Notes From A Train

Luckily this was not my experience on Amtrak.

I took Thing One and Thing Two on Amtrak to DC yesterday to meet my parents who are taking them down to Georgia to enter a fiddle competition with the Devil spend a week on the family farm.  We embarked at Union Station in New Haven and got off in Union Station in Washington, after passing through Penn Stations in New York, Philly and Baltimore.  We left the house at 7:15am and I rolled back in around 11pm.  It was not cheap, though it was cheaper than flying.  It was perhaps faster than driving, certainly easier to nap.  It was also much more comfortable than flying as the seats actually fit your ass.

If Thing One had not left his iPod Touch on the train to continue on to Newport News, it might have been enjoyable.

Amtrak is no doubt "socialism" because they aren't being run by Dagny Taggart or using Rearden metals.  I don't know, I don't read Ayn Rand, because I don't want to encourage the sociopaths.

But in the northeast corridor, it clearly gets a lot of traffic, which makes sense, given the population density.  I sat next to a young Korean woman who switched fluently from Korean to English on her iPhone.  Coming back, I sat next to someone who appeared to be from South Asia, and then later next to someone from Narnia.  Maybe Middle Earth?

It wasn't perfect - would it kill them to get Wi-Fi on the train - but it had its advantages, especially if you happened to live in one of the cities along the route.

There was also something interesting about looking out the window.  Not from 30,000 feet and not from the corridor of the interstate, but right in the midst of communities.  We passed through both the affluence of places like Westport and Greenwich, but also Bridgeport and Stamford.  We passed through the Meadowlands in such as way so to actually see meadows and wetlands.  We saw egrets wading in the marshy water.  We passed through the ineffable sadness of South Philly and Baltimore, but also the sprawling muscular energy of New York and the vivid light of DC.

It is too expensive to make a habit of, and far too expensive to use Acela.  But there is a place for trains in our national transportation system, aside from the masturbatory dreams of Randian filmmakers.  (Really, read all about it.)

I was reading about how diversity, which we profess to value, actually makes the social contract and social safety net harder to support.  No one wants their tax dollars going to "those people" whether "those people" are African Americans, French Algerians or German Turks.  It is a struggle to live with people who are so very different from you.

But it isn't impossible.

I think the people who advocate for trains, and for sharing the burden of building them, are in some ways trying to build communal bridges as well as trestles.  They are trying to link the country with more than just steel, because to sit on a train is to force yourself to sit next to America: both out the window and in the seat next to you.