime. It was a pretty neat experience, and it even included dinner and breakfast which to my surprise were fantastic. The views were somewhat boring but worth seeing for the most part, and sleeping was not impossible. I also had my laptop so I could watch some movies and get some editing done as well. So here's the best part of this story. It's about 1:30 AM and I'm in a light sleep. I feel the train come to an abrupt stop. I commuted on SEPTA trains daily for a while and have ridden Amtrak numerous times and only ever felt a train stop like that once before, so I know what had just happened was an emergency stop. Passengers are starting to talk in hushed tones about what might be happening. One person says that we've just stopped to change engines from electric to diesel (wrong, we're diesel the whole way) another says they smell gasoline and this must be a fuel stop. Out my window I can see a shopping mall, and trains don't run on gasoline so I just roll my eyes at both of these assumptions and try to go back to sleep. Finally another passenger comes from towards the front telling people we've hit a vehicle at a road crossing. Yeah, that sounds more like it. Perfect, how long will this take? The news articles online gave us more information than Amtrak ever did. Hung Tran (no joke, that was the vehicle owner's name) wanted to hang up the train I guess. Here's the article -
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... -carolina/
So when we finally winch the car out from under the train we get moving again. Long story longer, we had a small fire hours later caused by the accident damage (part of the car was dragging under the train I think?) and what should have been a 16 hour train ride was about 23 hours. Needless to say I was happy to be off that train and a free man again! They unloaded my jeep without any trouble, I hopped in and blasted out of there. I made it about 3 miles before he quit on me. The engine just softly idled down to 0 rpm as the light was turning green. Thankfully I was on a down hill so I was able to coast off the road and into a shopping center entrance. I wasn't really on the shoulder completely but I couldn't get it any further. I tried to ask the owner of a modded JK at an adjacent car wash if he could possibly be a non douche Jeep owner for a second and tow me off the road but the dude wouldn't even make eye contact with me. A wonderful older woman offered to help me and took me to a gas station where I bought a tank and 5 gallons of fuel to see if that would get me going again. It did not so I called AAA to get me off the road, and my buddy with the Cummins to head down to VA and just get me the heck home already without any more drama. While I was waiting...after I had a tasty burger...I decided to pour some gas down the carb to see if I could get it running so we wouldn't have to winch it on the trailer with a come-along. The engine fired right up. It's shut off like this on me a few times now and I've learned this was just the starving beast's way of running out of gas. I'm pretty sure I was getting about 3 gallons to the mile at that point. Yes, gallons per mile.
That's about where the drama of this story ends. My buddy and my dad actually came down, we loaded up, got some coffee, and hauled ass back to PA.