Riding the Rails: Part I - I Took a Train

I just read this article from Orion Magazine.  It reflects on one environmental writer's experience riding the rail throughout the United States after swearing off airplanes.  She speaks of the romantic nature of traveling by train--from the folk tales of people traveling across the plains and up and down the coasts of our country's past to hobos hitching rides to the European ideal of traveling easily by rail from country to country.  So, here are a few parts on trains...we'll see what happens.

Part I: I Took a Train...

"King's Sleeping Quarters" © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

As a child, I thought riding a train was an exotic way to travel.  I rarely saw trains, and the ones we did see were purely for moving goods, like coal.  I imagined riding a train to be a luxurious adventure of eating meals in the dining car, coughing my way through the smoking car, sleeping in a fully serviced room the size of an RV and waving at passerby from the caboose.  Upon further thought, I still imagine traveling by rail in the U.S. to be like this.  Hopefully my dreams will be realized or quashed sometime soon.

While I have never ridden the rails in the land of opportunity, I have been privileged to travel by train in Europe and India.  My experience in Europe happened years ago, in a sleeper car with my mom, traveling from Krakow to Prague...I think.  I don't really remember!  Some memory I have.  I do remember a middle of the night pound on the door to check our passports.  It was nice, as I recall, but not as fancy as my childhood fantasy.  It looked something like this:

That is a far cry away from what I imagined as a child, but not too shabby!  Traveling by train offers a much more comfortable way to get from place to place than sitting in a cramped airplane seat, and it lets one relax and sit back a lot easier than a car ride.

After a ten year hiatus from trains, not necessarily by choice, but from lack of trains/abundance of other forms of travel, I took them again in India in April 2010. It was sticky, loud, uncomfortable, crowded and awesome.  The trains are cheap, five to twenty bucks to get nearly anywhere in the country in the horrible sleeper cars (not the same as European sleepers!).  The trains are often fully booked, but that doesn't keep large families and holy men from hopping aboard and taking your seat.  One train I took had the old babas on the top bunk of every single berth.  the lower berths were overflowing with families...about twelve people in a space meant to hold six.  Coincidentally, my seats were often taken.  I wish I had a picture of all of the old "holy men" stealing the upper bunks as seats. Combine the following two photos, and you'll have an idea of what it looked like:

Imagine two Babas on that one bench, hunched over, with their tridents lying across their laps.  After spending some time standing in the aisles with my large backpack, someone else kicked one of the poor schmucks off so I could be the hunched over whitey on the top bunk.

While on the trains in India, I had the pleasure of reading Atlas Shrugged, which follows the building of a high speed railway in the U.S.  It was coincidental reading for this experience, although wholly different.  After getting very ill after my ride from Varanasi to Agra, I made sure only to eat the train food that mothers purchased for themselves and their children...it kind of worked.  I still got sick, but not quite as sick, and I still got to eat the delicious food of the tracks, from samosa and chai (I miss the voice changing chai wallahs) to strangely long cucumbers with spicy salt:

A Train Vendor Selling Strangely Long Cucumbers to a Family Below Me.

Sleeping in the "sleeper" car was a very different experience.  Theft is common, so I snuggled with all of my belongings on an eighteen inch wide bunk and spent most of the night listening to my iPod and reading.

The train from Trivandrum to Madurai, in southern India, weaves through one of the largest wind farms in the world.  We sped through it at twilight.  It was amazing...the soil there is a deep burnt orange, and the sky was purple with these graceful towers of energy spread as far as the eye could see.  The view from the seats of the trains are bothersome because the windows are barred.  I don't know if you can do this on an American train, but I stood in the open doorway of the train, nothing but the wind between myself and the landscape.  My hair slapped my face and my skirt billowed in voluminous waves as crimson, tangerine and hues or purple flew past, diced with the crisp white of turbines.  It was absolutely gorgeous.

Of the few trains I have ridden, the experiences have been amazing in their beauty, stench, accessibility, convenience and memories.  One of my friends takes trains in the U.S.  I should hop aboard soon.