Railroading 3

Railroading 3

We arrived at Union Station in Chicago 45 minutes late, not bad considering. A red cap in a bizarre kind of articulated tractor loaded our bags, gave us seats, and off we went to the Amtrak first class club. Union Station is vastly disappointing and this club is downright depressing, with a constant vibration, the kind of bad lighting you find in saloons serving $3 shots, and a humming that silenced my own tinnitus, it reminded me of a waiting room for purgatory.

We may have been the youngest people in the room, but the real shocker (the place was jammed, with three long-haul trains gearing up) was that 15% of the place was Amish! I looked around at the prim white caps, suspenders, beards, black hats, and black coats, and before I could come up with a good remark my wife whispered, “Do Amish have conventions?” Many of them were eating MacDonald’s food they had purchased in the station.

The only great train station in the US I’ve visited is Union Station in Washington, DC (apparently train people lack imagination in naming stations and when they come up with one, they slap it on everything). There, you can find great food, cigars, very nice shops—and another desultory Amtrak first class lounge. Boston isn’t bad, New York is mediocre at best.

The best thing about our five-hour layover was the half-pound BLT sandwich on toasted torpedo roll we found in a sports bar. THAT was living!

Another redcap with another tractor took us to the Southwest Chief at 2:10 for our 3:00 departure. This is a more modern train, and we’re upstairs. There are fewer than 10 compartments like ours on this train, which carries about 250 people and is sold out. Our car steward is Angee (“That’s with two ‘e’s”) who (of course) is a 25-year Amtrak employee with a 3 year-old grandchild (and she, Angee, is lovely). We’re awaiting our dinner reservation time. Breakfast begins at 6 on a first-come basis, but lunch and dinner are by reservation. There’s also a café car with an observation level above it.

This trip is 2,265 miles with 32 stops, terminating in LA. (A station is an intermediary stop, a terminal is always a final stop.) Coming from Boston we went through suburbs of decrepitude arriving at Chicago, but going west we are literally running in the middle of delightful towns and homes.

I’m debating between a four-day beard (I didn’t shave for a day prior to the trip) and trying to shave on a superliner that can make 100 MPH. Can we have a vote as to which is worse: a scratchy face or a head without an ear?

We’ve passed about 100 baseball fields on the trip, built by the Kiwanis or the towns, or some social group. There are some scattered soccer fields, but I’m imagining when trains were in their heyday there were thousands of ball fields along the right-of-way and kids were pretending to be Joe DiMaggio, or Willie Mays, or….Sandy Koufax.

© Alan Weiss 2012. All rights reserved.