David Slack
Drop at the station and he’ll be happy to hop a midnight train going anywhere.
People keep trying to kill me on the pedestrian crossing outside our house. For that reason alone I am excited about driverless cars. I also believe they are the face of a happy future of unclogged roads and unwarmed planet.
But will anyone ever invent a better way to travel than a train? I never took a train ride, ever, that I didn’t enjoy, and that includes the Tube.
My first time in America I found my way to Union Station in Los Angeles. Give me a ticket to everywhere, please. The Southwest Chief was leaving in four hours, bound for Chicago. Perfect. A few hours in seedy downtown LA where no-one walks, then back to the most beautiful railway station in the world, all palm trees and art deco and wooden benches and a vast floor tiled in the pattern of a Navajo blanket.
We pulled out at dusk, for Barstow and Needles, Flagstaff and Winslow, Albuquerque and on to Illinois, a night and a day and a night away. Cheerful conductors made the roll call over and over. Every stop ahead was the world capital for something, Cherokee Nation art, tractors, potatoes, beets, carrots. Each world capital mute behind the windows of the train, so much of it empty: a pickup truck, a semi-trailer, then nothing. Here you find what it’s like on the wrong side of the tracks.
Budweiser and microwaved hot dogs in the bar, New York strip steak in the dining car with more Budweisers and you bet I loved every one. Getting to know strangers over the roll of the hours, and don’t mind if I do and what are you having and no, not Australia, New Zealand, actually. Strolling about, as comfortable as your lounge at home, and out your enormous window, there it is, America.
The only reason I have spent an afternoon in Schenectady is because you had to get off one train and wait for another, and I like that a train will make that happen to you.
My first-ever long train ride was from Feilding to Auckland on the implausibly named Express, which stopped at every town in between. You struggled to sleep in seats that were not wide, not kind.
Mum had made delicious tomato soup and it was a great adventure but it was also a kind of torture that went on forever. Perhaps it helps to be an adult where you don’t mind how very long it takes and actually welcome the excuse to step out from life for a while. Like being in hospital but not sick.
So I’ll always climb on board. Any train I’ve ridden I would step back onto right now, The Sunset Limited charging across Texas and still taking a day and half to get through that huge state. Pulling into Phoenix,10 at night, the stillest kindest heat lifting off the platform and you breathe in Will anyone ever invent a better way to travel than a train? I never took a train ride, ever, that I didn't enjoy, and that includes the Tube. the fragrance of blossoms and you think this is where I will come and live one day.
Up into Montreal on the Adirondack, down to San Diego on the Pacific Surfliner. Rattling in a tiny bunk on the overnight train from Prague to Munich, opening a bottle for our wedding anniversary at 10 in the morning underneath the English Channel, even the TGV that was stormed by a gunman one week after we were on it.
And now maybe their time is passing because it may be easier and cheaper to have driverless cars. What a shame that would be.
The Government released statistics this week about how we get to work. We spend, on average, just under an hour a day travelling. Meanwhile, and quite possibly entirely related, train patronage in Auckland has grown by 67 per cent in five years.
How great would it be if you could take a train at any old time between Hamilton and Whangarei and Tauranga and Auckland? How great would it be to sit and let someone else do the driving as you read, or listen to your music, or get up and walk around and chat, or just look out from your comfortable seat at the poor sods on the motorway?
How great would it be if we took the billions we spend on roads and put it into that? You couldn’t keep me out of them.