Tales from a Train Riding by rail across post-modern America.

1. SETTING OUT

“Are you nuts?” they say. “Thirty-three hours on a train?” I will be stiff, they warn. I will be bored stiff. I could get to New York in a tenth of that time.

“Only $230 round trip,” I counter. “And I love trains.”

At this, a few friends turn nostalgic, talking about the elegance of the grand old trains. Am I romanticizing, too? Trains feel somehow literary. William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Vladimir Nabokov wrote from dining cars and Pullman sleepers. Agatha Christie was obviously inspired. Jack Kerouac wrote chunks of On the Road on a train, which must seem like heresy to those who equate the auto with the exhilaration of postwar America.

But trains are American. They created a grid for our economy, transported the materials that built our cities, carried our politicians and our assassinated presidents, lent us a metaphor for the struggle against slavery, magicked the crossing of vast expanses. Granted, riding coach on Amtrak today is more like taking a nice bus. No doubt I will arrive weary, disillusioned and, as the Victorians put it, “travel-stained.” Were they referring to coal dust, sweat, or spills? I pack travel wipes to be safe, also trail mix and three notebooks. After months of reading dire warnings about our hyper-efficient, artificially intelligent future, I want slow travel. And I want to prove the naysayers wrong.

•  •  •

One of the thrills of leaving home is knowing you will return slightly rewired, a new assortment of molecules with a richer patina. Also better stories, including a few funny-afterwards catastrophes.

On this trip, catastrophe starts at daybreak. All at once, my phone rings, an email flies in, and a text vibrates: the Texas Eagle is ninety minutes late, and if I am connecting, I must take the earlier train. They do not say what time that train leaves. I yell for my husband and we tear out the door, only to arrive two minutes after the earlier train’s departure.  The agent says the earlier train was only for people with immediate connections, which now seems obvious—but at the crack of dawn, nothing is obvious.

I plop down, liking the unfanciness of the Gateway station. No crap to buy, no merchants pretending that we are special or about to have a treat. Also waiting are a woman in a hijab and another with turquoise hair; a guy in a floppy fishing hat and another in a stripey Guatemalan poncho that looks comfy. What would turn this disparate group, each of us still clinging to bits of our everyday lives (emails, texts, the book we were reading last night) into a community? Only a disaster, I decide–unless it turned us against one another, which these days seems likely.

Absent disaster, though, this experience feels unusually relaxed. There is no security line, no one eager to scan my body cavities or yank off my sandals. No assigned seats, no seatbelts, no litany of rules, no oxygen-mask demo. Coach passengers are waved to the top deck, which might be far from the loo but has the best views. How rare, for cheapness to yield privilege.

I climb the narrow stairs and am settling into a seat when “Mrs. Cooperman” booms over the PA system, summoning me back to the platform. It seems my ticket has been mysteriously canceled. After enduring a burst of hysteria that is only half strategic, the conductor—Cortez, a legend on the “22,” the sort Harper Lee meant when she wrote, “Trains changed—conductors never did”—sighs and allows me to board. When we reach Alton, he brings me into the station to pay all over again.

Now the trip can properly begin. I look around. We are still fresh, all of us, a little sleepy and edged with travel nerves but resilient. How will we look by tomorrow evening? The train builds speed, splitting wind down the middle, and the wheels syncopate the beat as we roll over uneven tracks. The quiet inside—people reading or dozing, the occasional soft murmur of conversation—is broken only by the high hum of the engine, the hard slide and definite click of the lav lock again and again, the whispery metal vibration of luggage buckles and zipper pulls, soft thumps as people fiddle with their bags. Best is the train’s low whistle, resonant as a foghorn, a holdover from a gentler era.

The miles slip past us, yet the world outside the window stays stock-still, as though someone cast a spell on it and stopped all those lives mid-sentence. We pass rows of small brick houses, no doubt cheaper because of their proximity to the railroad. “The other side of the tracks” has divided us for so long.

Around these houses are scraggly trees that, placed in a botanical garden, would look thrillingly wild and sustainable. There, I would admire them. Concrete-block warehouses follow, one ramshackle town after another. Why must they be so ugly? We make our streets wide straight strips of asphalt and edge them with strip malls, building for efficiency (financial, spatial, temporal) rather than character. Eyes squeezed shut, I imagine passing a creek with an old wooden mill, a cluster of stone houses atop a hill, walls covered with climbing roses.

When I look again, we are cutting across the flat green fields that feed the country. Emerald and gold, the colors of Oz. Their flatness, the usual road-trip complaint, feels stable, soothing beneath the scudding clouds.

This train ride reminds me a bit of grade school: planned trips to the lav, whispered exchanges, everyone returning to “their” seat, announcements over the PA, admonishments, snacks. Greedily, I laced my trail mix with extra dried tart cherries and dark chocolate chips, but now it tastes too sweet, and I realize the point is the mix; no single flavor should dominate. If only countries could see that.

Across from me sits a pale, skinny young woman in a crocheted hat, her hair the color of red velvet cake. Thumbs flying, she has sunk into herself. Will this be all of us soon? I want to urge her into the aisle’s light chitchat. Even without disaster, we are, in tiny ways, becoming a temporary community. And the more AI takes over our interactions, the fewer of these moments we will have.

A mother urges her little boy, deprived of screens, to look out the window. “Illinois is boring,” he complains, and his little sister chimes in: “Illinois annoys me!” I want to tell them that mastodon teeth have been found in these wetlands. That we are crossing some of the world’s richest farmland, with ten thousand years of prairie grasses mulched in before anybody figured out how to break up the tangle of fifteen-foot roots and farm the land. How the railroad went through that farmland and made Chicago the hog butcher for the world. How chicago is the native word for a stinky onion field.

Biting back my preachy travelogue, I listen to the wheels grind as we reverse to make room for a freight train. When a teenager panics—“I’ve gotta get to a concert!”—the conductor reassures him, easing his mood before moving on to situate a baby more comfortably. “The grapes and fan are next!” he teases the parents.

When we reach the South Side, even the snoozers perk up. Cities amp the energy, change the scale. Cathedrals, now, instead of clapboard churches, and many decades at once. A faded Canal Street sign from the 1940s is painted on the side of a redbrick building, next to it a 9/11 sign that promises, “America Will Not Forget.” That sign, too, has faded.

An assistant conductor reminds us to tidy our places.

“How much time do we have?” asks the young mother across the aisle from me.

“Half an hour.”

“We’re moms. We can clean up in fifteen minutes,” the mother says, winking at a newfound friend with kids the same ages.

“Yeah, but we’ve got pencils on the floor, we’ve got crayons, we’ve got Playdough,” the assistant conductor says wearily. (Luckily, she has not noticed the Slime.) Earlier, she implored us, “Please don’t walk on my train without shoes! I’m tryin’ to protect your feet!” They are cranky shepherds, these Amtrak staffers.

•  •  •

The Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station. (Photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

Chicago’s Union Station, the nation’s fourth busiest, is the opposite of Gateway. There is grandeur here, and chaos. Wandering, I finally realize that we are to board in the Great Hall, even though the signs for the train gates point the other way. I walk in and gape. There is the staircase Brian De Palma’s Elliott Ness dove down to rescue a baby pram during a mob shootout. I sit on maybe the same bench where Paul Newman and Robert Redford sat in The Sting.

Do the Amish watch movies? The place is full of them, the women bonneted, the men in hats. They sit calmly amidst the tech addicts, untouched by the modern world that has softened and nerved up the rest of us. Are they going to Manhattan? It does not seem the right place. How does it feel to be so different, all the time, from the larger world, and so similar to those in your small community?

The older Amish rarely smile or laugh, but a little boy gives me a big, sassy grin. A grandfather, black-suited, tells me they are going to a wedding, but they cannot all be going to the same wedding. I want to know more, but I am shy with them; they seem solemn and private, not eager for exchange. Also, I think I feel judged. In childish self-defense, I think irreverent thoughts, like what a great disguise Amish garb would be if you planned to steal something.

By 9:30, the Great Hall is quieter, more people asleep in crumpled heaps on the hard, beautiful benches that look like pews. Old libraries and train stations had reverence built in.

My husband calls, worried that I did not bring enough to read. He sees me piling books all over the house, reaching for print whenever I have a chance. Is this a tiresome addiction? Books are like travel: they take you somewhere new. But for this particular trip, I would rather just be present. Peaceful, thinking lightly, as I am moved across half a country.

Announcements spurt every few minutes. “Last call to board…” “Boarding now…” No doubt this will soon be done by AI, so I cherish every hesitation and intonation—the one who sounds punch-drunk, the one who could read Shakespeare.

At last, “Lake Shore Limited!” reverberates. Lining up field-trip style, we are led out to the trainyard. Long silver canisters wait in an indoor twilight, weirdly still, each on its own row of track.

Once aboard, people rush to the window seats, then use the window to slump against, not look. Suddenly I get it. They jockeyed for a window seat not for the view but to be close to the outlet. We moderns live like EVs, charging up with caffeine and juicing our devices.

Railroads were the internet of their day, connecting little Petticoat Junction towns and rowdy cities, stitching us all together. Sprint started as a railroad telephone for Southern Pacific. In City on the Rails, Danelle Morton remarks, “Some say the railroads invented modern life.”

•  •  •

(Photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

The LSL chugs toward the south shore of Lake Michigan, the Mohawk River, and the Erie Canal, following a famous Native-American highway. (Even when you think you are breaking ground, someone has gone ahead of you.) Watching through the window, I feel anonymous, as though I have left most of myself behind. Placeless, homeless, I could be plucked from the world easily right now. I have no carapace to protect me, no context or companion.

What I do have is a ridiculously long journey with time to do whatever I like at any given moment—read, doze, snack, chat, think—and know I will get to all of it eventually. For once, my to-do’s are smaller than their window. A new definition of leisure.

A young man falls into the seat next to me. He is Romanian but grew up in Bangkok, and he works in the kitchen at a gourmet burger place in the East Village. “You should open a Romanian restaurant someday,” I say, and he lights up: I have hit upon his dream.

Where are we now, we wonder half an hour later, and he checks his phone. Michigan? No, wait—Indiana! Strip malls, golden arches, then the outside vanishes altogether. Darkness rushes past, hazy golden streetlights revealing the puckered seams of the city, the hidden spots under concrete overpasses that most of us never see.

When the train begins to empty, he finds a row where he can stretch out, having partied four nights straight. But first, he comes back to tell me the seats are better in the other car. I thank him, but weirdly, I do not want to move. This rigidity surprises me. It is the sort I often mock in others. But I set down my stuff, and this is now My Spot, my little gray home-away-from-home. Irrational though it be, I do not want to gather up my carry-on and hunt for a new place. Enough of me is moving already.

I head for the train’s restroom, a place for despair, repairs, dreams, or transgression. All I do there is brush my teeth.

The outside has vanished, save for occasional bright lights. Slowly, the graffiti on another train slides by, and for a minute I am not sure which of us is moving. Are there hobos in those cars? They still exist, catching trains in the night and riding them through wind shear, no food or toilet, nothing to protect them but foolish courage.

Humans are vulnerable in the dark, vulnerable when they sleep. Lurching past on my way to the loo, I feel an inexpressible tenderness for them. Also, I am jealous. The smartest have brought pillows and comforters, filling in all the painful gaps and softening the metal edges. Kids and young lovers look the comfiest, the greenwood limbs still bendy, nestling into odd crannies, and the lovers melting into one another. Otherwise, people drape themselves over hard armrests, snuggle up to cold windows, sprawl or slump in positions that would work better without a spine.

I hear soft snores, an occasional snort or throat clearing. Sighs. Mouths gape as though in wonder. A dad curls around his small son, both of them zonked. I am the only one awake on this whole damned train. Are they all medicated?

So many strange bedfellows.

•  •  •

(Photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

A stop at a desolate station, lonely in the moonlight. And then it is dawn, the sky shell-pink, and we are in Cleveland, rolling past the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of fame. Slow Train Coming, Dylan sang, right after he found Jesus.

Big, boring houses now, set too close together. Outside town, Papp’s Body Shop—I bet Papp is a character. Will AI teach itself to have that kind of color?

The sun climbs higher, turns pale gold. There is a slight haze from wildfire smoke. The woman across from me—who is from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico—says once the kids at Little League got covered in red dust, the haze chest-high, before the grown-ups even realized what was happening.

Another train passes, so close I could reach out and touch it if train windows still opened. Once, lovers grabbed hands through those windows, blew kisses inside. Safety has painful tradeoffs.

Amazon cars scroll past, the logo’s curved arrow promising to speedily deliver our stuff. When they clear, I see what they obscured: a beautiful little bridge, tiny whitecaps frosting the water around dark rocks below. The stream pours into a swampy olive-green river, perforated by a line of bright kayaks. The tracks are smoother now; earlier they felt a little rough, like the train was pushing across bent rails, but this steady jostle is like riding a big, docile horse.

A few plain cottages nestle in the woods, and a huge, glitzy house sits high on a hill across the river. Do its inhabitants ever wonder about the train passengers, or has surfeit killed their curiosity?

More trees now, edging the farmland. A meadow, so densely packed with honeysuckle and shrubs and wildflowers that it looks sculpted. Soon the land is heavily forested and hillier. Humans need heights, as points of vantage and for that sense of enclosure. In the Midwest, you can see for miles but do not always care to.

Construction sites, great clods of earth rucked up and waiting for us to define progress. It is 9 a.m., and we are already in Buffalo, yet it will take another ten hours to reach Manhattan. Time and space have wrinkled.

A friend texts, curious how the trip is going. I call, bubbling over. She listens, mildly surprised, then asks just how long, again, until I arrive. I shrug an answer. The usual restless imperatives are dropping away. The train’s motion is enough; I can sit still awhile.

Next stop Albany, then Schenectady, where the little brick Amtrak depot has arched windows and a gold dome. The train splits near here, part of it heading over to Boston while we go south along the Hudson River.

Sunlight sparkles on the river, edges its curving banks. Lily pads lid shallow pools, and long-legged birds stand in the scuzzy shallows. We are seeing what the Hudson River School painters saw almost two centuries ago, when their mentors urged them to make Nature their studio.

I stride toward the snack car. In the wee hours, this was scary—metal pieces were flapping, and I saw a Danger High Voltage sign. Daylight steadies the world, though, and now I enjoy the roar of noise between cars, how much faster it feels there, how cool the air is. Pressing the doors open, I remember train chases in old spy movies. This is the same landscape Cary Grant saw through the window of his compartment on the 20th Century Limited, as he fled police and Russian spies and wooed Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Then came Strangers on a Train. The Girl on the Train. Mysteries work better on trains than on planes, mixing intimate proximity with secret agendas in curtained compartments. When people are locked together for long periods, anything can happen.

At the moment, someone behind me is speaking a language I cannot identify. It sounds Asian but not Chinese. I am bouncing along with life-worlds that are opaque to me, trying to peer in anyway. A born voyeur.

Next stop, Poughkeepsie, which ought to be a small dog breed. Spotted, perhaps. How easy it is to induce delirium after thirty hours. The sun warms the glass, and I lapse into a dreamy state, a mashup of lucid and imaginary snippets. How often have people had sex on this train? The vibration is sexy, and so would the furtive haste be, the necessary silence, the fear of discovery. But the jostle could knock things askew….

Squinting, I see a lacy, ruined castle on an island in the middle of the Hudson. More wonders await. As the city comes closer, passengers turn voluble, as people do when they will soon be parted. “L.A.’s too plastic and pushover,” says a guy with a rock-star look. He refuses to fly, he adds: “There’s more crazy people than ever in the world.”

•  •  •

Amtrak comes into the newly renovated Moynihan Hall, airy and efficient. I am tempted to cross over to Penn Station, inspired by the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla and built as a Beaux-Arts masterpiece in 1905. It was the fourth largest building on earth, its main waiting room the world’s largest room. Then New York lost faith in the age of rail and covered its masterpiece.

Penn remains the busiest railroad station in the western hemisphere. But now there is no way to fix it—not with ugly Madison Square Garden squatting on top of it like a sumo wrestler. Cultural historian Vincent Scully remarked that in Penn’s glory days, “one entered the city like a god…. One scuttles in now like a rat.”

Should I, too, scuttle in? Maybe I could find the restroom where Louis Kahn—the architect who set out “to illustrate Silence and Light”—suffered his fatal heart attack. I could catch the subway from Penn, too. I close my eyes and conjure its underground rumble, the shrieking of brakes, the slight vertigo when you step onto the bumpy yellow strip and then onboard, the lurch toward a seat or pole.

But it is almost dark, and I am tired, and have no sense of direction and will be tugging a big suitcase. I want a good old-fashioned New York taxi. The kind you whistle for and people either argue over or share and fall in love.

2. HEADING HOME

Sped by adrenaline, the week in Manhattan is over all too soon, and it is time to reverse my journey. We board the Lake Shore Limited at 4 p.m., and by 5, half the passengers have already crashed. Americans are exhausted.

This time, I have better provisions—bread, cheese, chocolate—and I know how to walk, clutching seatbacks at speed like a chimp swinging from branch to branch. Feeling celebratory, I head up to the snack car for a glass of wine, only to find that the pinot grigio must be cooled with ice cubes. Snooty, I opt for a beer instead, and now I must walk past the Amish clutching my sweating IPA.

This is the photographer’s golden hour, the sky a faint peach easing into blue-violet. Lights are coming on in the little houses. Any of them could be my home. How different would life be? Setting does shape us, amplifying certain traits and sanding off others….

I doze, then wake to hear the man in front of me speaking German with a younger man who just approached. A college trip? A neo-Nazi cell? What we guess about one another reveals more about us.

Darkness falls, moonlight striping the train’s corrugated steel sides. The windows, portals to the world, go black, reflecting us back upon ourselves. A baby frets, high sharp cries that tear the silence. I let the baby voice my own anxiety—will I be up all night? Trying to get comfortable does not work; I know this now. You have to let your body go limp and then find the support it needs at that moment. Sometimes you build yourself a little infrastructure, using an arm to support the other arm, which supports your head….

I fall asleep.

At dawn, I wake to see Sandusky Bay on both sides of us, as though somebody pulled a strip of land from a dispenser and stuck it across the water. We clatter along at a good pace, like babies jounced by a drunk uncle. I am waiting eagerly—me and two big-bellied old guys, everyone else still asleep— for the Snack Bar to open at 6:30 a.m. Will they have coffee? Can a trainload of humans continue without it?

There is coffee. There are even diner-ish tables at which we can drink it, rather than slop it down the aisle. But they are a far cry from the “tables covered with snowy linen” on Mark Twain’s Pullman car, “garnished with services of solid silver.”

Trains were beautiful then. If Amtrak asked, I would suggest dark bronze metal and pale pink upholstery, or a velvety black with white enameled trim. These beasts deserve style, not just gray metal and indifferent cloth.

As I return to my seat, the few who are awake look up, their smiles radiant. We have all made it through the night. The baby is quiet now, swinging down the aisle, her hands in her mother’s. We humans can acclimate to so much strangeness. A wonderful but dangerous capacity.

I play a child’s game, watching my phone to see if I can catch the time shifting back to Central. It was railroads that standardized time in the first place, wresting it from the arbitrary hands of church-tower clocks and pocketwatches. Trains synchronized our lives.

(Photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

In Elkhart, this one grinds to a halt. Someone walked into the path of the train, the conductor explains a minute later, frank and matter-of-fact. A fatality. Once it is deemed safe and the fire department and EMTs have cleared, we will proceed.

No one seems alarmed. Like a sheep, I set the news aside and join them. Passivity quiets the mind. But a life, gone that fast—was the end desired? If it was an accident, will blame be placed? Who will have to live with this death?

The train heaves forward, rolling again. How fast they cleared that scene. We speed on, the body forgotten, our lives back in center stage. Survival is selfish by definition.

I stare out the window with a sharper focus. Will I know the place, or is it already scrubbed back to anonymity? How much of our landscape was once a place of death? Family members will come here later, trying to place their loss.

Death can be selfish, too.

I will look up the “fatality”—that remote word—when I am home. Google it, an act we think gives us information, even though the facts we learn will be nothing that matters.

When I next glance down, the time has changed.

Our next stop is inauspicious—a sign, some concrete, a stretch of grass—compared to the grandeur of Union Station and the slick newness of Moynihan, where each sink has a little spigot for soap, a medium one for water, and a big one to blast hot air, and women have to explain the system to one another all day long.

Third call for breakfast service in the sleeper car lounge. Am I jealous of them? Seething. I chose coach, not wanting to be stuck alone in a car or stuck with a bill five times as high, but have only the grim triumph of surviving what the Scots call the croochie-proochles: the fidgety discomfort of sitting in a cramped position for hours.

Never mind. We have reached Chicago.

•  •  •

People’s lives are such fun to imagine. The man in the gabardine suit is a spy…. So far, I have met a freshwater biologist, an engineer, a sales rep, a photographer, a future chef. None of us minds the length of the trip. I used to wonder how people tolerated ocean voyages, but now I realize we carry a calendar in our heads. An hour’s flight delay is maddening, but when you know you will be somewhere for thirty-three hours, a few more cause no frustration. Expectations are what do us in.

Back in the Great Hall: more Amish! Now where are they going? Gate 19, I hear one say. Maybe it is like Harry Potter’s No. 9? I pull out a chunk of surprisingly good chocolate I bought at Moynihan. Refreshments, always important, become inordinately so on a journey. You need to know you can find provisions wherever you go. And when what you find is ample and delicious, the world is reassuring you that you are welcome. The hospitality industry was well-named.

(Photo by Jeannette Cooperman)

Upstairs at Starbucks, a young woman alerts me to a plug for my laptop, then I lend her a charger for her phone. Tech does not have to be alienating, I think brightly. Then we sink into our separate electronic worlds for the next two hours. Are we all better behaved now that we have our babysitter devices? Hardly. Some are more docile, others more angry. Like old age, tech simply magnifies who you already are.

Meanwhile, the Amish seem friendlier this time. As a result, I stop thinking of them as “the Amish.” There is, after all, no such thing, just various groups of individuals who are Amish. Including the teenage girls in matching pastel tiny polka-dotted dresses, bubbling over, telling me how they made them all to match and they are headed for fun at Niagara Falls.

The Texas Eagle lands four hours late. We board and find our next places, life an extended game of musical chairs.

“He can’t sit in that seat, ’cause that lady got on shorts and it is INappropriate and God don’t want him to be there,” an Amtrak employee whose shift is ending informs her colleague. “Y’all deal with it.”

Somehow, he does, and we chug into the sunset. An hour later, we have built up a good speed when—the train stops. Moments later, two cops board. They are here to arrest someone for drunk and disorderly conduct—but first, they have to wake him. “Seriously?” asks a guy behind me. We wait, tired and restless (cancel that bit about delays not mattering) while the conductor files a police report.

“I was hoping somebody was a spy,” another passenger mutters. “Drunk is so banal.”

So is the scenery. Old barns. Car repair shops just as obsolete. Sheds and warehouses. I want to paint them all Bermuda pastels, or turn them into French villages where all the roofs are terra cotta and the buildings look like they belong together. We shy away from that in this country, have to be free—and look where that has landed us. Each town still looks much the same as the next, but they are all hodgepodges, incoherent, refusing any unity of design or material, any plan. Freedom turns ugly when it only privileges the self.

“Fresh air stop,” the conductor calls, but I stay put and breathe the canned stuff, like Dr. Doolittle in his transparent shell under the sea.

Half an hour later, we pull into the Gateway station. My husband and dog, comfortable bed and soft pillow are waiting. But so is the rush of the world. The minute I step outside this compartment of slowed time and sealed space, all my non-Amish tech and excess stuff will be in my hands again.

I am not entirely sure I want it back.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.