#2 Boxcars and Broken Brakes
When I was a kid, our first home was right next to the train tracks. And I mean coal cars traveling at 45mph was less than a stone’s throw. As can be expected, my parents had some pretty obvious ground rules when it came to where we could play outside. Short story: nowhere near the tracks. But as is this case with all children, this forbidden fruit just seemed all the sweeter and we would sneak quick trips over to put pennies on the tracks and watch them get flattened. When I was stuck in my room, punished or sick or day-dreaming of different lives, I would imagine I was one of the train passengers, or a lump of coal, off to some unknown destination.
Flash-forward thirteen years and you’d find me living in a DIY punk show house nestled right next to the train tracks in Huntington, WV. All the familiar rattling and squealing of breaks from my childhood but now mixed in with a lifestyle meant to challenge sociocultural mores. We were known as a safe space for “traveling kids,” those youths who “who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,” as Allen Ginsberg so beautifully put it. They would stay overnight on our couch and tell us stories about rail pigs, hooking carabiners to the rail ladders (not the safest night’s sleep), and crouching low in empty gondolas to avoid being spotted by track security. Kerouac’s rucksack revolution alive even all these years later.
All this build-up to say that I am fascinated with train travel. But one of the strangest quirks is that with all this desire, I have never taken a long-haul train any which way. Sure, I took subways in cities like New York and travelled by train to get from Belfast to Coleraine when I lived in Northern Ireland, but none of those adventures lasted more than a couple of hours at the most. So, while thinking about ways to get up to Chicago to see those same friends who used to share a home next to the tracks with me…I got the idea that I was going to make this trip by train.
Now, as adventurous a sort as I am, I am not quite as young as I once was and the notion of getting beat by a railyard rent-a-cop like Into the Wild didn’t seem all that appealing to me. I decided to go ahead and scratch out the idea of hopping a train Ernest Hemingway style and stick to the slightly safer option of taking the primary (and to my knowledge only) option for passenger railways: Amtrak. With means, motivation, and a destination in mind, I booked a ticket on the Amtrak Cardinal, so named because it passes through six states where the red cardinal is the state bird (including my very own West Virginia). From New York to Chicago in just under twenty-two hours total. From Charleston, WV…about fourteen and a half hours.
I’ve known a few friends who have traveled by Amtrak train, and of course have been subjected to the TikTok content floof of “slow travel” through the American landscape, so I had this romanticized idea of creeping along the backyards of America, getting a nice meal in the dining car and napping to the slow rocking of the car snaking its way to my destination.
Spoiler alert: romanticizing anything is a sure way of being disappointed.
I like to think of myself as a fair assessor of life, so before we get into the negatives, let’s mention a few positives of this experience:
- Train travel is significantly cheaper than pretty much any other method of transportation. For a cost comparison, my round-trip Amtrak ticket was $117 from Charleston, WV to Union Station in Chicago, a ticket which included a checked bag, a carry-on, and a personal carry bag. While driving my car would have cost about $112 in gas in total, parking in Chicago is not cheap and would have racked up an easy extra $90 for overnight parking near my friend’s place for the week. Flying, on the other hand, would have cost about $180 for a round-trip ticket. Slightly cheaper than driving, but not by all that much. The only option that is cheaper than the train is bus, which would be about $70. But let’s be honest…bus is about the most uncomfortable riding experience possible and is to be avoided at all costs.
- Unlike cars or planes, trains are designed to allow passengers the freedom to walk around while in transit. While it is still a limited kind of walking around, if you happen to get bored you can go grab a snack in the dining/café car or stroll through the passenger cars just for fun. A nice little surprise is that the train also makes the occasional stop for a smoke break at specific stations, so you can get out and stretch your legs while waiting for others to board.
- Even in coach, trains offer a bit more leg room than on a plane. Planes always make me feel extra cramped and, as someone who has difficulty sitting still for long periods of time, those flights that last more than a couple of hours really wear on me. While coach is still not as ideal as a sleeper car or a private room, for the cost I can put up with using the little leg rests, reclining myself back, and nesting my head against the window.
- Train travel really is quite beautiful. Watching the American countryside slip by, the lights of the metropolis’ looking like so many stars in the gloom of the midnight moon or the mist of the early morning rising off the muddy Appalachian rivers, is something that feels so very special in a world where destination is often more important than the journey. Watching the familiar streets of my hometown from the very tracks that I used to fantasize about as a child was a deeply satisfying moment. “Slow travel” is a worthy experience of itself, and so I will have to give all the viral TikTokers a little bit of credit on this one.
Now…the not so good…
Sleeping on a train is not easy. While planes are stuffy and cramped, trains have this weird floating sensation when it is in motion, so not so much a gentle rocking-back-and-forth as a feeling of flying in turbulent weather. There is also the train horn which blares at every road intersection, as those of us who have had to live next to train tracks know all too well. While I had a nice jacket to keep me warm in the surprisingly cold car, enough melatonin to knock out a horse, and a little flannel to ball up into a make-shift pillow, future travelers might want to bring along a little blanket and a neck pillow to try and make the experience somewhat cozier. Oh…and one of those combo sleep mask / headphone deals. Even with the lights dimmed and “quiet hours” enforced, the other passengers were still on their phones, watching reels and TikTok without headphones of their own, and the aisle lights are still enough to keep up light-sleepers like me.
Also, slow travel is meant to be…well you know…travel. So, when my train had a brake malfunction outside Portsmouth that delayed us by an hour, you can imagine a little bit of the frustration that comes along with that. This happened around midnight, so my thought was “Well that sucks, but at least the train isn’t moving and the horn isn’t blaring, so it should be easier to sleep.” But oh…what a “sweet summer child” I was to think that an hour delay or a noisy cabin was the worst of what was to come. While we were all trying to fit in some fitful sleep crouched in our little chairs, the train came to another abrupt halt at the station in Maysville, KY. It wasn’t until an hour later that the conductor informed us that the brake malfunction back in Portsmouth had rendered our current train inoperable and we would have to wait here for a little while until they could find us alternative transportation. Said wait became an eight-hour ordeal.
If you have never been to the Maysville, KY train station, let me go ahead and let you know that you ain’t missing much. While the town was lovely in riverside American sense, there was literally nothing to do at the station while we waited besides wandering the parking lot or chain-smoking with the conductors. And I’m an introvert that doesn’t smoke…so that option was out.
The restaurant nearby was obviously closed, being that we were stuck from about 3:00am to 11:00am. The station itself was closed due to reconstruction, so not only was there nowhere to sit inside, but we had the pleasant sound of jackhammers and bulldozers to lull us to sleep in our stuffy train car. All the beauty of the town itself was also closed off behind the flood walls and, not wanting to miss any important updates or (God-forbid) the train when it finally decided to roll on, I never ventured too far from the station. The café car wasn’t even open for some reason, so in regards to food, all we had available to us was some rail snacks, little bottles of water, and all the coffee we could drink. At least they didn’t charge us for any of this.
After fighting for a few hours of shut-eye, playing around with the new legacy edition of The Sims on my PC, and reading Shin-ichi Sakamoto’s Innocent Omnibus Volume 1, we were finally informed that they were going to be getting a “rescue engine” from a CSX train that was passing by. This train was going to drag us to Cincinnati at which point we were going to finish the rest of our trip by bus. Oh joy. My absolute favorite method of transportation. Paying the extra cost for a train and still ending up on a bus for half the trip. In Amtrak’s defense, they did send me a coupon voucher worth about $55 for a future traveling experience…but seeing as how I’m going to be leaving the country for a year, in which time the coupon will have long since expired, it felt like a rather empty compensation.
The rest of the train trip was enjoyable, if short-lived from there. The Ohio river is full of abandoned trawler boats littering the shoreline, all the ghosts of America’s idealized past rusting away in the stormy winter weather. The cityscape of Cincinnati is also really fascinating by train, as you can capture all the little details of the post-industrial past slowly melting into modern urbanity. And the Cincinnati Union Terminal, a massive 180ft half dome, is a beautiful example of Art Deco that stands in stark contrast to the surrounding buildings. As a National Historic Landmark, I kind of want to go back and explore the museum itself when I don’t have to worry about getting onto a bus.
The bus from Cincinnati to Chicago did nothing to assuage my hatred for bus travel. The bus got unbearably hot about halfway through the journey. Nothing is more boring than watching the interstate for multiple hours on end. While the Midwest landscape is novel in its own way, and I always get a kick out of the massive wind farms that dot the Indiana and Illinois landscape, they aren’t enough of a distraction from the smell of burning rubber and the snores of my fellow passengers. The only stop we made was a restroom and stretch break an hour outside the city where I ate an apple and chugged an entire 23 oz. Arizona green tea. When we finally finished our trip outside the Union Station in Chicago, I don’t think I have ever left a vehicle faster in my life.
But finally…Chicago. One of my favorite American cities, filled with friends who I have made an effort to keep in touch with even all these years down the road. And since this blog post is already a little past that expert recommended limit, I think we shall save my adventures in the city itself for our next post. As mentioned in the previous post, I plan to release a new post every two weeks on Mondays around 5pm EST. So stay tuned for how my actual trip to Chicago turned out.
And now, for a new little tradition, I will end this post with a dive into a particular word I find interesting. I’m going to call it…
Ending with Etymology
Coach (n.) As in “I’m riding coach.”
Coach first comes from the “Hungarian kocsi (szekér)” and was named from the town in which the vehicle was created. Apparently, a lot of vehicles were named based off the place of their invention and kocsi was named after the village of Kocs. Coach later became a term for railway passenger cars around 1866 and, eventually, became a stand-in for “economy or tourist class” in American English around 1949. I find this word particularly interesting as it also has an etymological off-shoot into metaphor for “football coach.” That version of “coach” was first used in academics for a tutor who “quickly and comfortably carried students to their goal of passing their exams” and later into coaches who would carry their sports team to a victory.
All of this research comes from Etymonline, Oxford English Dictionary, and Keith Webb.com.
And with that, I hope that your own travels treat you well my friends. Stay safe, stay serene, and see you soon!
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