Since the key to making America great again is the good old days, I suggest we all ditch our cars and planes and stick to trains. Take bus number 400 at Carolina Coffee Shop, and 40 minutes later you will be across the street from the historic, solemn building that is Durham station.
My usual trips are either Kannapolis or D.C., but enough of that. Why not catch the 5.30 p.m. train west-bound, get off at the large but shabby Greensboro station, vigilantly camp there for 8 hours, catch the 2 a.m. train en route from New Orleans, get off five hours later to a misty morning in Charlottesville, wait around, and then catch the noon Chicago-bound train. Before Chicago, you wind through the New River Gorge.
The possibilities are even greater at the Raleigh station. If you arrive by 9:30 p.m., you’ll just catch the night train to Florida. My cousin from Jordan and I did this once — we had a sworn pact to visit Harry Potter World. We arrived fresh-faced, the train having rocked us to sleep in its arms all night. On our return, gray dawn was slipping through the pines as we clipped through small towns in South Carolina.
In D.C., the train steams into Union Station, a colossal building with a never-ending pantheon of sky-bending columns. You can buy wonderful, unhealthy food, then walk 15 minutes to the Capitol Building and read a book on a bench before the grandeur of US law-making or not-making.
The most heart-breaking sight I ever saw was the outskirts of Baltimore. It was 40 minutes of what looked like bombed-out homes.
Sometimes, the train is empty; or you might sit beside the miso soup eating guitarist heading to Greensboro to interview a Quaker; or the lady born in Rome, bred in Mexico and Manhattan because her father worked for the UN, and en route to Chapel Hill to visit her school-friend who now works in the Global Studies Building, also raised in Mexico.
Once, the toddler Jacob and his mom sat behind me, and Madison and her mom sat in front, and Jacob’s mom and Madison’s mom (strangers) insulted each other over my head for hours while I pretended to sleep.
Last December, I got a $130 ticket to ride the California Zephyr, a two-day train trip going west. We climbed the Rockies, followed the Colorado River down the mountains, had a midnight Salt Lake City stop, and awoke the next morning to Nevada deserts.
So tell your Congress members that you’d rather they didn’t always threaten to cut Amtrak’s subsidies; tell them that you want good, solid, reliable trains all over the US. Then go ride. All aboard!
