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The great and not-so-great parts of rail travel.
Andy Demsky
Here’s what stinks about traveling by train—you get slammed on punctuality. No matter what your ticket lists as your departure time, there’s little chance that that’s when you’re going to leave.
Prepare yourself, modern traveler, to grind your teeth and check the clock on your cell phone every three minutes in growing anguish.
The rail system is, at present, the domain of freight carriers, pushing the passenger trains into a decidedly second tier in terms of track availability. It’s as if your flight out of Chicago had to squeeze some runway space in between endless streams of Fed-Ex and DHL flights. In essence, your passenger ticket buys a seat on The Little Engine That Could But Often Doesn’t Because The Big Freight Trains Beat It Up After School Every Day.
Knowing this didn’t lift my spirits much in November when I slouched, exhausted, at the Martinez Amtrak station with my wife, Katy, and our kids, ages three and five. It was midnight and we were waiting for a Portland-bound train scheduled to have arrived at 9:30 p.m., but having been sidelined, no doubt, by countless flatcars carrying refrigerators and automobile parts to San Jose.
Our lengthening wait time was a reminder of our first overnight train ride, when Katy and I took Amtrak’s Coast Starlight to Seattle on our honeymoon. The train arrived—after numerous gloomy updates of its delay—a couple of hours late. Our mood remained buoyant in spite of this setback. After all, we would be riding in grand fashion as first-class sleeper car passengers. The first class I’d envisioned—and this must have come from an old movie—was something with a big bed and white linens, Turkish rugs, a couple of comfy, overstuffed chairs, and champagne chilling in a silver bucket.
We grabbed our bags and headed for our initiation into the romance of train travel. Our mood remained fine until we were shown our first class accommodations, which the brochure had called a roomette. This amounted to a closet-size compartment equipped with an upper and lower berth. This roomette bunk-bed configuration would be the perfect way to travel with someone you did not care to be in physical contact with, such as a fishing buddy or Henry Kissinger.
“Um, are you sure this is first class?” I asked our porter. This elicited a chilly response from the porter and I got the feeling we were being ungrateful.
The next morning while exploring the length of the train I learned just how unappreciative I had been—I discovered the poor souls in coach who’d spent the night confined to their seats. Oh the humanity. If there was a breakfast cereal called Misery it would carry on the front of the box a photograph of early-morning passengers in coach.
As it turns out, Amtrak offers several levels of first class. On the trip we took with our children to Portland (about seven years after the honeymoon) we wised up and reserved a Bedroom Suite. While not the Orient Express, it’s a step closer to the dream—though in terms of its size and configuration it ought to be called the Travel-Trailer Suite as it comes with a small RV-style sink and mirror just inside the doorway. A double-size bed is the lower sleeping area, which can fold into a couch. A berth overhead unfolds from the wall. The toilet inhabits the shower stall, which from a space-use perspective makes good sense but from an Oh-God-what-next perspective becomes less attractive with time. All that said, it felt less perilous than airline travel and even in business class you’d never get a bathroom all to yourself, so yet another check goes in the reasons-to-like-Amtrak column.
Now here’s the great part about being forced into waiting until past midnight to board your sleeper. The delirious exhaustion combined with the gentle, hypnotic, mechanical music of the rails that goes chuh-kunk ... chuh-kunk ... chuh-kunk ... accompanied by the soft, swaying of the car itself lulled me into a deep, muscle-relaxant-like coma. It reminded me of being a kid on a long ride home falling asleep in the back seat of the family car. It was, without exaggeration, one of the best nights of sleep I’ve had since the early ‘90s.
We woke to gray light somewhere in the Sierras. There was snow. There were forests thick with dark-trunked trees. It might have been Narnia for all I cared. I wasn’t driving. I wasn’t on an airplane. And I wasn’t at home and therefore I couldn’t clean my office or replace the garbage disposal.
Now here’s what’s kind of lousy about rail travel. It’s never like what the promotional materials tell you. Prior to our honeymoon trip the brochure made the menu in the dining car sound like a white tablecloth, Alice Waters style, culinary event. So when the dining car fare turned out to be, essentially, Applebees with fewer choices, we were pretty disappointed.
On the Portland trip we knew going in what to expect and as a result our breakfast seemed decent: omelets, French toast and something called Bob Evans Egg Scramble. But all of these breakfasty issues faded into meaninglessness as we sailed around the broad base of a white powdered Mount Shasta and continued at a steady plunge through snowy forests and witnessed sights of natural wonder you’ll never see from an automobile on I-5. As far as the kids were concerned we were on The Polar Express.
At this point Katy, who I’ve long suspected of being a closet Buddhist, quietly pointed out that if our train had been on time we wouldn’t have experienced things this way. We would have slept, and woken in the less interesting parts of southern Oregon.
The satisfied rail passenger doesn’t need to get from point A to point B with surgical precision. And as such the entire train experience defies most standards by which modern travel is judged.
In spite of everything you may have learned, there really are rewards for not being punctual, our morning view of snow-covered Shasta being just one example.
We arrived at Portland a bit later than expected. We said goodbye to our porter, who’d been friendly and helpful the entire journey. And as we bundled ourselves out of the train I determined that in the future I’d be less concerned about racing through my life, eating too fast, barking at drivers who didn’t leave red lights quickly enough, and hustling my kids out the front door on a school day.
And since I haven’t learned to do that just yet, it may be time for another journey by train.
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