As you read this, you’re going to think I’m picking on Amtrak. I’m not. Or I don’t mean to. I’m going to simply relate the facts as I recall them.

This monster storm bearing down on much of the East Coast has me thinking about an ill-fated train trip I took — or tried to take, rather — from Niles, Mich., to my home in south Mississippi one Christmas sometime in the late 1990s.

Saturday morning’s television news coverage showed the Duquesne men’s basketball team stranded on a highway someplace in Pennsylvania. The team left Fairfax, Va., on Friday afternoon at about 4:30 p.m., headed home to Pittsburgh after defeating the George Mason basketball team 86-75.

When CNN interviewed Duquesne coach Jim Ferry at about 9 a.m. Saturday, the team had been stuck on a bus on that highway in the bitter cold for more than 13 hours. Traffic was backed up and at a complete standstill. As of the writing of this column on Saturday afternoon at about 3 p.m., the Duquesne team was still on that bus, still stranded.

I shared their pain.

My train trip was to end in Brookhaven, where my family would pick me up and take me the hour drive down U.S. 84 home to Natchez for the Christmas holiday.

I boarded the Amtrak train at Niles’ lovely, historic depot and made the two and a half-hour trip to Chicago’s Union Station in good order. It’s only about a 96-mile drive from Niles to Chicago, but this was about the experience. I had never before been on a train.

My wait to board the City of New Orleans for trip south was to be just a couple of hours. We were supposed to leave Chicago at about 5 p.m. However, 5 p.m. came and went.

As luck would have it, Chicago and most of the middle part of the nation was in the grip of a deep freeze. We got some snow, yes, but the problem was the cold. It was minus 20 degrees in Chicago that night before any wind chill.

More than half of Amtrak’s Union Station personnel didn’t make it to work that night. Dozens of trains were delayed or cancelled and Union Station was overflowing with tired and frustrated people.

Finally, my train was boarded at about 11 p.m. I thought it would be smooth sailing from there. Thank goodness I had booked a little sleeper room because after we boarded the train, we went nowhere. They boarded our train simply to get people out of the train station.

At about 6 a.m. the next morning, our train headed slowly out of the station. Surely, that would be the last of the issues. Au contraire.

We traveled about 26 miles from Chicago to Homewood, Ill., and there we stopped. And we waited. And waited. Finally, some Amtrak worker made the announcement that our crew had been on the train longer than federal labor laws allowed and we were waiting for another crew to arrive and take over.

As we simply sat on that train on those tracks in Homewood, Ill., Amtrak ran out of food and water. Babies cried. Toilets overflowed. Tempers flared.

After sitting for 12 hours, with basically zero communication with anyone in any official capacity, we felt our train start up, but it felt like we were going in reverse.

Indeed we were. They backed our train up all the way to Union Station and cancelled the trip.

Amtrak was kind enough to arrange for a bus to transport us back to Niles and Kalamazoo and other parts east in Michigan.

I remember arriving back at my home in Niles on midnight of the day I was supposed to arrive in Natchez. It was the first Christmas I ever spent away from my childhood home and away from my family.

Pouting and feeling sorry for myself, first thing I did when I got home in the middle of the night was take down my Christmas tree.

It’s been a funny story to tell, but I did a lot of growing up that Christmas, a lot of realizing that things never stay the same and we’ve got to learn to roll with the punches.

I’m praying that those in harms way of this storm are able to stay safe and warm and come out of it with nothing more than a good story.