The trip, this non-Kerouac ramble is from jungle-Mexico up to tourist-Mexico, on board a cruise ship toward Miami, then New York and back to Miami for the medical games for which I came. This is not the journey of Jack, Mrs. Kerouac's son, nor his roll of paper to document the journey across the land. This is not Robert Frank's photo-trek across the landscape of American people and faces, waitresses and signs, the landscape of hope and despair. Frank worked with film with real grain, gritty pictures pushed to the limits. Kerouac had a grainy head, highly sensitive and harshly ready to show itself to posterity, that generation down the road of time.
It is my trip into what I thought would be the lonely road of the forgotten railroads washed over by time and jets, federal highways filled with vacation throngs. Not. There is a new view of the rails in America. Changes are happening fueled by the forces of Arab threat and hellish security.
In 1959 Cary Grant crawled into the upper berth of a spacious room on the 20th Century Limited to Chicago in order to hide in the corn rows from the biplane of doom. Back in 1954 or so this boy watched the Silver Meteor in its diesel aerodynamic glory ring its glory bell as it pulled in Tampa's Union Station from New York. The stuff of dreams, of travel, of exotic New York and of that shiny fine locomotive of gleaming power.
Eisenhower's federal highway system grew from a semi-military, cold war path for missiles into the economic arteries of America. From it came the red highway network of coast-to-coast trucks and the slow strangulation of the passenger rail, the ascendancy of the four-car family and the blossom of airline routes tying the nation together at high speed, business travelers rushing to the airport gate to be stopped by all the other travelers headed for the gates.
Came 9/11. Air travel had already become first class or steerage with both lacking service and charm. Pack them in like 650 mph sardines and see how many delays and lost bags the industry can survive.
America reacted to another Pearl Harbor. It installed guards at the gates to shut the barn doors and guard them with machine guns against explosive shoes. Air travel which had fueled great industries began to be painful. There seemed few alternatives. Passenger ships were mostly gone and Amtrak had lost the luster of the glory days of romantic rails.
Article comments
1 - RNB
Passenger rail carries less than 1 percent of the intercity travel in the U.S. That's not a transportation mode, it's somebody's hobby.
2 - Mark Saleski
wow, really great stuff howard.
reminds me of shorter (and far less scary) version of paul theroux's The Old Patagonia Express
3 - Elvira Black
Hey Howard--good stuff. My b/f and I took Amtrak twice from NYC to Wisconsin. What a schlep, and the route was not very scenic. The second time I brought a ton of sandwiches for the road because the sandwiches etc cost a fortune. We didn't travel in "style" but I noticed that the supposed "sleeper" seats were identical to the regular ones. I guess you got the real deal though.
The conductors can be rude and unhelpful. You're right about the lack of security--one time we went right after there was a big announcement that Amtrak would be checking security more closely but apparently not.
My b/f went out to Ohio recently by plane to visit his folks, and though it was a short trip it was hellish nonetheless. He is very hesitant to ever take a plane trip again after that ordeal.
But it sounds like you had a relatively "pleasant" time of it in exchange for the extra bucks.
4 - Howard Dratch
Thanks for the comments. Mark: time for me to read the Theroux. Elvira yest it did have a "relatively" pleasant time. In the morning I board the Silver Star for the return.
I posted a similar article on my own blog, 7 Color Lagoon which garnered a wonderfully informative comment by Jim L. It is really worth the read for more of the Amtrak passenger rail situation from the keyboard of a real railroad man. I hope he will also post it here.
RNB. You may be right about the percentage of travel by rail but that could mean that there is a lot of room for the country to go back to the future.