Okay, I apologize for the title.  I couldn't resist. 

 I finally got up the nerve to submit something (trivia) to tv.com.  In the Criminal Minds episode "Derailed," this has always bugged me - Elle is going to Dallas, but she flies to El Paso and takes a train back to Dallas.  Having lived in the DFW area since 2001 (and it's the first place that has ever truly felt like home - I think once you're a Texan?  You're a Texan - unlike when you move to Vermont and are never truly a Vermonter, or whatever they are called) (or was that New Hampshire?), and at least having a basic knowledge of TX geography, and knowing the size of the DFW airport, this bothered me a little.

I was also suspicious of the train thing.  When I was in Vermont last summer, there was a train line that ran through the state and had stations close to me, so I thought it would be cool to take the train to Maine for a weekend.  So I looked it up.  Was that going to work?  Nooooo.  The route was going to take me through BOSTON and be more than twelve hours, and be as much as round trip airfare for just one leg of the trip (of course, I'd have to drive to Boston for a flight, too - driving to Maine would have been the easiest)!  There was no way I could have done it in a weekend.

So, I got a little obsessive (who, me?) and went to priceline.com and amtrak.com and looked it all up, and found that no, actually, it wouldn't have worked...  She could have flown non-stop to Dallas in three hours, but instead, she flew 6 hrs to El Paso (with a layover in either Dallas or Chicago), waited a day, at least, since the train schedule shows that the train from El Paso only leaves at 9am on Mon Th and Sat, and no plane would get in early enough for her to make the train, and then she took the THIRTY HOUR train trip to Dallas.

So I send it in, and then I tell my brother about it, and he tells me that I sound like a "Foamer" - someone who is completely obsessed with trains and knows where all of the engines are at all times and apparently bothers the people at Amtrak quite a bit... my brother had a friend who worked for Amtrak and told him about them.  So now I'm slightly embarassed.  I mean, it's one thing to be taken as being obsessed about what you really ARE obsessed about (in my case, time issues and anything lab related), but to have people think you're obsessed with something you know nothing about... well, that's just terrible.  :-)  So, for the record, I know nothing about trains.  I just know how to use the internet, and I believe in verifying details.

Personally, I can understand them having Elle on the train (the audio commentary says she wanted to work with Chris Bauer, who played the "bad" guy (although he wasn't quite so bad - I HATE it when they have the misunderstood guys end up getting shot at the end!), but couldn't they have had some throw-in line explaining why she went to El Paso in the first place?  She could have had family there.  And maybe she liked trains.  Maybe all the flights were booked for the next week.  :-)  Something...  But it was still a very good episode.  I like the episodes with the delusional characters.  :-)