Trains, Planes, and Bar Cars

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“The journey is the destination.” You will hear this a lot if you take a long trip by train, because it is how passengers explain rail travel to themselves. The trouble is, I had a destination, a specific one: Albuquerque, New Mexico. As I write this, I am still on the train, because that is what happens when you travel 7,870 kilometers round-trip by rail. In the world beyond the windows of the lounge car, people fall in and out of love, empires rise and fall, the great cycles of nature are ever renewed, and you are still on the train.

I had decided to travel by locomotive in order to see the future, which I can now report is gleaming steel and chugs up the Santa Lucia Mountains in Southern California with all the verve of a reluctant camel. At times it seemed like I was actually going backward in time, like when the train was hissing and farting at some midnight platform while a conductor shouted “All aboard!” But it only seemed like the past—in fact, it was the future. That is the difference.

A typical flight to Albuquerque from my starting point in Vancouver would have taken a dozen hours, home to hotel. In that same span of time, my futuristic journey via Amtrak’s Coast Starlight and Southern Chief railways got me as far as central Oregon. Flying to Albuquerque and back, though, would make me responsible for the equivalent of 1,380 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions—as much polluting punch as a typical North American will deliver from behind the wheel of his or her car between New Year’s Day and September 9. My train ride kicked in just 30 percent of the impact of going by plane. That’s a saving of 966 kilograms of carbon. Picture 55 bags of charcoal briquettes.

Seeing the world: For some of us—for me—it feels like something close to a necessity. Every culture and era has its wanderers, people for whom being far from home is as important as the deep roots of family or religion are for others. Without it, we do not feel whole. Yet if we wish to continue to see the further reaches of the globe, then trains and ships are the future, and planes are not, because air travel is indefensible.

As my lady friend and I climbed aboard (she would join me for the first leg of the journey, to Los Angeles), we were lost in daydreams of the Trans-Siberian howling through the Russian taiga; the Orient Express threading the capitals of Europe; the narrow-gauge Old Patagonian Express inching up the Andean foothills—each calling to mind the meditative shukka-shuk of steel wheels and the zoetrope flash of exotic scenery.

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