The Train Truth

I’m sitting in what’s known as the "women’s dressing room" on an Amtrak train travelling from Austin, Texas to Chicago, Illinois. The train, which originated down the road in San Antonio, is already about two hours late. This is nothing unusual for the Texas Eagle; if tales of other travelers are representative, the train regularly arrives at its destination at least five hours late. I have some firsthand experience of this; on the way down, we were ten hours behind schedule by the time we reached the Texas border, a fact which prompted the crew to "terminate" the train — which basically means they said to the transportation gods "we give; you win" and put all of us on buses aimed directly at our destinations. (Our bus was so directly aimed at our destination that it actually dropped me at my hotel — something a train can’t usually accomplish.)

"So," I hear you regular readers of this irregular publication asking, with a slight quirk of the head, a small arc of the eyebrow, "do I detect a tone of disgruntlement in the prose of Ms. I-Love-The-Train?" Well, yes, I suppose you do. I must admit that I was more than a little frustrated to arrive in Austin at 4:30 a.m. — eight hours later than scheduled. (But it was eight hours and not ten; we picked up two hours on the bus trip from Fort Worth to Austin, during which we saw the aftermath of only one must-have-been-fatal semi truck accident on the Texas interstate — a memory that just now floated up from that night of sleep in fits and starts.) I will also admit that my tension level was heightened by having spent the entire journey seated in front of a woman whose unpleasantness was rivaled only by her loudness and her tendency to dispense utterly inaccurate information in a tone of absolute authority. (Okay, and her tendency to say she went "down" to Chicago from Dallas. But perhaps this is finical.)

Yes, I’m frustrated. But in the end, my frustration is not with Amtrak — cranky and careless and unhelpful though its four remaining overworked employees may often be. I’m frustrated — I’ll just say it — by the fact that it seems to me impossible for train travel to improve. Impossible without a transformation of national (by which I mean both the people’s and the government’s) attitudes toward travel. Impossible without an attitude adjustment that also results in massive influxes of cash.

Now it may seem to you that train travel is already subsidized to beat the band; after all, every ten minutes it seems Congress is being called upon to bail out Amtrak, which is yet again on the verge of bankruptcy. But if you were to investigate the matter (which you could do pretty easily right while you were taking a train trip, both because you would have the time, and because you would be sure to be surrounded by people who know a lot about train travel--people who have chosen to take the train because they believe in train travel), you’ll soon discover that passenger train travel receives the smallest subsidies of any form of transportation in this country, including the private car. (Remember the interstate system!)

And it shows. Train travel in most of this country doesn’t work well. Trains are infrequent and connections are awkward-to-impossible. (I couldn’t take a train all the way from St. Paul to Austin without staying overnight in Chicago each way. Dedicated train riders, I have noticed, refer to this as "breaking up the trip.") Amtrak leases its tracks from freight trains, which means its trains must always relinquish the right of way to the freights. Effectively, this means that every time you are delayed a little bit, chances are good that the size of your delay will increase, as you meet freight trains you wouldn’t have met, had you been on time. (Of course it might also mean that you will meet fewer freights than you would have, had you been on time. And you might already be a winner.) This ownership issue can also present another obstacle to the rail line, when it wishes to add or change routes. Track owners may well go to court to block the increase — as was the case in Maine, where some seven years of legal battles were needed before service between Portland and Boston could be reestablished. Tracks are often in bad shape, requiring trains to move remarkably slowly. The net effect of these obstacles is a kind of experiential Zeno’s paradox; when you’re on a train that has been forced to stop six times in the past hour, it does start to seem impossible to traverse the distance between two points.

The result? Long distance trains are filled (okay, not filled) with people who take them either as the enactment of their ecological/political/social commitments; or because they are afraid to fly; or because they needed to go somewhere on short notice (which is not the same as quickly!) and they couldn’t afford the airfares and they couldn’t bear the Hound. Some of this last group get on the train unhappy, and become increasingly unhappy as the trip progresses. (Or they become increasingly drunk. At one point, I realized I was riding in the equivalent of a moving bar that had decided to stay open way past closing time, in an attempt to placate the drinkers for the fact that they weren’t going to get to their destinations on time. Not the best idea ever to come down the track.)

So, why am I sitting in this dressing room? While I’ve been typing this, the four women who have come in to use the toilet have no doubt wondered that very thing. They’ve gotten quite flustered to see me sitting here, and I’ve had to reassure them that it’s okay, this really is a toilet, and they are free to use it. (Okay, they’re also flustered, like a lot of other women in Texas, because they aren’t quite sure I’m not a boy — never mind the big earrings. Girls in Texas don’t have hair this short. I’ve been called "sir" more times in the last four days than in the last four years of my life. Course I’ve been called ma’am more times too.)

I’m sitting in this toilet (let’s stop splitting hairs, shall we?) for two reasons. First, even earplugs would not sufficiently muffle the voice of the Designated Talker in this train car. (I’m convinced that they must actually assign these people; I’ve never really been in a car with more than one D.T., but I’ve never been in one with fewer either.) I’m just not good at tuning out the sounds of other people living their lives, because I don’t get much practice at it; I live with one other person in a quiet house outside a quiet small town, and I drive in a car to a quiet occupation. My life affords a thick buffer between other people and me. Some people live in a gated community; perhaps I have a gated life.

Sitting on a train strips that away. (Of course so does sitting on a plane, but you almost never sit on a plane for twenty-eight hours straight unless you’re in a hostage situation, in which case very different rules apply.) On the trip down, I learned more about Ms. Information behind me than I ever wanted to know — most all of it upsetting, and every single lick of it None of My Dang Business. (I really didn’t want to know her husband was an abuser, for instance.) I certainly don’t think there’s anything admirable about my princess-and-the-pea attitude toward the Lone Star Talker, or about my inability to function. I just know it’s a fact of the matter.

The second reason I’m sitting in the bathroom: the battery on my computer died, and there’s an electrical outlet in here. Two of them, in fact. Of course there’s also an electrical outlet right at my very seat on the train. However, the arm of the seat (a seat obviously retro-fitted to this car) is located right spang over said outlet. Kind of a good metaphor for train travel in the U.S., I think. It’s right there, but you just (twist) can’t (wedge) quite (nudge, wrestle) use it.