Music blends perfectly with rhythm of the rails
Roots on the Rails series is ‘a carefully curated mini-music festival on board a train’
BELLOWS FALLS, Vt. — Stacey Nakasone had a choice to make: fly from her home in Los Angeles to Japan to learn more about taiko drums or take a 50-mile train ride in Vermont.
For Nakasone, and about 50 other people this fall, Vermont it was.
The destination was the East Coast’s first visit by the Roots on the Rails series, which since 2003 has developed a cult-like following that combines rail trips with music, while bonding passengers to one another and to the musicians.
Roots on the Rails grew out of a trip a group of musicians took from Toronto to a music conference in British Columbia in 2000. Along the way, the musicians just wanted to play, said founder Charlie Hunter, a former music promoter and a painter of aging American infrastructure who now lives in Bellows Falls.
He soon began to run train trips in the U.S. and Canada, most of which travel for about a week. He calls the trips “a carefully curated mini-music festival on board a train.”
“The rhythms of American music are inexorably tied in with the rhythms of the rails,” Hunter said.
The trips are marketed to fans of the musicians who play the broad genre of country-folk. Hunter called one of the musicians on the Vermont trip, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, one of the most distinctive voices in the genre during the last 40 years. The other acts are all well-known in their own way, he said.
Jack and Claudia Gaffey, of Kensington, Maryland, travelled to Vermont so they could ride the music train. This was their first Roots on the Rails trip, and they’ve already signed up for a longer trip next summer.
“It’s very soothing to listen to music inside a train. It was a completely different experience I’ve never had before and I’ve ridden many trains,” Claudia Gaffey said. “The rhythm of the train goes into the rhythm of the music, and it combines in a really nice, sensory way.”