I am tripping a non-Kerouac ramble from jungle-Mexico up to tourist-Mexico, on-board a cruise ship to Miami, to New York and back to Miami for the medical games for which I came . This is not the journey of Jack, Mrs. Kerouac’s son nor his roll of paper to document the journey across the land. This is not Robert Frank’s photo-trek across the landscape of American people and faces, waitresses and signs, the landscape of hope and despair. Frank worked with film with real grain, gritty pictures pushed to the limits. Kerouac had a grainy head, highly sensitive and harshly ready to show itself to posterity, that generation down the road of time.
It is my trip into what I thought would be the lonely road of the forgotten railroads washed over by time and jets, federal highways filled with vacation throngs. Not. There is a new view of the rails in America. Changes are happening fueled by the forces of Arab threat and hellish security.
In 1959 Cary Grant crawled into the upper berth of a spacious room on the 20th Century Limited to Chicago in order to hide in the corn rows from the biplane of doom. Back in 1954 or so this boy watched the Silver Meteor in its diesel aerodynamic glory ring its glory bell as it pulled in Tampa’s Union Station from New York. The stuff of dreams, of travel, of exotic New York and of that shiny fine locomotive of gleaming power.
Eisenhower’s federal highway system grew from a semi-military, cold war path for missiles into the economic arteries of America. From it came the red highway network of coast-to-coast trucks and the slow strangulation of the passenger rail, the ascendancy of the 4 car family and the blossom of airline routes tying the nation together at high speed, business travelers rushing to the airport gate to be stopped by all the other travelers headed for the gates.
America reacted to another Pearl Harbor. It installed guards at the gates to shut the barn doors and guard them with machine guns against explosive shoes. Air travel which had fueled great industries began to be painful. There seemed few alternatives. Passenger ships were mostly gone and Amtrak had lost the luster of the glory days of romantic rails.
AN AMTRAK TREK: PART I
This expatriate came visiting America again but needed to keep going from Miami, where the ship left his non-flying soul, to The City: New York. Ah, the romance. Ah, the luxury. Bring on that Pullman porter and hear the bell ring and the proud conductor call “All aboard”.
It is 2007. The ticket was booked on-line. I made this trip about 10 years ago from Rhinebeck, NY, through the City to Tampa to visit my ill mother. I was broke that year — could barely afford a coach ticket. It was better than I thought but the coach for 27 hours was stiffening, the train and toilets clean until somewhere in the South when everyone was too tired, the trip too long.
This is another year, another life and I splurged on the roomette for luxury, for survival and perhaps for the romance of railroading. The roomette was an extra $185 dollars over the $113 for the ticket. It was said to be fine for two but there is only one of me. Super-sized Americans may not fit into the roomette with ease.
Meals in the dining car are included along with bottled water and other first class perks. I didn’t believe it would be worth the money. Trains are great for medium distance intercity travel. New York to Washington, Albany to New York, throw in a Boston and these are great trips of luxury, speed and comfort delivering the traveler from center city to center city without the taxi ride out to where they hid the airports. (more…)
