Why Train Travel Is Better

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and subtle insinuations of mild sensuality.

Introduction

 Six years ago I blogged (here, here, and here) about my family’s trip on Amtrak from the Bay Area to Chicago.  Well, we’re at it again.  I’m typing away from the observation car as the train makes its way through the mountains east of Grand Junction, Colorado.  Our destination this time is Denver.

(As far as you know I posted this after the fact and/or we’re flying straight home from there so by the time you read this it will be too late to burglarize our home.  Or maybe not … maybe this is the beginning of a long vacation, in which case you’re welcome to try to steal our sentimentally valuable but commercially useless family heirlooms, though you’ll have to deal with our psychotic gun-nut house-sitter and his meth-fueled pit bull, who never knew his father.)

Having tackled the overall train travel experience in my previous posts, today I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons why train travel is the best way to go. 

Reason #1:  Train travel is novel

Train travel is novel.  Flying has become as routine as taking a bus, more so actually, as has driving, and both activities get old pretty quickly (unless you’re driving on a cool highway like US 50).  And on the train if you get tired of your coach seat or sleeper car berth, you can mosey on up to the observation deck, or down to the lounge, and at mealtime you get to sit in the dining car (and actually, the Amtrak food is pretty darn good).  At bedtime if you’re in a sleeper you fold down one bed from above and turn the seats into another bed, which is really fun for kids (I think this gave my younger daughter goose bumps the first time).

The train stops from time to time, in places more rustic and less bland than the convenience stores along an interstate.  You can step off the train for a little fresh air.

Reason #2:  Flashers

Also, if you take the California Zephyr route you’ll cruise along the Truckee and Colorado rivers, where there are lots of rafters, and your chances of being mooned or flashed are very high.  It’s a long-standing tradition, apparently, for young men to moon the train, or young women to pull up their shirts or bikini tops for the benefit of Amtrak sightseers.  When my brother took his kids on this train back in ’05 they were flashed by rafters, as was my wife in ’06 (while my head was, alas, turned the wrong way).  And while I was sitting here peering into my laptop just now, a rafter flashed the passengers to my right.  I’m so bummed to have missed that.  Serves me right for writing this instead of just gazing out the window and watching life go by.  I hope you’re happy.

Reason #3:  Better for the planet

Wikipedia reckons that “a train seems to be on average 20 times more efficient than automobile for transportation of passengers, if we consider energy spent per passenger-km.”  They base this on an assumption of the car getting 39 mpg, which is far better than most cars get, especially with a bunch of luggage and/or bikes fastened to the roof rack.  In contrast, Wikipedia estimates that a passenger train gets 468 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.

I’m not sure how Wikipedia gets their “20 times more efficient” figure because they don’t show their work.  My Volvo gets about 28 mpg on the highway, so with 4 passengers that’s 28*4 = 112 passenger-miles per gallon, which—compared to the train’s 468 passenger-miles/gallon—makes the train look only 4.2 times as efficient as a fully-loaded automobile.  I’m not going to ponder this disparity at length, because I’m more interested in comparing a train to a plane.

Wikipedia estimates that an Airbus 380 (the dumpy plane most of us tend to fly) gets 78 passenger-miles per gallon.  That means the train is 6 times more efficient (per passenger) than the plane. On top of that, the plane is polluting up in the atmosphere where the emissions do the most damage.  The so-called “climatic forcing” effect of jet aircraft means that although “per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1,574 lb) of CO2,” this is “equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2.”  That is, the fact of the aircraft emissions being high in the atmosphere increases the environmental damage by a factor of 2.7.  So the train is actually about 16 times less bad for the environment than a plane.  In other words, for the environmental cost of one family vacation involving air travel, we could take 16 train trips of equal length.

If these numbers start to make your head swim or your eyes glaze over, here’s a more interesting way to express the efficiency of trains:  in 2007 a man dragged a 7-coach train weighing almost 300 tons along its track for more than 9 feet, using his teeth.  This is possible because the steel-on-steel interface between the train wheels and the track incurs so little friction.  (You think that guy could lift even a small single-engine aircraft off the ground with his teeth?)

A final environmental consideration:  the benefit of your choice doesn’t end with your train trip.  Amtrak pays freight train companies for the use of their tracks, so by supporting Amtrak you’re also supporting the railroad freight industry, which is far greener than long haul trucking.

Reason #4:  Can be cheaper

If you can tolerate coach class—where the seats are way bigger than an airplane’s, by the way, with far more legroom—Amtrak can be very inexpensive.  I’m sharing a table in this observation car with an lady who is traveling from Winnemucca, NV to some town just outside Chicago for under $280, round-trip.  The gal across the aisle is going from the Bay Area to Denver and the total tab, one-way, is $222 … which covers herself and her two kids.  (Full disclosure:  this was her original cost, but a couple days before her trip, Amtrak ran a special on the sleeper car so she upgraded for “not much money.”)

The sleeper car is generally a lot more expensive than coach, but I sprung for the sleeper car because this is our big vacation for the year.  It was worth paying extra just to be able to tell my kids, “We’re livin’ large as possible, posse unstoppable, style topical, vividly optical.”  I can’t make this boast with air travel because first class there is way too much money to even consider, and the seats are still smaller than even the coach seats on Amtrak.  (Each seat in the sleeper cabin is wide enough for two.)

Reason #5:  None of the airline bullshit!

I hate flying.  Going through the security check, and having to take off my shoes (even though the one guy who tried to smuggle explosives in his shoe got caught), and having to drink up or forfeit my water, and let some guy pat me down so closely I expect him to ask for my phone number afterward, and then having to take my bag over to some table where somebody runs a little cloth swab all over it to check for explosives—as if!—and then, once I’m finally on the plane, being deprived of legroom, food, even peanuts, and invariably being seated right above the wing with the jet engine shrieking in my ear, and having the baggage policy get ever stingier practically every time I fly, and being asked to pay—get this—$150 each way to bring my 17-pound bicycle on the plane … it’s all just such bullshit I can’t even describe it without the “-shit” part.  I tried to use “BS” but it just wasn’t enough.

On Amtrak, there is no security check.  None.  I mean, what are you going to do, hijack the train and make them take you to the Flagstaff, AZ station instead of Denver?  The Amtrak process is so simple:  you make your reservation, print out your single sheet of paper which serves as the boarding pass for your whole family, show up at the station 45 minutes in advance (no check-in required), and bring practically as many bags as you want, for free, and take them right to the train where you’ll have access to them the whole trip and never have to wait for them to come off the carousel.

And you know what?  If you’re not that organized, and you get a late start riding bikes to the station with your teenage daughter, and if Google Maps totally screws you by leading you not to the station but to a barren place across the tracks and more importantly across a giant fence from the station, so you have to spend an extra ten minutes racing around on surface streets, you can literally roll up with your bike less than 15 minutes before the train leaves.  At least, my daughter and I did, and incurred only a very mild, brief tongue-lashing at the ticket counter, where I paid $10 each to take our bikes on the train.  And the bikes, un-boxed (because Amtrak had run out of boxes), didn’t have to go through some system of conveyor belts like at an airport, which present some danger to the bikes, which danger the airlines—being dicks about this, like everything—accept no liability for.  I put the bikes on a luggage cart, and the conductor said they’d just be leaned on a wall and lashed down.  Simple.

Reason #6:  Less stressful than driving

Driving is a leading cause of accidental death.  Even if you’re the best driver ever, you’re sharing the road with drunks, and irresponsible young men who think driving fast is a game, and drivers who just plain suck.  And you have no control over the weather, which can turn your road trip into a nightmare.

With a train, you’re responsible for  getting yourself to the station and that’s about it.  Then you can read, sleep, look out the window, play a board game, blog, or take advantage of the seventh reason why trains are better.

Reason #7:  Friendly fellow passengers

It is technically possible to have a good conversation on an airplane with a fellow passenger, but highly unlikely.  First of all, your only opportunity is with the person in the next seat, vs. wandering around a train with the opportunity to chat up anybody who seems friendly.  Second, most air travelers are too angry, too tense, and/or (if they’re on business) too preoccupied to want to chat.  In my experience, everybody in the Amtrak observation car is there to soak up the view and relax.  I’ve conversed with several friendly passengers today.

Conversely, if you don’t feel like chatting, you don’t have to be rude to the person in the (assigned airline) seat next to you who keeps asking what you’re reading instead of letting you read.  On a train, you can just return to your seat, or into your sleeper car where you can close the curtain and/or door.

Now, if you’re sharing an automobile with your favorite people, of course you can chat with them, but only to a point.  If you’re the one driving, you shouldn’t get too caught up in the conversation or you’ll become that “distracted driver” that is such a menace to society.  (Once, at the end of a 6-hour drive, I missed the exit to my mom’s town because I was so caught up in reciting the poem “Kill My Landlord.”)  If you’re not driving, you need to take care to not distract the driver too much.  And you can’t have a good conversation with your kids because they’re too busy fighting in the backseat, and dispensing toilet paper out the window to make comets, and fussing, and squirming, and asking, “Are we there yet?”  On the train you can split them up, banish them to their sleeping room, or tell them to go pester the conductor about the ETA.

Reason #8:  Better scenery

The view from the tiny plastic airplane window is okay during takeoff and landing, but once you’re at cruising altitude you’re usually too far up to see much.  Occasionally the pilot will get on the PA and say, “Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the Grand Canyon down there … looks a little like a cracked lip.”  Often there’s cloud cover below the plane so you can’t see anything at all.

The view from an automobile is better, but you still don’t see as much.  Train tracks sometimes go through places that don’t have roads.  I’ve been looking out at the Colorado River and the gorge it winds through, and it’s pretty impressive.  The tracks go through less developed areas so the landscape is often especially impressive.

Right now the train is threading its way between Routt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest, near the towns of Kremmling, Heeny, and Sheephorn.  Have you heard of these places?  Of course not, and that’s the point.  (“I used to live in Kremmling,” a friendly fellow passenger just piped up, having perhaps read that over my shoulder.  “One saloon and one cabin.”)

Even familiar scenery can be completely changed by the unique vantage point of the train.  I’ve seen the Carquinez Bridge hundreds of times, but never from below, as I did yesterday.

There are even volunteer docents on some stretches, who will give you history about an area (such as the gold country or the gorge we’re going through now).  They don’t just drone on either; they’re pretty funny.  “Look at that white thing way up on the bank there—that’s a Suburban,” one just said.  “That’s a teenager’s driving lesson.”

You also get to see cooler animals via the train.  On this trip my family has seen antelope; prairie dogs; some strange animal we’re calling a desert badger; a jackrabbit; mule deer; and even a T-Rex scarfing baby Ewoks like they were croutons.  (I made that last bit up to see if you’re still awake.)  Some animals seem curious about the train whereas no living creature has any interest in cars (except certain humans).

On top of all this, you’re not going that fast on the train, so you get a better look at everything.  (And you still get where you’re going sooner than a car because the train doesn’t stop for the night.)

Reason #9:  Don’t have to look at people

There comes a time during a conventional voyage when you get so bored, you may be unable to resist looking at other people.  How often have you been on a 6-hour flight and you get so stir-crazy you decide to head over to the lavatory, even though you know there’ll be a line, and you stand there looking out over all the other bored, irritated people, packed in like cattle, and you just hate them all?  Or you’re so bored during a drive that you start to look at every driver you pass, and in every single case they’re looking back at you, and you’re both thinking, “What are you lookin’ it?!” and it’s just kind of creepy?

I guess if the answer to those (albeit rhetorical) questions is “No,” then you’re a better person than I am, and you can have your boring interstate highways and jam-packed airplanes.  For me, boredom just isn’t a problem on a train, and there’s so much to look at, and everybody looks better to me because, like them, I’m so much more cheerful.

Reason #10:  No deep vein thrombosis or perforated eardrums

Okay, I’ll concede that deep vein thrombosis isn’t exactly an epidemic.  It’s the rare person who, due to being too cramped and still for too long, suffers a blood clot that moves through his/her system and causes a pulmonary embolism.  But it can happen.  What if you got one and died on a plane or in your car?  Wouldn’t that be a rotten way to go?  (“He died as he lived … stuck in coach” or “He didn’t die alone … his car veered over several lanes and took out a school bus.”)

Meanwhile, train travel is easier on your ears.  The pressure changes on a train are very gradual.  As you cross the Continental Divide, you might notice the foil on a single-serving coffee creamer start to bulge, but you won’t feel much in your ears.  This train is at over 7,000 feet elevation right now and I’ve barely felt a thing.  Airplanes are different.  Cabin pressure is at cruising altitude is equivalent to 5,000 feet of elevation, and can decrease to zero in a matter of minutes when you land.  Once, I had a minor cold resulting in a clogged Eustachian tube, so when the plane descended I suffered a perforated eardrum.  This was absolutely excruciating and turned my ear into a geyser of blood and pus for several days, and required several follow-up visits with a doctor.

Bonus Reason:  Hand-to-hand combat

If you try to give somebody a real beat-down in the aisle of a passenger jet, you’ll probably get arrested when you land.  And an automobile is just too confined a space for a good fistfight—your elbows keep hitting things.  The sleeping cabin of a train, however, is private and spacious.  I could hear my daughters going at it from across the aisle.  They don’t pack a good punch, those girls, so neither was injured, but I think they had a good, satisfying tussle.

This was confirmed when I interviewed my daughters for this post.  Among the reasons my older daughter gave for preferring train travel was “Can finally fight it out with your sister once and for all.”  She even admitted that she was fantasizing a bit about being James Bond, who never boarded a train without having one final battle with this or that nemesis.  (And for the record, upon reading over my shoulder just now, she has assured me that she was pulling her punches and actually could have done serious damage.  Maybe on the way home?)

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - BART Opinion "Card"

Introduction

For the first five years I lived in the Bay Area, I had no car and depended on the excellent Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. It’s easy to use when you get the hang of it, but when I first started using it, I was clueless. Worse, I was anxious about it, I guess, and really wasn’t very resourceful when it came to studying the map, looking for schedules, etc. I didn’t understand the time-saving benefits of transfers, either, and I wasn’t even thoughtful enough to bring a book. Probably I was just so dazzled by it all, my brain couldn’t do anything right.

Over the last couple of decades, BART has improved quite a bit: its reach has grown (most significantly, it now goes all the way to the San Francisco International Airport), its ticket machines work better and accept credit cards, and its website is very easy to use (which helps the newcomer understand about train transfers and such). But even back in 1990 BART was a much better system than the following letter suggests. What you are about to read started out a handwritten response to a survey, but quickly I ran out of paper and it morphed into something like a short story.

I actually did get a response from BART to this letter/survey/story, but it was absolutely the most rote, boilerplate response possible. If somebody had scrawled in the margin, “There are plenty of schedules at the customer service kiosk, you dope,” that would have been very helpful. Anyway, I forwarded my letter (and the response) to some family members and friends, some of whom couldn’t believe that the remarkable events described my letter really happened. I swear to you that it’s all true—I didn’t make up or embellish anything.



BART opinion card — August 28, 1990

The little blue card says:

Your Opinions Count!

We’d like to know which of BART’s services you especially appreciate and how you think we could make BART better for you.

This is what I like about BART:

Riding BART is nostalgic, reminding me of my past family vacations when your electric trains were more a novelty, like an amusement park ride, than merely a means of transportation. Rockridge station is only two blocks from my apartment so I can walk there. I like that you let me take my bike on BART so I can go out east of the Oakland hills for the only flat bike ride I’m likely to get around here. BART is clean and quiet and allows people to travel without completely polluting the air and becoming freeway zombies who occasionally spring to life from their drowsy half-comas to cuss at other drivers, make frantic obscene gestures, and even cut each other off because they’re so frustrated at being trapped in a little steel box that can’t move because of all the other single-occupancy rolling motels.

This is what I don’t like about BART:

I don’t like how you people don’t give out schedules and maps. The other day I ran into your station, running because I had no idea whether I had thirty seconds or twenty minutes to catch your next train. I arrived at the depot just in time for your train to arrive. As the doors opened for a few brief, precious seconds (this time should be lengthened!), I suddenly realized I had never before commuted on your trains from the Shattuck station (or whatever it’s called—I can’t check to see because you don’t give out schedules or maps) and didn’t know what direction I had to travel in to transfer to the Walnut Creek station. So in my moment of hesitation, not wanting to get on the wrong train, the doors closed and I missed the train. Sometimes I can find schedules posted in your stations, sometimes not.

I decided to ride my bike up to my apartment, drop it off, and try to make the next train from the Rockridge station. I ran the few blocks between my apartment and the station, feeling like an idiot because I was just sure I’d make it with fifteen minutes to spare and have gotten all sweaty for nothing. Did I mention my shorts were falling down, too? All because I didn’t know when the next train left. I got to the station and tried to add some fare to my ticket. Your machine wouldn’t take my bills. You know those incredibly crisp, new twenties the Automatic Teller Machines give out? Well you can’t get singles, just twenties, that are that crisp. So why do your machines seem to demand them? My bills were pretty good, I thought. I’ve fed change machines in video arcades much more weathered bills than that.

Anyway, you can guess what happened: by the time I gave up, resolving to get better bills later, I ran up the escalator and just missed my second train of the day. We’re talking a matter of seconds here. There’s nothing more frustrating than barely missing your train. I once saw this scenario played out by somebody else while I waited safely inside the train. The poor, irate sod just started beating the side of your train, clubbing it with his foot. Can’t your drivers stop the train for people like that? This was the second time in as many weeks that your ticket machines had made me miss my train.

I guess it wouldn’t be so bad if your depots weren’t such a hell on earth. I mean, you’re suspended on this platform that looks like something from the Death Star, sandwiched between two roaring freeways, protected yet trapped by link fences like a caged animal. There’s absolutely nothing to do—maybe you can read the business section of the paper that somebody left behind, or you can look at the cold cement structures or beyond the fence at the fuming cars, or listen to the honking horns and blaspheming drivers. But that’s no way to spend twenty minutes just because you didn’t have a schedule to consult before making your way to the station.

Perhaps you feel as though I’m just nitpicking for the sake of whining, but bear with me, as my BART story is not quite done yet. The same day I missed two of your trains, I was returning from Walnut Creek on the 11:55pm train, and at the station I even asked the attendant which set of tracks the train for Rockridge would arrive on. Well, I waited my fifteen minutes or so (resting after my ridiculous and inevitable sprint to the station) and felt greatly relieved that I would make the last train after all. (I had called your number in the yellow pages asking for schedule information, and your operator sounded like she’d been asleep, or on Valium or something, and gave me very vague information.)

In the station I found a section of the paper that wasn’t too boring, having some comics and whatnot, and this cutesy columnist had asked various people to describe the worst date they’d ever been on. One response was so fitting I even clipped it, and at the risk of copyright infringement, I will share it with you now: “Michelle Garber, 28, legal secretary, Moraga: The date itself wasn’t so bad. We just ended up drinking, and I lost track of time. We parted, and I discovered I had missed the last BART train to the East Bay. I had to spend the night at Carl’s Jr. with the bums drinking coffee all night. I didn’t call my date. I felt too stupid and embarrassed.”

I had just shared this funny article with a well-dressed, young executive-looking woman when the roar of the train shocked us both into that state of stomach-churning paranoia that comes from having only five seconds to get through the doors of the train. Suddenly a calm, perfunctory-sounding announcement came over the loud-speaker: “Attention riders bound for Daly City: the Daly City train will arrive on the Concord platform.” One of your employees came running out of his little kiosk, frantically waving his arms in the universal symbol for “Run! Run!” We watched, spellbound, as seconds later the train slid in on the far tracks, across the huge cement trench of the near tracks—and more importantly, across the dreaded Electric Third Rail. Had I been Indiana Jones, I would’ve swung across on my whip, but alas, I’m a mere college student, so I ran after my hapless co-passengers, risking life and limb to run down the escalator, across the station, and up the other side.

One well-dressed young businessman walked confidently, sure that the train would be held since BART had, after all, screwed up. Perhaps I could have made better time, but I found myself behind the executive woman, who was actually running astonishingly quickly for somebody in high heels. The horror! For the third time in a day, the train roared off blindly, just outrunning three panting and hugely disgruntled would‑be passengers.

Adding to my pathetic fate, one of them—a woman far less sophisticated than the high-heeled executive sprinter—screamed, “Noooooooooo!” almost right in my ear. To my bewilderment, she then threw herself down on the floor and started shaking, even wriggling, as if a pre-teen having a tantrum. I think she was vying for attention from the goony guy she’d run up the escalator with, who looked like one of the guys in my high-school shop class who was out of high‑ school now and working in a factory de-burring plastic parts or something. He had these fingerless gloves that I couldn’t figure out.

Whatever buttons the shrieking woman was pressing were the right ones for him, boy. She had on this all-black Lycra outfit with some kind of vinyl jacket or something, and way too much makeup. The over-confident businessman had arrived now, and seemed more than surprised at the inability or refusal of your people to hold the train for us. I guess maybe he wasn’t the standard businessman; his clothes were stylish but not office-formal. L.A. Gear shoes, actually. Handsome—a good match for Executive Woman. A nice pair of pairs, those two and the shrieking woman/shop guy combo. Where do I fit in, then? Well, somebody has to pay attention to the trains and fill out the little blue card telling you guys our opinions.

We all went down to talk to the guys in the kiosk, and one of them said, “I been working here eighteen years and this kind of crap has happened all along.” The other guy was making a phone call to see what the deal was. He came out and said, “Well, all I accomplished was to have the guy on the other end demand an apology. Say’s I’m not man enough to give him one.” I’m not making any of this up, I swear. I envisioned the five of us spending the rest of the night in a Carl’s Jr. drinking black, stinking coffee.

Fortunately, there was one more train. I was going to propose that we roshambo to see who had to throw himself down on the Electric Third Rail in case of a repeat track screw-up, but the two couples seemed to be hitting it off well and I didn’t want to disturb them. Classy Guy was describing a jazz festival he’d just seen to Executive Woman, who then began talking about the amazing watermelon daiquiris her thirteen-year-old nephew had somehow learned to make. Shrieking Woman and Shop Guy went out for a smoke. Then we all went back up to the platform to try our luck at the next train, and Classy Guy produced the Sunday Chronicle. He read our horoscopes, and we chatted away, while Shop Guy and Shrieking Woman had drifted off and seemed to hit it off in a more, uh, profound way. Two minutes before the train was due, they made for the escalator. “Wait!” cried Executive Woman. “Where are you going?” Shop Guy looked over at her and said, “To a motel.” Confused, she said, “Why?” and then Shrieking Woman gave her a little knowing wink. After they left, Classy Guy said, “What do you mean, why? Where have you been, don’t you know about motels?”

We all had a good laugh, and then Executive Woman and I had more laughs trying to figure out why Shrieking Woman had been flipping around on the floor like a fish out of water after missing the train. Finally the train came, on the right tracks, and on the trip home Classy Guy read the Prince Valiant comic aloud, in his best low deejay voice, while Executive Woman acted out the parts for us in the seat beside him.

As I left the train at Rockridge, Classy Guy said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow,/ That I shall say good night till it be morrow.” How could I match his wit? “Ah, William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Scene II,” I said. Then Executive Woman told me, “I’ll bet this is a ride train you won’t soon forget.” I think she’d mentioned having had wine earlier. “You mean train ride,” I said. I left BART with high hopes for Classy Guy and Executive Woman; after all, they had all the way to Daly City to become Classy Couple.

Obviously, everything had turned out for the best, but that’s not the point. What if, for company during my ordeal, I’d only had Shop Guy, or Shrieking Woman, or yet worse, both? I guess what I mainly don’t like about BART is its unpredictability. So print up a few hundred thousand schedules. Hold a train for a guy down on his luck every now and then. Fix your machines to take less-than-perfect dollar bills. And if your train is going to end up on the wrong side of the tracks late on a Saturday night, for God’s sake give us a phone call so we won’t have to worry!

Train Trip - Part Two

NOTE: this post is rated PG-13 for an instance of mild strong language.

Introduction

If you feel you need an introduction, perhaps you haven’t read my previous post, “Train Trip – Part 1.” Or perhaps you don’t need this introduction at all, and yet here it is, like that weird snub-nosed hair dryer provided in a hotel room, or those gross individually-wrapped toothpaste-flavored candies in the glass bowl at an otherwise great restaurant. (This introduction exists for the sake of form; I try for a certain consistency with these posts, having not yet read enough Donald Barthelme to develop better habits.) Suffice to say I’m in a huge rush, writing a bit here in the observation lounge before the rest of the family wakes up. Thus, there may not be any structure to this post, and it may run a bit long. The Times regrets—no, wait, the Times breathes a huge sigh of relief—that it isn’t paying me by the word, nor, in fact, at all.

Train architecture

I’m in the observation lounge, looking out the huge window at, uh, Kansas I think. It’s easy to get disoriented when you wake up on a train that’s been cruising along at 70 mph all night. To my left is the bar. So far on this trip there has been no activity at the bar: no drinks served, no bartender, no booze inventory. Just a little sink and the kind of faucet where you push the glass against a half-ring, and two small fridges built into the cabinetry. I picture a time, back when Americans drank cocktails, when this bar would have been the nerve center of the entire observation car: guys with narrow neckties and short haircuts drinking highballs. You can still get beer on the train, but it’s downstairs in the cheerless little snack bar among the Doritos and refrigerated box sandwiches. (Of course, this car is gorgeous, and has no need for a two-drink minimum.)

I’ve often filled our water bottles here at this abandoned bar, reaching over its low partition, feeling vaguely subversive. If anybody gives me a hard time about this it’ll be the Scoutmaster to my right, who is presiding over six or eight Boy Scouts on this train. The other day this Scoutmaster scowled at me hard for no apparent reason, though I’ve decided the scowl might just be his natural expression. He doesn’t look happy at all, though perhaps I wouldn’t be either if I had to wear a full Boy Scout uniform in public throughout my vacation.

Anyhow, yesterday evening I saw somebody manning the bar for the first time, but it was a college-age girl, standing behind the partition working on her laptop PC. I couldn’t figure out why she chose that area, having to stand and risking the wrath of the Scoutmaster, when there were seats available. (She wasn’t serving drinks, needless to say.) This morning the mystery is solved: she was there for the electrical outlet. This train, though it looks a lot like the one we took east toward Chicago, is evidently a bit older and doesn’t have electrical jacks running along the walls. The other one had plenty of them (each labeled “120 Volts” since probably half the passengers on these trains are foreigners). The only electrical outlet in the whole car is that one at the bar. I’ve got my laptop cord snaked through there and hope to have my battery back to 100% before the Scoutmaster notices.

Situation room

Downstairs from the observation lounge is the snack bar and a restroom that mainly serves the coach passengers. This restroom is certainly harder-used than the ones in the sleeper cars. We only use it when the kids need a restroom during our meal, as it’s quicker to get here via the observation lounge than to go back through the sleeper cars. During one meal I stood outside the restroom, chaperoning Alexa, when another passenger (ball cap, sleeveless t-shirt, slack jaw, paunch) went right by me toward it. It didn’t occur to him that I was in line. I guess he thought I just preferred standing over sitting, and preferred restroom-perfumed air to fresh. I said, “Hey, dumbass, you think I’m just standing here for my health?”

No, of course I didn’t really say that. I said, “There’s someone in there.” He replied, “Both of ‘em?” and continued down the short dead-end hallway. There is of course only one restroom there. I replied, “Oh, I didn’t know there was a second one.” When the guy discovered there was only one restroom, he said, “Oh, my goodness, right you are! I’ll line up behind you like any reasonable person.” No, of course he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything: he just tried the latch on the one restroom, where Alexa was. I guess he figured I was lying about the restroom being occupied, or was somehow mistaken, or perhaps he thought that tiny door would miraculously open out into a giant multi-stall men’s room. Alexa called out, “Excuse me, I’m in here.” The guy came back out past me, mouth-breathing, his brain unable (through overexertion or sheer paralysis) to contrive a facial expression. This is the beauty of a train: aren’t you glad this idiot isn’t on the highway instead, buzzing along at 80 in his Ford Expedition, changing lanes without checking his blind spot?

Off the train

Last Thursday we got off the train in Chicago. It had been a great three days but the kids were starting to become unstable, in the way that a nuclear reactor sometimes does. Their roughhousing was becoming more violent and unstructured, approaching that of two little boys (which of course I have no stomach for). My attempts to calm my daughters down were failing. I put a stack of pillows between them; these became weapons. I felt my authority slipping away: the kids would desist for only moments before gradually going at each other again. If Joan Didion had been trapped in our little sleeping car, she’d have said, “The center cannot hold, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

The train was only about four hours late, which wasn’t bad at all over such a long distance, with a freight train derailment along the line. (Amtrak pays the freight companies to use their tracks.) Our checked bag, however, took another forty-five minutes to reach us. It’s hard to know, in a train station you’ve never set foot in, that you’re in the right place, that there isn’t an evil twin baggage claim area that actually has your stuff. There were no announcements of any kind concerning any of this, and when I asked somebody in an Amtrak uniform what was up, he said, “Oh, it’s on the way. They had to wake up baggage.”

We spent the night in Chicago (our hotel, which we’d paid for in advance, was overbooked and they sent us down to a “sister property” and refunded our money!) and we spent the next morning recombobulating ourselves. Then we had lunch at an Italian place called Volare. Glorious! Look at this pappardelle alla Bolognese I had:

As I cropped the photo just now, this big black woman passing behind me must have looked over my shoulder because she said, “Mm-mmm-mmh.” And she’s right.

It was hot and sunny and humid in Chicago. We found a little pocket park with a fountain. The kids were instructed not to get wet. They got drenched. Erin said, “I can’t believe they got wet!” I replied, “I can’t believe you can’t believe they got wet!”

There’s a big park in Chicago next to the naval pier, and a nice stretch of beach. The kids wrestled on the grass for at least an hour. Instead of running all over Chicago (in the heat and humidity) and trying to tick off items on a metaphorical tourist’s checklist, we just spent the afternoon at this park relaxing.

Unreasonably close to the departure of our next train—which would take us a short distance up to Michigan to visit some friends—we suddenly became ambitious and headed to the John Hancock building. It’s not as tall as the Tower Formerly Known As Sears but has the best view in the city, according to our waiter at Volare. To be precise, he recommended the view from the women’s bathroom in the 96th floor lounge. The elevator made all our ears pop. Here’s the view Erin and the girls got to see:

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There is no window at all in the men’s room of the 96th floor lounge.

It was a bit tight making our train to Michigan. I have a vivid memory of my kids sprinting down the platform ahead of Erin and me, the train seething and groaning next to us.

Michigan was excellent. Among other attractions, there is a gorgeous beach near New Buffalo:

After a lovely few days with our friends we headed back to Chicago, where we locked up our luggage in the baggage claim room at the station. This took twenty-five minutes because it involved a fingerprint reader that wasn’t working. The attendant got it basically working and I managed to cram our carry-on bags in the locker. On the way to checking our last bag I realized I’d locked up our tickets with the carry-ons. I went back, released our baggage, checked out the locker again—only it assigned me a different one so I had to move everything—and then when we checked that last bag we finally learned the location of the mythic passenger lounge where they’ll hold your bags for free. (I’ll be making a voodoo doll of the person at the information desk who played dumb about this lounge and directed us to the lockers.) By now we’d wasted not only $12 but too much time to go up in the Tower Formerly Known As Sears. Here’s an exterior shot, anyway:

We still had time to head over to Giordano’s for real Chicago-style pizza. (Doubtless a local would contest the “real” label, since Giordano’s is a chain, but so is Uno, and we have no guide, so what could we do?) Regardless, it was tasty:

(Note, in that photo, how assiduously Lindsay is wiping salad dressing off her plate so as not to taint her pristine pizza.) In case you’re wondering how this ‘za compares to other offerings, it’s quite similar to Zachary’s in Berkeley, whereas Uno (the original one) is more similar to Little Star in San Francisco. Uno and Little Star are single-crust pies with a cornmeal crust. Giordano’s and Zach’s are double-crust pizzas. Overall, I found Giordano slightly inferior to Zach’s: the sauce isn’t as bright or zesty. (Uno outside of Chicago, meanwhile, is greasy in a Pizza Hut way, though I still like it a lot.)

We have many dozens of itchy souvenirs from Michigan: during movie night, outdoors near the swimming pool, we were absolutely feasted upon by mosquitoes, despite taking every precaution. We’d worn socks, shoes, long pants, long-sleeved shorts, bug spray that smelled like Thai food, and even these Lawrence of Arabia hats, provided by our hosts, that covered our necks—but all to no avail. I slaughtered a good many mosquitoes, but clearly not enough. My entire back is a night sky of welts—you could make out any number of constellations. At least the bites are small (perhaps due to the allergy shots I get?) compared to that of our host, whose back was a raised topographical map of mountainous welts. Erin got it really bad, too, on her legs: evidently those insect bastards could bite right through her pants. Alexa has one on her face and another on her neck, poor kid. Next time it’s jeans and a denim jacket, kitchen gloves, and rubber waders.

Scenery

During dinner the other night, we crossed over the Mississippi River. It was all but unmistakable given its vast size, but since the waitress was right there we asked her if it was indeed the Mississippi. She glanced out the window as if she’d never seen the river before, and said she really didn’t know. As she turned to head to the kitchen area, I said to Erin and the kids, “I did hear one guy say that this was the largest body of water west or east of the Mississippi.” The waitress turned back and said, “Is that right?” (This is what we in the amateur comedy industry refer to as “collateral damage.”)

Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa offer multiple—no, countless—no, almost continuous—opportunities to look at cornfields flying by.

If a Martian landed on this train and looked out the window for a few days, he would probably conclude that corn is the main thing we humans eat. And yet all these cornfields aren’t abounding with the sweet corn that humans can eat; it’s all for cattle. So the question is, where is all this cattle? In feed lots, of course, and though rolling by a feed lot or two would be educational for the kids, I’m just as glad they’re not on display here.

We also pass by fields of soy, though I somehow missed my opportunity to photograph them. At least the kids got to see them. In their bedroom at home is a U.S. map showing (via cartoonish drawings) the main industries and exports of each state. Northern California has a picture of a semiconductor, which my kids easily recognized. Around Iowa in the map is a little bag labeled “soy.” Soybeans are among our country’s largest exports but nobody knows what the plants look like. For the record, they’re darker green and lower than cornstalks, and leafier. Not as characteristic as the cornstalks—or is it just that they’re not as ubiquitous here?

This isn’t to say the scenery is boring. The rows of manicured crops create nice optical effects if you blur then focus your eyes. The abundance is kind of soothing. Meanwhile, I get to watch freight trains, which pass by regularly. The sheer range of vintages and styles of these trains never ceases to fascinate me. Watching them at stations is the best way: when they come by, you can feel the vibration in your feet and the wind coming off of them. They are serious industrial beasts. Best of all, when I'm traveling by train I don’t have to look at automobiles. In general, I hate cars. If you asked me to rate each car we saw as we drove along an American highway, I’d say, “Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, passable, ugly, ugly, hideous, ugly, ugly, okay, ugly, ugly, passable.” And there are too many lousy drivers on the road to give me complete peace on road trips. The train is really the better way to go.

Check back soon for Train Trip Part 3 – Dining Car Ewok Meatloaf Special!

dana albert blog

Train Trip - Part One

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and a scene of mild sensuality.

Introduction

I’m on vacation with my family, taking a cross-country train trip to Chicago. In case you’re a criminal who trolls people’s blogs to see who’s out of town, and plan to burglarize my house while I’m away, think again. I could be home in two days, or could be home already. As my brother wrote in his grade-school “My Book About Me,” I am not stuppid.

In this post I’ll give a bit of personal history regarding my past trips on Amtrak; explain how we chose this unique vacation; offer a few pre-trip tales; and provide a day and a half of impressions and such. I’ll also include a recipe for my mother’s famous cranberry bread and step-by-step instructions on changing the oil in a 1986 Ford Fiero, per usual.

My previous train trips

I first rode Amtrak during the early nineties when I took it most of the way to Ashland, Oregon to visit my mom. The closest station was Dunsmuir, I think (I can’t fact-check because I have no Internet connection, a problem I’ll have to solve before posting this, obviously). It could have been a six-hour car trip. Instead, the train limped along at about thirty, which is all the track conditions would allow it to do. Somehow we got so delayed that some passengers were going to miss a connection, so the train was stopped in the middle of nowhere for a couple of hours so a bus (!) could come fetch those passengers and speed them ahead to rendezvous with their connecting train. (By this time Amtrak had sunk, in my regard, from legitimate transportation to pointless novelty.) I had to get out at some station—where I absolutely froze, it being winter—to find a pay phone, to tell my mom to wait a couple hours before driving down to meet me. The trip took ten or twelve hours.

My next Amtrak trip was coming home, a few days later. This was worse. The delays so infuriated me that my brain stopped shunting things into long-term memory and I don’t recall anything about that trip except that a) I couldn’t sleep because everybody on the train was a loud snorer, and b) it took twenty-five hours to get home. I vowed never to ride Amtrak again.

So, why this trip?

Obviously I’ve broken that vow, and it’s all because of “Parade” magazine, that little ten-page insert that comes in your Sunday paper. I don’t get the paper, but my mother-in-law, at my request, saves the Parades for me. It’s a guilty pleasure. I like the silly cartoons, the brain teasers from Marilyn Vos Savant (which I lack the patience to actually try solving), the ads for the Amish guys who are giving away portable fireplaces or air cooling systems that cost pennies to run because they’re not air conditioners. I even read the incessantly upbeat profiles of famous actors, with headlines like “What I’ve Learned” or “Love Is the Most Important Thing,” etc. (I really wish one day they’d profile Eminem. His feature would be titled, “God sent me to piss the world off.”)

Anyway, Amtrak had an article about cross-country train trips and how cool they are. I’d heard over the years that the interstate trains with sleeper cars are actually pretty cool and that the shorter-route bus-style trains were the Achilles heel of the system. Thus, I read the feature with an open mind. (Heck, I always read “Parade” with my mind wide open and all skepticism withheld. You kind of have to.) I learned that that billions of dollars have been pumped into Amtrak recently, not only by the Obama administration but by Warren Buffett (who would never invest in a doomed enterprise, would he?).

There’s a lot about train travel that, right off the bat, is enticing. Logistically, it’s pretty simple once you’ve assembled all your stuff and your family has made it on-board. Meals and lodging are included, making the trip fairly easy to budget (though it’s not cheap). Going by train is probably the best vacation possible for keeping a small carbon footprint while still getting to see faraway places. Moreover, the U.S. is, in my opinion, highly underrated as a place to travel across (an opinion which was only strengthened by a nine-month 7,500-mile coast-to-coast bike tour that my wife Erin and I took in 1994).

And finally, I think our kids are the perfect age for this. They can enjoy a, b, and c without pining for x,y, and z. For example, teenagers, the way things are going, might not be able to go a whole day, much less multiple days, without Internet connectivity. Meanwhile, even pre-teens might be too jaded to fully appreciate something so subtle as the niftiness of how a train car manages to fit everything, Tetris-like, into a minimal space. (When my family goes to the Claire Tappan lodge the kids wring remarkable amounts of pleasure from the bunk beds.) And I figured my young children’s culinary tastes would still be vulgar enough to enjoy what I expected would be fairly mediocre food. (Alexa said the other day, “Remember that hotel in Sacramento, the Embassy Suites? That omelette was amazing. It was thick and fluffy and inside there were just gobs of really gooey cheese. I remember it to this day!”)

The lead-up

We prepared carefully for this trip. You can’t do your laundry on a train, and can’t stop at a convenience store, and we feared that failing to bring enough activities for the kids could turn our train ride into a prison riot. So we bought some portable games, laid in a supply of decent books, and I picked up a couple of Lemony Snicket audio books. (These I had to rip to MP3, retag the files so they’d play sequentially, find the little speaker thingy I got at a fund-raiser years ago and never used, dredge up its AC adapter, find a reliable MP3 player, locate a male-to-male headphone cord to connect the two, and find the USB cable to charge the MP3 player.) And of course we had to pack. Here’s our checklist shortly before our departure:

Meanwhile, my credit card number was stolen recently so up to the last day before vacation I was updating all these autopay setups (last time this happened I neglected to update GoDaddy, who locked up my albertnet domain, killing my blog, my e-mail, and my family’s e-mail accounts). The day before the trip we had a plumbing issue and Erin was running all over town buying fixtures and dealing with the plumber. And I can’t begin to describe how hard it is to find a crazy gun-nut house-sitter willing to sit in our living room all day and night with a shotgun across his lap during our absence, waiting to gun down a would-be burglar. Finding a gun-nut like that who is also good with cats is especially difficult.

Preparations aside, the anticipation of the trip kept the kids in good spirits for weeks beforehand. Alexa brought me this note a few days ago when I was on the phone:

And the morning of the trip, the kids were simply jubilant:

The station

I recognized the Amtrak station in Emeryville right away: I had loitered there for hours once, five years ago, waiting for my train-delayed brother and his family to arrive. We loitered some more this time, having shown up incredibly early. Right away I appreciated the lack of security. There’s no line, no x-ray, no notices … it’s like boarding a bus, other than checking baggage (for free, as much as you want, meaning those venal airlines can officially go stuff it). We checked one bag, which had our contact lens fluid in it—d’oh! Once we got all our carry-ons loaded on the train and found our sleeping car, we still had like twenty minutes before the train left. I decided this would be a rare opportunity to get a photo of the front of the train. The kids protested bitterly, as they were certain I’d somehow fail to make it back on the train and would miss our vacation. Here’s the shot:

When I passed by the window of our sleeper car Alexa was pounding on the window, gesticulating for me to hurry up. I stopped to get her picture, and came up against the old reflection problem (which has made photography from the train difficult as well). It made for an interesting shot, anyway, after Lindsay joined her sister:

I got back on the train, returned to our room, and sat down. Soon the train just started rolling, with no fanfare. No safety announcements, no instructions on how to operate a seatbelt, no fussing with an overhead bin, no shrieking of a jet engine outside my window. Just gobs of legroom.

Our first crisis

Naturally, being first-time interstate train travelers, we made a crucial mistake, with disastrous consequences you might have actually heard about on the news. Okay, I’m grossly exaggerating for fear of losing your interest. But we did mess up, by following the instructions of our porter: “Don’t go to the dining car until the conductor makes an announcement! He’ll do that at either 11:00 or 11:30.” At about 11:35 we got impatient and went up there. Every table was already taken. We put our name in, and for the next two hours I made one bad promise after another to my kids about when we’d be seated.

This might not have been a big deal, except that none of us had had a proper meal in a couple of days. We were too busy preparing for the trip and using up the random food in the fridge. Twice we gave Lindsay broccoli of questionable vintage, and she actually ate it. I dreamt about nothing but food the night before we left (which normally only happens when I’ve dug myself into a caloric hole with a long bike ride). Nobody got much breakfast.

Anyway, when we finally got a table in the dining car, the service was unhurried—in fact, the waiter read the entire menu out loud to Lindsay. It may be that the kitchen is the weak link in the system, and the limited number of tables and long meals keep the cooks from falling behind. Anyway, the food ended up being pretty darn good. My standard point of reference is the burger. Here it is:

I’m bound to put on some pounds on this trip because lunch and dinner both come with dessert. So far I’ve sampled (through my own selections and mandatory parental tariffs of my kids’) the cheesecake (excellent), carrot cake (also excellent), ice cream (Haagen Dazs, ‘nuff said), gooey brownie (delicious), and lemon sorbet (Ciao Bella or whatever, great). Meanwhile Erin is still on the South Beach Diet, so I’m getting enough second-hand food to break new ground with my North Beach Diet. Here’s the little family at the tail end of dinner:

Scenery

The view really is better from a train. We’ve often taken Interstate 80 past places like Sacramento and Auburn, but I can appreciate them more seeing the older, better parts. We had a guide from the California Railway Museum (tk) onboard until Reno, and she pointed some things out. For example, Rockland is named after all its quarries, and Roseville used to be called Junction, because it was a major railway hub. Its citizens, feeling expansive after a city-wide picnic, renamed it Roseville after the most popular girl in town. After Reno, I had to take over with the education of the kids. I just made stuff up, of course; they’re never going to know. (For example, when we passed through Helper, Utah, I pointed out that it has a sister city in Florida called Enabler; Erin chimed in about the third sister city, Co-Dependant, Missouri.)

Past the dining car is the observation lounge, a spectacular place. Look:

Though it’s hard to snap photos out the window, I got a few. The first was taken near Auburn, Californa; the rest are from western Colorado. (We slept through Nevada and as we went through Utah we were down in the sleeping car, which has kind of small windows.)

Living in California, I miss the gorgeous clouds of Colorado, and not since my childhood have I had the idle pleasure of watching telephone wires swoop like this:

I was lying on my back reading in the sleeping car when Erin suddenly burst out laughing. I was too late to see what had so amused her. She explained that a pair of young sunbathers on the banks of the Truckee River had greeted the train with irrational exuberance: the young man held his arms out at ninety-degrees to flex his biceps, and the young woman next to him pulled up her shirt and flashed the train! I’d heard before of this kind of thing with Amtrak. Needless to say I’m cursing my fate at having missed it.

Night

Watching the porter convert our seats into beds was really something. Lindsay had been asking all day if she could have an upper berth, but I couldn’t promise anything. In the morning the porter had said, “This one that folds down into a double … it may be big enough for you and your wife. Some couples can do it, some can’t. I’m gonna leave that up to you.” In the event I found the bed not only wide enough for two, but remarkably comfortable. Lindsay was ecstatic about getting an upper berth. “This is too good to be true!” she sqealed.

Being on the train after dark, I couldn’t help but think of the James Bond movie, “Live and Let Die” I think it was, where towards the end Bond is getting ready to bed down his Bond girl and one last villain shows up. The girl is in another room—it must be a suite, or Bond is in the bathroom or something—and she is oblivious to the hand-to-hand combat. I kind of wished I could take out some nemesis too, as long as he didn’t put up too much of a fight.

I slept pretty well, though there must have been some bumps because twice I dreamed of crashing my mountain bike in snow (and thus not being hurt). There was an annoyingly persistent clicking as I dropped off to sleep, but I wear earplugs and didn’t mind. The only trouble was the closet door that kept bumping my elbow; I couldn’t figure out how it kept coming unlatched. At maybe 4 a.m. Erin told me to quit shutting it: she had been re-opening it all night because its latch was causing the annoyingly persistent clicking. Eureka!

So far the train is about two hours behind schedule. A freight train derailment ahead of us will screw over some of the passengers, but (if I heard the announcement right) shouldn’t affect us.

Stay tuned for Train Trip Part 2 – Ewoks On the Tracks!