Trains, Planes, and Bar Cars

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If rail is the future of long-distance travel, no one seems to have alerted Amtrak, not to mention VIA Rail Canada, both of which appear to operate under the unspoken motto “Why Not Take the Plane?” Long-term planners—the kind of people who have finished their Christmas shopping by Labor Day—can get a great deal on train tickets. More footloose types are punished with fees that increase to ludicrous extremes as the departure date approaches. If I had bought a same-day airfare to Albuquerque, I still would have saved $150 on the price of my advance-purchase train tickets, despite the fact that I spent close to half my 114 hours aboard without one of the sleeper berths with fold-out beds. It’s a steep price to pay for dealing with one attendant so uptight that she wouldn’t let me choose which side of the train I would sit on, and another who talked me down like a naughty 12-year-old for sneaking a nap on an unclaimed seat.

Bellyaching helps build a sense of community among people trapped together in a small space, and conversation soon turned to what rail travel could be. A shift in government priorities here, a drift in consumer demand there, and suddenly the mind reels: a bar car that looks like an actual bar rather than a palliative care ward cafeteria; a gym car; a children’s area; maybe a live band . . . but at a minimum, more and cheaper beds. Nothing fancy, but sojourns that are counted in nights and days have no future without the ability to get horizontal.

And so I slowly swung back toward self-justification. Sitting in the lounge car, watching jet contrails vex the sky over Mount Shasta, I reminded myself that I was doing my part to kill the world’s polar bears a little more slowly. I was still a part of the problem, but with imagination the endless hours began to look like the start of a solution. Isn’t rail travel somehow a deeper experience than going by plane? Did time not wear me down until I began, simply, to live in the moment? What would the transcendental naturalist Henry David Thoreau have to say about the train? Would he not observe that the journey is the destination?

Actually, I looked up what Thoreau had to say about railways:

“That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore. . . . Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?”

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