It’s time to buy a ticket and hop on a train. I’m not talking about the Ipswich/Rockport Commuter Rail line or the Green Line to Fenway Park. I’m talking about an Amtrak train with coaches, sleepers, dining and club cars, and great American railroad names like “Sunset Limited,” “City of New Orleans” and “Southern Crescent.”
There is nothing comparable to boarding a cross-country train, settling into your seat and feeling the slightly vertigo-inducing thrill of sitting stationary one second and then slipping forward the next and watching the train platform and its occupants slide away.
Traveling by railroad is expensive, but it is worth every dollar — and you want to make sure you pay extra and reserve a sleeping compartment. I’ve embarked on a dozen multi-state and multinational automotive excursions and I can assure you that comparing car travel to train travel is like comparing a movie viewed on a television or laptop screen to watching one in a theater.
The mind-numbing grind that, to a great or lesser extent, is part and parcel of road travel is absent from train travel. The “our-flight-today-is-completely-full,” rule-laden slog that now defines the once-glamorous and fun experience of flying doesn’t hold a candle to train travel.
When you buy a train ticket, you don’t just purchase a trip aboard a train; you also purchase a pass for a journey into American history. You roll through the backsides of big cities well out of view from interstates. You slide through small towns and glide through fields and forests. People wave at you from backyards, railroad crossings and station platforms with names of places you never heard of until you climbed aboard.
I love trains. If I had my own way, I’d be on one right now. If I was Jeff Bezos, I wouldn’t ride a rocket into sort-of-space. I would buy my own train complete with a restored 1950s-era locomotive, a Vistadome dining car, and a club car like the ones you see in Hitchcock movies.
Train travel condenses your world down to a rolling village with food, beds and bathrooms. You know your fellow travelers only by a passing glance or with the familiarity afforded by a conversation over dinner.
Train travel gradually but inexorably tugs you away from work, worries and responsibility. The sensation and sound of the wheels meeting the tracks lulls you into contentedness or drops you into sleep.
I’ve traveled by train across America three times and each trip marked a crossroads in my life.
The first trip came at the end of freshman year in college. I almost flunked out and my academic future was in doubt, but for two days and a night, I disengaged from my life and let my mind free-associate about anything and everything that rolled through it.
My second trip made almost 15 years later came during a time of adult reckoning that included spending time alone with my late father and with my mother.
The third trip was my favorite: My wife and I took the Southern Crescent from New York City to New Orleans. We ate dinner in the gently-undulating Virginia hills; went to sleep in North Carolina, woke up in Atlanta and rolled into the Big Easy in time for dinner with all the luggage we pre-shipped waiting for us.
Traveling by train with kids sounds like a pain in the neck, but think again: If you’re a kid aboard a train, you invariably find the opportunity to sneak away from your parents and go exploring. You see all kinds of people you would normally never see. You hang around the club car and get to know the steward who slides you a free Coke or a bowl of ice cream. You see other kids and start hanging out with them and, before you know it, the trip’s over and you want to do it all again.
That sums up train travel perfectly: You slide out of the station and into a journey that wakes up feelings and memories you haven’t experienced in years and, before you know it, the trip’s over and you want to do it all over again.
