My Big Fat Midwestern Train Journey, Part II

12 January 2009
Somewhere in Middle America

I just spent the past three days in Omaha. As it turns out, Omaha is a very good place to think about trains. I arrived at the tiny Amtrak station—the sad remains of what was once a booming passenger rail system—thinking, This is IT?? I was expecting a station similar to Denver's, which has been in use for 105 years. It has obviously seen busier times, but has recently started servicing one of the light rail lines, and is once again becoming an important part of the city fabric.

In Omaha, the station was tucked away, in the shadow of the former passenger train station—this enormous, ornate, art deco thing that was built in 1929, which now houses a history museum. The friend I was visiting took me there, and it was a magnificent space. We wandered through the exhibit detailing the history of the station and rail service through Omaha, and I imagined what it would have been like to be alive when the station was built—it would have been such an exciting time in history, with the whole country suddenly opening up to be explored and experienced. The museum gives you a sense of that residual novelty on the train  in the old train cars they have on display, where you can poke around in a coach car from the 30s, a sleeping car full of bunks with tiny toilets hidden under the fold-up beds, a lounge car decked out in red velvet. "It was a great place for socializing!" the volunteer museum guide told me in the lounge car. Surely this was better than the utter pain in the ass that air travel has become...slower, sure, but time much better spent.


As cities go, Omaha kind of sucks—a tiny downtown, surrounded by a huge, sprawling wasteland of strip malls and subdivisions, with crap public transit and virtually no walking access to anything of use. My friends live on the edge of downtown, and even they can't really walk to much—a coffee shop and an artsy movie theatre, and that's about it. Most of the city has the seedy look of a place that hasn't seen any development at all since about 1952, save the constant addition of cookie-cutter housing developments and big box stores. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect the city's economy started to dry up around the same time as passenger rail was superseded by widespread car useage and interstate highways. I learned at the history museum that Omaha's role in the regional livestock trade was once so significant that it warranted the building of one of the city's grandest architectural features to serve as an exchange building (today it's a general office building), but much of the city's importance as a regional economic hub seems to have disappeared around the time that other modes of transportation—modes that did not depend upon transit access to and from a single, centralized location—became cheaper and more feasible. Driving around, you can tell that the city was once very prosperous—buildings from the turn of the (last) century through about the 30s or 40s are elaborate and ornate and still dominate the skyline—but there doesn't seem to have been much of anything with any sort of aesthetic or functional quality built since. (On a side note, Omaha is also home to the corporate headquarters of ConAgra. Fun, no?)

And this is unfortunate, because as it turns out, Nebraska is kind of an okay place. I'm writing this on the train in Iowa which, as it turns out, is also an okay place. Did you know that Nebraska and Iowa are actually incredibly beautiful? I did not. I have driven through Nebraska and Iowa no less than 42 times (no joke), but I have only once ventured off the interstate. Now that I've seen other parts of Nebraska again, I can safely say that the U.S. government, for some reason, built the interstate highways through the most hideous, barren parts of the landscape—or else the ugliness of the interstate highways has gradually seeped into the surrounding land and turned it all blah. Once, while driving through Nebraska on I-80, we were detoured onto back roads going through the Sandhills, and I almost flipped my lid over how unbelievably beautiful it was. This is Nebraska?? I thought. No wonder everyone thinks Nebraska is such a pit—they've only ever seen the flat, drab, uninspiring rows of corn monocultures that surround the ENTIRE rural length of I-80, but there is definitely more to the state than that (who knew?). My train from Denver to Omaha traveled through the same Sandhills area I saw on my detour from I-80. The moon was full, and I could just make out the outline of the undulating hills against the night sky, and it was incredibly gorgeous and peaceful. This is what we're missing when we rush from point A to point B with no interest in what lies between.

Lately, I've found that I've become a student of the minute: one city block, one old house, one columned porch, one tomato plant. Each contains enough detail to keep a person occupied for far longer than we typically spend on it. What do we miss when we breeze right by them?


15 January 2009
I Think the Honeymoon is Over

Well, the bloom may be off the rose. Some of the glamor of train travel has started to wear off. Shortly after I typed out the above musings, things took a turn for the slightly inconvenient. A major train derailment in Illinois between Galesburg and Chicago prevented my train and a bunch of others from making it into Chicago via that route. After an hour of sitting and waiting, those with connections in Chicago got put on a charter bus and the rest of us took a detour into the city. In the end, my train was about four hours late, and for much of this time the train staff were either unable or unwilling to tell us where we were or when, approximately, we might arrive in Chicago. Kind of annoying.

However, two facts made this experience far less irritating than it might have otherwise been—for me, anyhow. First, we found out when we arrived in Chicago that the charter buses had gotten hung up in traffic—it was basically blizzarding the entire day—and still had not arrived in Chicago when we got there. On a nice day, bus travel is probably significantly faster than train travel (though only because we've got crap train infrastructure in this country), but when the weather's bad, taking the train is totally the way to go, derailments notwithstanding. In fact, once we got going on our detoured route, we were traveling much faster than at any previous point in our journey.

And second, I was surprised but very pleased that they were able to put together a detour route so quickly that, when you subtract time we spent sitting and waiting for instructions, really only took us a few hours longer than it otherwise would have. When asked, one Amtrak employee told us that he couldn't guess when we might get into Chicago because the route we were taking was akin to taking the back roads in your car—none of the employees was at all familiar with it or where it went. Evidently there must be serviceable rail routes out there that don't currently see passenger traffic...I wonder how feasible it would be to get these operating again in a lower-energy economy?

Today I am heading from Chicago back to Minneapolis. My train's departure was delayed for nearly four hours due to some mechanical difficulties; however, it's a good -10°F here, and the mechanical issue and the long repair time were both reportedly a factor of the weather. I don't doubt that if I'd been flying from Omaha to Chicago on Monday when it snowed like mad the entire day, my plane would have been delayed as well, so I looked at it as a fair trade-off with the universe. Others in the waiting area were not inclined to be quite so chill about it, though, and one woman proclaimed, loudly and repeatedly, to the entire waiting area, that she was absolutely livid about having spent $175 on this ticket, and wanted a refund and would never take the train again. Train travel is not for everyone.

But this is unfortunate, because it certainly could be, if we got our act together over here and actually put some money into our train network and infrastructure. In terms of the conveniences we've all come to expect from our modes of transport—on-time departure and arrival, speed, staff knowledgeability, etc.—Amtrak gets a big ol' F (through little fault of its own, honestly), but despite all of this, I've actually really enjoyed my train experience. The delays have upped the stress level a bit, but it certainly hasn't been any more stressful than flying. (Yeah, so how about that plane that crashed into the Hudson River this afternoon?) It's been warm and cozy, relatively comfortable, laid-back, and scenic. Monday, on my way from Omaha to Chicago, a woman from Fairfield, Iowa sat next to me, and we had a wonderful chat for three hours, until she got off the train. We both got out our knitting and worked on that for a while, and swapped tips and stories. Of course this kind of thing can and does happen on airplanes, but it's not the kind of thing that I ever do; usually I'm too nervous about flying, and stressed from all the rushing around (mine and everyone else's), and completely focused on getting from point A to B as quickly as possible.

And then there's stuff like this: Earlier, on this leg of my journey, I went to the lounge car to have a beer, and witnessed the following spectacle: a group of 20-somethings with spiky pink hair and the like, congregated on one end of the car, singing folk songs to the accompaniment of a banjo; and a group of 40-somethings at the other end, completely trashed, having what I would consider a very lewd conversation, and punctuating their points by (I shit you not) pulling down their pants and mooning each other. WHAT. Umm, so like I said...train travel isn't for everyone, but it is definitely more eventful and, um, social (if you can call seeing someone's butt social) than other modes of transport. This trip has been as much about the experience as it was about the destinations, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone with the time to spare, inconveniences and all. That is, if you think you can tolerate the occasional glimpse of some stranger's butt.

My Big Fat Midwestern Train Journey

I'm trying to cut my airplane travel. This is hard, because I make the journey from my current home in Minneapolis to my parents' place in Denver four times a year or so, and these trips are probably the last thing I am willing to eliminate in my attempt to cut my carbon footprint. In the past, I've been working full-time, and thus I've had extremely limited vacation time, so plane travel was almost a necessity to make the trip worth the effort and expense... Now that I'm in grad school, though, I've got a LOT more time (this is the absolute BEST thing about being in school), so I figured I could afford to start taking more time-consuming forms of travel.

As Jim Kunstler has pointed out, America is really, REALLY big; WHY on earth aren't we paying more attention to the imminent demise of the airline industry, and re-investing in our rail system??? My parents and I took the train from Denver to New York City in 1999, not because it was cheaper than air travel (it wasn't, and we didn't even get a sleeper), but because we'd always wanted to take the train somewhere. And it was pleasant enough, but fraught with the kind of inconveniences that would deter 90% of everyone, especially people on a tight schedule. For example, our train was approximately eight hours late into NYC; apparently, this was because Amtrak was having disputes with freight rail companies over right-of-way, and our train kept getting diverted to the side tracks where it sat completely stationary for hours at a time while coal trains rambled past. This was during the World Series between the Yankees and the Mets. The Amtrak employee running the snack bar had tickets to the game the evening we were supposed to arrive, and he missed it entirely, by a good number of hours...he was so mad that he gave away all the snack bar's food for free. So, given that it took the better part of three days to get there, and the timing was completely unreliable, I can't imagine that the majority of people would ever willingly choose such a mode of travel over planes.

But I've had exceedingly pleasant train experiences as well—though not in this country. In 2005, a friend and I spent three weeks in China. We took the train all over the country, from Hong Kong to Beijing, hitting eight other cities in between. Looking back on this trip, I think the train journeys were my favorite part. They were LONG—some of them over 24 hours (China is a BIG country), which ate up some of our travel time, but also provided a much-needed respite from the otherwise constant action of our adventure. We booked beds in the open sleeper bunks—second class, essentially—where we shared an entire car with bunk-fulls of other travelers. Most fortunately, my friend spoke fluent Mandarin and Cantonese, so she was able to converse with all of our fellow travelers and learn all about their lives, and we had a great time swaping stories and passing around the scarf I was knitting for my dad, which the Chinese women, it seemed, couldn't wait to take a crack at. It was just pleasant all around—clean, friendly, affordable, and best of all, on-time. I honestly can't imagine NOT choosing the Chinese train over airplane travel, given the difference in price, not to mention the opportunity to watch the (fascinating and beautiful) countryside go by. If only American trains could be like that...

So, upon learning that my winter break would be an incredible FIVE WEEKS LONG, I went onto the Amtrak website to find out how one might get to Denver from Minneapolis on the train and discovered that it was actually quite difficult: I could either take a THREE DAY journey west from Minneapolis, through the Dakotas and Montana to Seattle, then down the west coast to San Fransisco, and east to Denver (which would undoubtedly be a beautiful journey, but a bit long for my tastes); or, I could take the train to Chicago and then southwest to Denver, but I'd have an overnight layover in Chicago. Neither of these really struck my fancy...but I realized that I have friends I can visit along the way and in Chicago, and a rambling, slow-paced cross-country train journey might be just what I needed to top off my fabulous, month-long winter vacation.

So I flew home, but booked a one-way train ticket back (thanks to Amtrak's multi-city fare finder), and tomorrow I will be leaving Denver on the train and heading to Omaha to visit my college roommate and her husband. I'll stay there for a few days, then move on to Chicago for a few days to visit some other friends, and then head back to Minneapolis from there. It will be slow-paced and, I hope, relaxing. I suspect it will be much less-stressful than airplane travel (knock on wood). I haven't exactly been pressed for relaxation over the past few weeks of my break, but even so, having the opportunity to kick back for 8+ hours between cities with nothing to distract me from my reading or knitting sounds fabulous. And it will be nice to have some sort of connection to place—a sense of what lies between me and my destination (besides corn), an alternative concept of space to that of the near-instantaneous movement from A to B that I've been experiencing for the past...well, forever. I don't want to overly romanticize a world characterized by slow movement—air travel has had its distinct benefits (like its ability to open up far-flung places to people of average Western means, like me), but as long as we're headed in the direction of limited air travel (and I truly believe that we are), we might as well focus on what we've lost by making it possible to rush across thousands of miles of landscape without a second thought as to what we're missing in between.

Though it does seem to me that with the enormous expanses that we must cover out here, west of Ohio or so, train travel will never be an appealing option to anyone on a tight schedule. This is yet another unfortunate aspect of the measly two-to-three weeks vacation that most Americans get—it makes any sort of slow-paced vacation or travel totally unappealing. I wouldn't have considered a multi-day trip back to Minneapolis if I didn't have the time to spare. So, while I hate to wish underemployment upon anyone, I suspect that a lot of us are going to have a bit more time on our hands in the future than we do now...and I can't help but think that a little bit more travel of the old-fashioned, laid-back, slow-paced variety will do us some good.