I came across an old photograph, from the days before cell phones, when you had to drop off the film and pick up the prints later. The photo was taken in the summer of 1992 from the window of an Amtrak train on the outskirts of Albuquerque. I had never seen a backyard full of bathtubs before, and I managed just one shot before the train rolled on by.
You see things from the train that you see nowhere else, parts of America away from the vast network of roads and the endless chain of gas stations, stores and eateries, identical from coast to coast. On a train you see wild estuaries and flooding rivers. You see quaint midwestern towns and the worst parts of a few large cities. Surfers flash you from the shore on the elbow of California. Sometimes you can literally look into someone’s back yard – and it might be full of bathtubs.
That summer, I’d taken my kids on a long round-trip via mostly train, from San Diego to Maine and back. Amtrak had a deal going: a 45-day pass for which I paid full price, half for the first kid, and the second kid rode free. We saw a lot of the country on that trip, sandwiching two weeks in Maine between stops in Boston, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.
I was fortunate – if losing a job can be called that – to have the time, and, temporarily, the money, to visit family on the east coast without getting on an airplane. We slept in our seats, packed in food when we could, and my daughter, seven, made friends with a girl a couple years older who played the violin. The train was three hours late leaving Los Angeles, and ran late all the way to Chicago. We made the connection to Boston with minutes to spare. The trip out took most of three days. The trip back took four, not counting stopovers. Most Americans get two weeks of vacation a year, if they’re lucky.
Many other parts of the world, of course, do not have our capillary-like system of roads into which even the smallest villages are connected. Trains go where no car has ever gone. In 1991, the year before I would take my young daughter and son on our adventure aboard Amtrak, travel writer Colin Thubron set out to explore Siberia, newly (mostly, and with conditions) opened to westerners. He returned with a book, In Siberia, published in 1999. He traveled by mostly by train, but also by airplane and riverboat to remote places in the permafrost. One train dropped him off at the northern end of Lake Baikal. He hired a hydrofoil boat to take him to the lake’s southern end, 400 miles away, because there was no other way to “get there from here.”
I’ve heard people say they hate to fly, to drive, to ride buses. But who doesn’t like a train? Even when they are costly and ineffective, people love trains. Now we have a train-friendly administration in Washington, and growing support for the return of passenger rail to the hinterlands of Maine. The time has come to get on board.
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