Train ride, 2019
Cross America on Amtrak and you’ll find a culture on board that hasn’t changed much since the advent of rail
… There isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, no matter where it’s going … — Edna St. Vincent Millay
Very few things — baseball, perhaps, or small-town carnivals — conjure American nostalgia more than a train ride. I took a grand one early this year, a 2,700-mile journey on Amtrak from our nation’s capital to Los Angeles. On the first day of the trip, around midnight, the Capitol Limited passed through Pittsburgh some eight hours after leaving Union Station in Washington, D.C.
For perspective, reaching the Gateway to the West from Philadelphia by stagecoach in the days of the Founding Fathers — a mere 300 miles — took three punishing weeks.
I booked a tiny “roomette” (cozy but cramped, smaller than the more expensive “bedroom,” and everything the suffix “ette” implies) and crossed the continent in about four days, leaving Union Station at 4:05 p.m. on a Friday in midJanuary and arriving in a rainy Tinseltown about 8:30 a.m. the following Monday.
The first leg of the trip, along an old Baltimore & Ohio line, crossed the Allegheny Mountains before hitting the City of Bridges. Then it was on to Cleveland (and why Johnny Winter in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?) and Chicago to change trains on Saturday afternoon.
In the Windy City, there was enough time to get a deep dish tomato pie in the Loop with Sewickley native Christopher Buckner Kennedy, a musician now chasing the blues in the town where Muddy Waters made them famous.
Then I hopped the Southwest
Chief and set about getting to know the people I’d be living with for the next 42 hours. It did not turn out to be a landmark undertaking on par with Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” in which the Swissborn photographer, now 94, crisscrossed the United States in 1955 on a Guggenheim. But it was an adventure nonetheless, rich enough for fat slices of the 21st-century American pie, as much sweet potato as apple.
Falling pawns
The first folks to catch my eye were an older, diminutive man in a sporty fedora alongside a lanky, fresh-faced teenager paying close attention to everything the old guy said.
Grandfather and grandson, they were touring college campuses before the youngster decides which school might fit best. A contender is Aurora University, nestled in the Illinois hometown of Wayne and Garth.
I have two abiding images of the pair — retired Westinghouse engineer Christopher Vale, 79, and 17year-old Richard, a high school junior known as Aric.
One is watching them play computer chess between lunch and dinner in the dining car, not exactly a memory tinged with sepia but without the worry of falling pawns as the train rocked and swayed through Harpers Ferry.
The other came before we boarded on the East Coast, a Rockwellian portrait of the elder Vale pointing to electrical wires running above the tracks, explaining technology very likely to be obsolete by the time the young man has grandchildren of his own.
“My grandfather is a very friendly man,” said Aric, somewhat shy himself but nonetheless drawn into many of his grandfather’s conversations by listening and commenting. “He likes talking to strangers.”
It’s a good trait to have on long journeys by train, strictly defined as “a means of conveyance of passengers and freight on wheeled vehicles running on rails known as tracks.”
If my brief glimpses of the Vales are indelible, imagine what treasure they’ll be for Aric when his grandfather is gone, when he is the dapper guy in the fedora telling stories of the “big train ride” he took way back in 2019.
Dealin’ cards
2019 — way back when a oneway ticket for a sleeper car across the continent cost about $1,100, several times the cost of a plane and a thousand times more abundant in reflection, quiet and leisure — rich in time; slowing the rhythms of body and mind as long, lingering ribbons of dusk — blood-red and Halloween orange — crease the horizon of the Great Plains.
The views, illustrations for songs by Springsteen, Leadbelly and Joan Baez, bathe glass-paneled “observation cars,” modern versions of “Vista Dome” carriages introduced 70-years-ago this month on the California Zephyr between Chicago and San Francisco.
At midnight Saturday, a full day after passing Pittsburgh, a dozen or so pro football fans got off at the Pershing Road depot in Kansas City to attend a championship game the following day. Left behind were a middle-aged couple — decked out like they were tailgating in red, white and gold Kansas City Chiefs gear — who listened to the game on dual headsets plugged into satellite radio.
I could tell how things were going by reading their faces. Husband and wife rarely looked at one another, instead staring intently at the plastic box that carried the news as though it were an oracle; grimaces and fist pumps as the tides turned, ultimately in favor of the opposition.
In Steve Goodman’s beloved train song “The City of New Orleans” — immortalized by Arlo Guthrie, who came by rambling naturally — the narrator passes the time ...
There was plenty of card-playing on the Chief — usually two people who were traveling together, but down in the club car men and women were crowded around a smartphone, watching the Chiefs battle the Patriots in real time.
“I’m a sucker for a bet,” said one man. Announcing that he was a recent convert to Jehovah’s Witnesses, the amiable fellow took every wager offered (a few dollars here and there, nothing serious) and, while declaring that religion had turned his life around in a mere four months, asked that we overlook the beer he held in each hand. [Five bucks a pop for 12ounce domestic.]
Around him, a dozen travelers previously unknown to one another were cast into fraternity, cheering together, toasting good plays and, like the man-and-wife upstairs, shaking their heads in dismay as overtime expired.
“How the heck,” they griped in somewhat stronger language, “did that blasted Tom Brady do it again?”
Ask fans of the Los Angeles team, in jerseys and hats emblazoned with curled horns all over downtown L.A. when we arrived in town on the morning of Monday, Jan. 21, two weeks before the Rams lost the Super Bowl to New England.
Nostalgia express
Over the course of my four-day excursion, virtually all of the conversations I took part in or overheard were dominated by one theme: Tales of journeys past.
“I’ve done this same route five times,” said one woman. “When I want to go somewhere, I check to see if the train goes there. If it doesn’t, I don’t go.”
In a recent interview with the Paris Review, the centenarian poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti mentions that he once rode the Trans-Siberian Railway — some 9,300 miles, three times the distance I covered — simply because he’d read somewhere that French author Blaise Cendrars had done the same.
“I don’t know whether he did do it,” mused the founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Booksellers, “or whether he made it all up.” It doesn’t quite matter, does it? The was enough for Ferlinghetti to cross Asia on the longest railroad in the world.
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