Trains, Planes, and Nostalgia
I’ve been thinking a lot about train travel lately. Last week, I took my friend, Jay to the Denver Amtrak station for an epic journey to Tampa, Florida. Even though it was going to take him about three days of train travel (he was stopping for a couple of days in Philadelphia, so mercifully, they weren’t all in a row), and one way would cost him almost twice as much as a roundtrip plane ticket, he wanted the experience. In an age when 5 miles over the speed limit is slow and microwave meals take too long to heat, you have to respect that.
I’ve never ridden a train in the US, other than the occasional scenic rail, or amusement park train. I’ve ridden plenty abroad, though. In college I spent a semester studying in Maastricht, Netherlands, and with that experience came a two-month Eurail Pass. I remember using the rails like a traveling hostel, always riding at night so I had a free place to sleep. I quickly learned the tricks. For example, (and this was easiest if traveling with someone else) if we found an empty compartment, my traveling buddy and I would grab it, turn off the lights, pull down the shades, and pretend to be asleep before anyone else could join us, forcing us to sit upright all night. Sometimes, though, there were no seats available at all, and we’d be forced to stow ourselves wherever we could find a free bit of floor, often being shuffled from spot to spot by grumpy conductors. Unless you wanted to pay extra to reserve a seat, Eurail Pass riders were not guaranteed seating. I remember once, when traveling to Oslo during the Easter holiday, being forced to spend the 10-hour journey in the open area where people enter and exit the train car. The area was unheated, and freezing with all the opening and closing on the frigid Norwegian night, and I was surrounded by skis that kept sliding with the rock of the train, and falling over on my huddled, shivering body (bit of trivia for you, Norwegians really like to ski over the Easter holiday). One of the longest nights of my life.
Other times, though, it wasn’t so bad being exiled to that area. On a trip from Berlin to Liege, I was forced into the outer compartment where a group of loud German men were halfway through a large cooler of beer. They were farmers from rural Germany who’d been on holiday in the big city (at least I think that’s correct; between the beer and the broken English, I only understood about every fifth word), and were squeezing the last bit of fun out of their trip as they headed home. They took my appearance as the perfect opportunity to practice their English, and welcomed me like they’d been expecting me the whole time.
I think my favorite train moment, though, was a quiet one on the way to Munich. A night train, of course. I was traveling with three other people, and we’d snagged a compartment all to ourselves, where we passed out to the rhythmic rock of the rails. I’ve always been a light sleeper, and the sudden silence and stillness of a stop awoke me. The first thing I noticed was the sun rising through a steely church spire in the distance in a gorgeous miscellany of reds and pinks and oranges. I just sat there mesmerized as the sky unraveled, wondering about the people just beginning to stir in this little town, glad to be the only one awake in my small compartment. The stop was brief, and as the train started to move again, the station sign moved into view: Ulm. Then it hit me. This was the town where my dad had spent two years of his life while in the army. The little German outpost where all those stories germinated about life as a young man living abroad for the first time. Life before my mom. Before anything that would come to identify my dad as my dad. When life was still mostly just a blank slate ahead—a million decisions yet to be made. And here I was, just passing through, about the same age as he’d been at the time. I had a sudden urge to jump up, run out of the compartment, and jump off the slowly accelerating train to explore this mysterious enclave of my father’s history. But I didn’t. I just watched it fall away as the sky opened, and pulled out my journal.
I rarely have such memorable experiences on planes. While I appreciate the necessity and ability of those great barrels of steel to span large distances in a short time (how do you think I got to The Netherlands in the first place?), there’s something to be said for measuring out your journey stop by stop on a train. Yes, Jay could have been in Tampa in a matter of hours instead of days, but in going by rail, he gained a real sense of the distance crossed—both geographic and human—and the mountains, fields, communities and human seas that lie between here and there. There’s nothing sterile about traveling by train. People come and go while you move forward, everyone with different points A and B, often more willing to talk about the space between. Before Jay’s trip, I hadn’t really thought much about US train travel. I assumed most of our rails were now devoted to freight and quick commutes. I find it oddly comforting, though, to learn that Amtrak is still alive and (mostly) well, with a solid crush of customers still sailing her historic rails.