Why Do I Keep Coming Back to Trains?

“Train Corridor” by Weike Wang

One fall I took many Amtraks. It was two trips per week or four trains. I was teaching at two different colleges, in two different cities. Most semesters I commute only to one school, so one trip per week or two trains. In total, I have taken hundreds of Amtraks and receive daily emails from them about my next trip or to give feedback for my last.

“We would love to hear about your boarding experience!” Select a number between 0 (not satisfied at all), or 10, (extremely satisfied). Sincerely, Amtrak Research.

I’m always tempted to write in my feedback. Dear Amtrak Research, you have sent me scores of enthusiastic emails I have never reciprocated. Like an avid admirer, you are constantly in my inbox. So it now feels disingenuous to respond with only a number. How would you differentiate a five from a six? And with only whole number intervals, which integer truly captures the weighted average of all my boarding experiences on your trains and others? 

Between New York and Philly, I take the Keystone, or the Pennsylvanian, or once, by accident, while trying to get on the Pennsylvanian, the Carolinian. Between New York and Boston, I take the Northeast Regional, never the Acela which, while marginally faster, is more often delayed. I also don’t like the light inside the Acela, garish, or its assigned seating, and the cafe car is less comfortable (stools instead of benches, to discourage you from sitting there and to encourage you to go back to your assigned seat). The business class of the Northeast Regional also has assigned seating (coach does not). So, why does the more expensive ticket restrict your freedom when one of the joys of train travel, as opposed to planes, is to be able to sit where you like? My last memory from the Acela is sitting in my assigned aisle seat, under that garish lighting, diagonally from a very tall man in sunglasses and a white alligator print suit. This outfit wasn’t funny to me, just strange. And I thought because he was so tall, his suit should be of giraffe print, not alligator. That same morning on the Keystone, I had sat behind a stout man in a brown suit, wearing teal socks printed with his infant’s face. This outfit was funny. Unless the infant was not his. Even so.

The Keystone doesn’t have a cafe car, but is more on time than the Northeast Regional. On the latter, I sit in the cafe car and work on my iPad, as I’m doing now. Without the tall seats, this car offers a panoramic view. The view going north into Boston is the most beautiful, especially as the train cuts through huge pastures, past rocky harbors dotted by white flat-faced houses with red doors, especially in fall, during misty rain. I never used to write outside of my own room or desk. When I wrote, I required total silence. But that severely limited my writing time and made the activity feel sort of precious. So, it’s best for a writer to learn how to write under any conditions and trains forced me to adapt. In terms of noise, the cafe car is the opposite of the quiet car. Families sit here. Today, a boy is throwing a tantrum. He shouts that he is having a panic attack and that no one cares about him, while across from him, the mother eats her sandwich wordlessly and beside him, the younger brother plays cards. I then make up the rest of the story. They’re on their way back from vacation. The father left early for work, or is not in the picture. The younger boy is easier, happier, thus the mother’s favorite, which causes a negative feedback loop for the older boy to keep throwing tantrums in public. 

Coffee and tea cost the same on the Amtrak, but hot water is free. When I first learned this, I thought of my parents who, at every public venue, even in summer, ask me to ask someone for hot water in a paper cup. They would like the Amtrak for this reason alone. Then while sipping their free hot water, they would complain about how slow the train was going.

Trains in China are much faster and when they reach top speeds, display that number on digital overhead signs. Trains in Europe are also faster but don’t display speeds, just the time and next stop. Signs on the Amtrak say EXIT in all caps, then in much smaller font, either “restroom this end” or “restroom, the other end” but because the signs are at the end of each car, you have to walk to one end anyway to confirm or negate a bathroom’s existence. Not all train doors open at every stop and if the station is particularly short, like New London, only three doors will open, it’s up to you to figure out which three. The intercom system is sometimes too loud, too soft or not on at all. I prefer the intercom too loud. When the train stops for no reason, I like loud conductors who update us frequently with clear information like “hi folks, it’s single track ahead, so there’s train traffic but we should be moving momentarily.” I much prefer that than sitting there for 10, 20 odd minutes, without news. 

In general, I have terrible travel luck. Across the board, with planes, trains and automobiles. If I can, I walk or bike. Both those modes of transport give me total control of time. 

My own horror stories: There’s a person on the tracks. A deer. A car. Another malfunctioning locomotive. Once, my train was stuck in a tunnel under Penn station. It was my last Amtrak of spring semester and I wouldn’t be taking more until fall. I was so close to arriving home, in the city, where to celebrate, my husband was waiting for me at a theater where we had tickets, booked ages ago, to see a play. My train was stuck in the tunnel for some time before we were told that we had not come in on the right track and now had to back out of this tunnel to pull into the right track, but we couldn’t back out now as there was train traffic behind us, constant traffic, and not enough tracks, so we had to wait. An hour passed with no movement, and then we were told that because of poor service, the chip reader of the cafe car had stopped working, so only cash, which I didn’t have, and another hour passed, in the same tunnel, the windows pitch black, I felt claustrophobic, I felt like I had been buried alive, and then another hour passed, before it was announced that the cafe car had no more food, and tragically no more alcohol to sell, before finally, we pulled from the dark of tunnel into the dark of night and then back into the dark of tunnel on the right track, at which point once the literal and metaphoric light of the platform pierced through the windows, people started clapping, laughing (from delusion) and I was hungry, sober, still cashless and I had missed the entire play. 

That night, I was kept up by my rage and the next day I received an email apologizing for the inconvenience, along with some points added to my Amtrak rewards program. 

Since then, my heart rate jumps whenever the train enters a tunnel and stops there, as it does at Providence, a station surrounded by solid concrete under which there is also no cell service. Large stretches of the Northeast corridor have no service and sometimes I wonder how that is possible. This corridor is the busiest passenger rail system in the country, running, as their website states, 2,200 daily trains serving over 800,000 daily passengers, and yet when my phone goes down to no bars, I look up expecting total wilderness only to see lit houses and telephone wires right off the tracks. 

On my most recent trip back to China, to Nanjing, where I was born, I was amazed that I had service on the subway, hundreds of feet underground. Amazed that I could text and send photos to my parents in America, and in a few seconds, read their reply. But in my awe, I was also irritated because how many times had I been told during my upbringing in the West that I had come from a backwards, third world country, and how many times had I been conditioned to think that America was the better place, though now with the asterisk that public transit is not where this country excels. I think it is a known fact that the quality of American train travel, above or underground, has fallen far, far below that of Asia or Europe. Because in America, you drive cars. And take highways. Or freeways. To be, literally, more free. Not lost on me is the irony that my father has worked, for over two decades, at General Motors.

I did have one terrible train experience in Germany. I was there for a December destination wedding, and the lesson learned is to not go to a December destination wedding in a Northern Hemisphere country. For the three days we were there, Munich experienced its largest snow storm in 20 years. The airport closed and our flight, along with hundreds of others, was cancelled, then rebooked, then cancelled, but not rebooked. The stranded slept at the airport and the German groom told me I just needed to wait for officials to sort it out. But there was no clear timeline for the wait, customer service hotlines had indefinite holds, and help desks could only offer a physical postcard to mail in for a possible refund. The only route back to New York was to fly out of Frankfurt, which was a train ride away, but the Munich train station was also not functioning. Boards posted arrivals but no trains arrived. That night, I spent hours in that station, in freezing weather, trying to translate German to see which trains were actually coming (hint, none). Yet like a frantic, gambling idiot, I blew hundreds of dollars buying mobile tickets, until finally, I admitted defeat and found a hotel nearby. The next day, there was one train leaving Munich to Frankfurt! We boarded it in a sprint, as I was still buying the tickets, but seriously how would anyone have checked our fare? The train was so packed that at every stop, the conductor announced we were dangerously over weight, and those crammed in the aisles had to step off for exiting and entering passengers. For three hours, my husband stood in the aisle and I folded myself under the luggage storage space, under a set of metal bars, where I couldn’t have written but I did think that for as much praise as there is for German punctuality and German efficiency, the Germans like things done a correct way, or no way, for which the only solution is to shut down and wait for the snow to melt. At one stop, a panicked woman’s shouts wafted over my head. “I need to get off! I need to get off!” and her suitcase was crowd surfed down the car, but it was the wrong suitcase so the right one needed to be crowd surfed again. The entire car laughed. So, an upside is that trains can boost camaraderie and remind us that really, we are all in this together.

But sometimes trains do the opposite.

I have a distinct memory of my grandmother, who I saw once every three summers, who is now bedridden and no longer recognizes me. My memory is of her running to the end of a platform, wiping her eyes with one hand, and waving at me with the other, as I board my train from Nanjing to Shanghai to fly back to the states. 

Traveling alone in Greece one summer, as a college student. Two memories. The first of me in a train compartment alone, then two young men enter and close the door, lock it. The men start asking me questions like where I am from, “no, where are you really from,” and me saying that if they don’t open this door, I will scream, which I do, and they open the door, run off. The second, me in a full train compartment, surrounded by older women. I don’t know what they’re saying but a steward is called and they’re all shouting and pointing at me. The lady next to me is the most incensed. Whenever her pant leg touches my bare calf, she runs both hands down that leg, as if it has just touched dirt. Later the steward explains to me, kindly, slowly, in English, that I’d bought a second-class ticket, which doesn’t guarantee a seat. So, I cannot be in the same compartment with first class passengers who paid for seats. I leave and afraid to cause any more trouble, sit with my dirty legs tucked in, on the floor of the aisle. From that experience, I learned that if I am going to travel, I am going to travel with money.  Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys you the privilege of not being told to leave, which for me is a kind of happiness.

My husband says if he had the same experiences that I’ve had on trains (and he did in Germany), he would never ride trains (and he hasn’t since Germany). So why, besides pragmatics, do I keep coming back to them? And why despite all the problems, do I subconsciously look forward to a train travel day? 

Trains often appear in one’s formative years, in books, on television, as toys. Some of us grow out of it. But some of us don’t. 

Math problems can involve trains. Train A leaves from town A towards town B. Train B leaves from town B towards town A. At which point in their journey will they collide?  I excel at these calculations. Collide! Collide! And imagine how easy the world would be if there were only 26 cities, letters A through Z, and only 26 trains. 

A moving train is often used to teach the invariance of the speed of light. In classical mechanics, shoot an arrow from a moving train and that arrow flies with the additive speeds of itself and the train. But if the train moves at the speed of light, an arrow shot from it travels no faster than the train, which violates common sense—as light often does.

Beyond math and science, another part of my education was to learn that in America, the Chinese built the railroads. I was taught this in social studies, across several grades, usually in one textbook paragraph that read something like this. From 1865 to 1869, 12,000 Chinese immigrants made up 90 percent of the workforce that built the Western section of the transcontinental railroad, or approximately 690 miles, while facing extreme prejudice, terrible work conditions, and lower pay than the white workers for more dangerous tasks like blasting through the Sierra Nevada mountains. What an extraordinary feat! These are not my ancestors but such information would always prompt some male classmate to ask me how much of the railroad I had built to be allowed to stay in this country. A joke. Don’t take it the wrong way, Comrade Wang.

Though to have railroads and trains is an extraordinary feat. Propulsion comes from the diesel engine. More electricity from the third rail. Friction between the wheel and track is minimal. To glide heavy loads over long distances. 

I would argue that a magical train trumps a magical car, a magical plane, and even a magical carpet. This is because a train inevitably sends me back to that industrious childhood of Thomas the Tank Engine and The Little Engine That Could. When I first read Harry Potter, a permanent hook was that at the start of each school year, the kids must rouse up enough courage to rush through that brick wall onto Platform 9 ¾ and board the Hogwarts Express, on which a Trolly witch serves you chocolate frogs that do not wish to be eaten. Each December, I watch The Polar Express and consider if one uncertain, sleepless night, a gigantic locomotive appeared in my street and its conductor berated me about Santa Claus, would I willingly get on? I think most writers would actually. Certainly Kafka. So, there would be a car full of feral children drinking hot chocolate and behind it, a car full of existential writers, collecting material about their youth. The part in that movie where the train steers itself across ice, with no tracks is impossible. Then the must-know-it-all-kid in me went down a rabbit hole to see if that stunt was actually possible and came across long online posts about how it was, if the train had differentials that could control the left and right wheel sets separately. But didn’t I just ruin a part of the movie for myself? The whole point is that the Polar Express runs on magic.

You know this image. I know this image. A train curves around a dramatic 21-arch viaduct (Glenfinnan Valley) such that for one moment, the first car can glimpse the last. Made famous by those same Harry Potter books and movies, but also travel shows urging you to, at least once in your lifetime, see the Scottish Highlands, because this so called “Harry Potter Train” is really called the Jacobite Steam Train and is a real working steam locomotive that pass the viaduct twice a day.

I dream of a house large enough to fit a nine-foot Fraser fir and around its tree skirt, a choo-chooing Lionel O gauge in red. Better yet, I dream of a house large enough to have one room where I can build an entire miniature train world, like that of the Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Gardens.

A trip I would like to take, for some big future birthday, is the Andean Explorer that runs from Lake Titicaca up through the snow-capped mountains.

I also like mysteries that take place on trains. Murder on the Orient Express. Or zombie outbreaks. Last Train to Busan. 

So it would be even more exciting if for that big future birthday, I was on the Andean Explorer, while also solving a murder or fighting zombies. A big ask, I realize.

In cars, planes and boats, I get vertigo. Strangely, I’ve never gotten sick on a train. Which means I can read, work, and I have, for unending hours, departure to arrival, but during that fall of many trains, instead of checking off tasks, I began listening to audiobooks of old classics, an act of sheer boredom prompted by the slow cell service and intermittent wifi. One chapter of Wuthering Heights became two, three. I’ve written about overworking before. I am very, very rarely not typing, teaching, multitasking, that to the person sitting across the cafe car table from me, the Weike just with her AirPods in, just with her audiobook and still hands, must have seemed dead inside (and I probably was, listening, several hours later, to Heathcliff dig up Cathy’s coffin. “I got a spade from the tool-house.”) But I wasn’t staring at my table companion intentionally, just through and past them, into a white space on which I was visualizing the words as I heard them. “Punctuality is the thief of time,” The Portrait of Dorian Gray. “It takes brains not to make money! […] Name, for example, one poet who makes money.” Catch-22. “My mother’s face, anxious and sallow as a slice of lemon,” The Bell Jar. “There is a loneliness that can be rocked.” Beloved. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.” To Kill a Mockingbird. Listening, as opposed to reading, was different. It was rhythmic, hypnotic. Eavesdropping, in a way, on someone else’s interpretation of books I thought I knew well. And through this process of having the familiar made unfamiliar, I discovered, magically, that alone on a train, but also not alone, being read to by a stranger relaxes me. 

Then what un-relaxes me is watching, at lunch time, that cafe car queue get 20 people deep and go to the end of the car. 

Or when the train stops on a tilt. 

We are now passing through that dead zone of the Northeast Corridor with the most beautiful views. Corridor is an apt word—imagine a long, narrow hallway that leads off to many rooms. The water in my left and right rooms shimmer silver. The sky room up above is grey. The lunch queue has subsided and the tantrum throwing boy from earlier is asleep and rain streaks silently across the windows in gorgeous parallel lines. Here, I am reminded of college ruled notebooks, and of writing by hand, which I haven’t done since, well, college. Here, I usually think of that scene from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping in which a train, called the Fireball, shoots across a bridge, into a lake that will freeze and entomb it, no survivors. “The engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it, into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.” I remember sentences like these for their verbs. The engine nosed over, as if catching a smell. The train slid in, as weasels do, but also as divers do from those ten-meter platforms, scoring perfect marks by making no splash. Am I romanticizing perishing in a catastrophic train accident, a “spectacular derailment” and being buried by water? Yes, probably, so let’s not manifest that. No murders. No derailments. No runaway trains. No collisions. No zombies. Except in the fiction room of my own head.

Though there was a recent explosion in Penn Station. Two maintenance trains collided and five workers were injured and a long, long day of transit chaos ensued. I should have been on a train that day. I was not. Lucky break. But when I saw the headlines, saw that picture some poor, stuck passenger took from inside their car out to this huge underground fireball, I thought how insane it was that something like that happened, then, I thought, well, what else was supposed to happen. Penn Station isn’t really a station or a tunnel. It is a volcanic lair of an aggrieved city dragon, that once in a while, must let off steam.

“How likely are you to recommend Amtrak to a friend, colleague, or family member.” Select a number between 0, not likely at all, to 10, extremely likely. Sincerely, Amtrak Research.

Dear Amtrak research, there are lots of reasons not to take the train. Possible accidents. Possible fires. And the much higher chance of not arriving on time than on. So, right, it is not for the travel anxious or those with specific needs. A train is a public space and when traveling alone, I am more vigilant of my surroundings and the security of my things. I don’t strike up conversations with strangers, unless it is an Amtrak employee, the cafe car worker for example, who kept saying “long story short” but then told me a long story about how the funeral home had misplaced (he thinks sold) his mother’s ashes, given him someone else’s ashes, and how, thanks to a distant cousin who saw a poster about his mother’s unpaid debt, he had heroically gotten his mother back. I told this employee I was a writer. It was loud that day in the car, and he replied, “I’m glad I’m talking to a lawyer.” As the writer-lawyer I’d become, I wondered was there a market for other people’s ashes? And how do you know the ashes that you do have are the real deal? But for every one of those conversations, there are plenty of less memorable ones about luggage etiquette or sharing a charging port or accidentally kicking your neighbor, while stepping over them to exit. In every train, I have had to sit next to someone. Usually, I choose a person who seems innocuous and quiet, which usually means another Asian woman. I never sleep on trains. I never nap. Even on overnight trains with bunks and clean, white duvets, I don’t sleep. I don’t because vigilance plus insomnia equals hyper-insomnia, and because, out of subconscious expectancy, I don’t want to. I’m afraid I will miss something. A view. An event. Santa Claus. A jumping chocolate frog. A dragon. Long story short, I don’t want to miss that.