Confessions of a Train Buff

I Just Booked a Train Ticket to San Francisco… from NEW YORK CITY!

Reigniting my passion for long-distance train travel

I’m launching this new series here on MEDIUM under the header of Memoirs of a Rail Buff. In drafting my list, I see there are at least twenty stories to be told about train journeys that live in the recesses of my mind.

I can’t believe I just did that!

In the first week of January, I’ll board Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor to ride The Cardinal down through Washington DC before it plummets onward through Charlottesville and White Sulfur Springs (WV) before heading due west toward Chicago.

Once in Chicago, I’ll have a few hours to wash my face — and reapply deodorant, I hope — before boarding the California Zephyr for the west coast. That will take me straight across Nebraska, down the windy Glenwood Canyon and over the infamous Donner Pass of the Sierra Nevadas before gliding across the Central Valley into the San Francisco Bay Area where friends will be awaiting my smelly arrival.

Did I mention I’m doing this all in coach?

After a night on a friend’s couch, he’ll put me on The Coast Starlight for the overnight journey to Portland (OR) where my brother will meet me for dinner before putting me on the plane back home the next morning.

I know what you’re thinking.

“You’ve lost your marbles! Going to the beach in the buff is one thing, but you’re a train buff, too?

Nobody rides a train from New York to California anymore!

I used to do this all the time.

I was a train buff long before I took up the hobby of French beaches.

In fact, I think I was only twelve or thirteen years old the first time my parents put me on that same Coast Starlight at the old Southern Pacific 16th Street Oakland Depot to make the overnight journey to Albany, Oregon where that same brother — 40 years younger — would be waiting for me at the front end of a long summer stay in Corvallis.

After navigating that itinerary a few times, I started taking the train to annual youth conferences for high school kids, one year in Galesburg, Illinois, the next year in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the latter of which required a tricky train change in Chicago Union Station connecting to a regional train that dumped me in Kalamazoo. Once there, I had to find a bus to my final destination. I couldn’t have been more that seventeen years old at the point.

Traveling alone.

Absorbing the vastness of my homeland, one expansive state after the next.

Shortly after my wife and I married in 1985, we booked a rail pass that allowed us to encircle the entire country. We were short on cash, but pretty well stocked with friends who put us up in places like Green Bay WI, Niagara Falls NY, Philadelphia PA — where we live now — and Newport News, VA.

That was also our first visit to New York City.

I still remember emerging from the tunnels of Penn Station in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, wondering “Where the hell are we and why does this train station smell like piss!?”

New York Penn Station has recently been renovated in an effort to capture the grandeur of the golden age of rail travel. I’ll muse about that in a separate post.

We were young, naïve, and ridiculously green! We couldn’t even summon up the courage to use the NY Subway! The entrance to stations near Times Square looked like entrance portals to hell.

We walked a lot on that trip.

In the ensuing years, I took several additional cross-country jaunts on Amtrak. Our grand finale was a trip in 1992 with two-year-old twins and our five-year-old daughter. That time, we went all out and booked sleeper accommodations coast-to-coast. It’s easy to romanticize seeing the country from a sleeper with a family of five, but trust me, it wasn’t very romantic.

If Amtrak ever had a heyday, the 90s would have been that time, with new equipment on most lines replacing the old rail stock they had inherited from legacy railroads like the Southern Pacific, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Today, much of that “new equipment” is as old as the tired rail coaches I boarded for those first trips up the Pacific coast.

My early intel for this upcoming trip suggests that I should be prepared for aging trains with unstable ventilation systems. That means my luggage will be stuffed with five pairs of underwear and as many blankets as I can cram around them.

And oh, did I mention deodorant?

Life changed dramatically for us in the mid-90s. We moved from the Bay Area to the east coast, ramped up our careers, and began trading out our train itineraries for plane tickets to Europe, Asia, South America, and South Africa.

We’ve been able to fold a fair number of train journeys into those international jaunts. Particularly memorable is a train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, then on to the former British colony of Penang.

Or the luxury train we took from the Zimbabwe-Zambia border to Pretoria, South Africa. That was several years after we took the twenty-four-hour journey from Johannesburg to Cape Town; a story I’ve been dying to write since I started on Medium as that was the night that Nelson Mandela died.

There are loads of shorter rides to be documented as well. An overnight train from Cambridge to Edinburgh. Innumerable trips across France and adjoining countries on the TGV and European counterparts. That’s to say nothing of a rather frightening journey with two teenagers from Tangier to Rabat, Morocco. Or an overnight journey from Salzburg to Venice with 50 high school kids. And I really need to document my token journey on the famous Japanese high-speed train from Tokyo to Kyoto.

So many trains, so little time.

In fact, here’s the rub….

Train travel takes time. And if you’re going to do that in the United States, it also takes a fair amount of patience.

Most of the rails are owned and operated by freight carriers that set the schedule according to the ever-pressing need to keep the American supply-chain pumping at full speed. Seems ironic somehow that my long-awaited return to the rails will take place amid an ongoing tussle between Congress and the railroad unions. With that, it seems completely viable that my westbound train may well grind to a halt in the blustery plains outside of Omaha where we could sit for days until a rail strike is settled.

I guess that’s a lesser peril that the legendary train robberies that plagued passengers chasing visions of a gold rush back in the 1800s. Who would be crazy enough to hold up a train in 2022?

With this post, I’m launching this new series here on MEDIUM to which I’m assigning the oh-so-clever kicker of Memoirs of a Rail Buff.

In drafting my list, I see there are at least twenty stories to be told about train journeys that live in the deep and tangled recesses of my mind.

All at the same time, not only am I charting the course for a return to the roadbeds of my youth, but simultaneously trying to assess the viability of taking a train from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minn City when we visit Southeast Asia next spring. The Man in Seat 61 says that’s a remarkable trip and that we’d be foolish to visit Vietnam or Cambodia without taking to the rails.

We’ll see how that pans out.

It’s only fair that I give a quick shout-out to a few authors here on MEDIUM who wrote with such conviction that my unrequited love for rail travel suddenly burst into flames with such intensity that I made my way to the Amtrak website and charted the course to California.

Here are a few of those stories that reawakened that part of my being.

I guess time will tell just how I feel about these inspiring writers should my prophecy about getting stranded near Omaha come to pass.

But if you’re crazy enough to board an American long-distance train, I guess you have to concede that it’s more likely than not you’ll end up with a story to tell that goes well beyond the unfolding landscape outside your window.

To that end, if the lasting value of travel is about amassing stories to tell on the topic of a life well lived, just about any train trip to any place is likely to enrich that experience exponentially.

California or bust!

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