Ian Dryden

It is the most pleasant way of covering every foot of the ground between here and there.

The conveyance which leaves San Diego for Los Angeles four times a day from the Santa Fe railroad station is trying as hard as it can not to be a train. The new “Amcoaches” of which Amtrak is so proud look as if they aspire to be something between an airplane and a Greyhound bus—the walls are rounded, the ceiling low, the seatbacks contain tray-tables which drop down. An incessant glue of Muzak oozes from speakers in the ceiling, and the food service consists of plastic-wrapped sandwiches heated in microwave ovens. This is not railroading.

From San Diego, three of Amtrak’s long-distance trains are accessible: the Coast Starlight (to Seattle), the Southwest Limited (to Chicago), and the Sunset Limited (to New Orleans).

Ian Dryden

Still, despite Amtrak’s best efforts and its worst decisions, taking the train in most parts of America remains at least the ghost of what it once was: the best form of mass travel over land yet evolved. Travel, not transportation. For pure transportation—that is, getting from Point A to Point B— the airplane of course rules. But for those who find airplanes boring and alienating, who realize that flying at 27,000 feet is not traveling, the passenger train still lives.

The appearance of Amtrak was probably inevitable, though it represents only another instance of the rage for standardization which threatens to wipe out those remaining features of our culture which still make life bearable. Most railroads considered the running of passenger trains a nuisance, performed the task grudgingly (though the Santa Fe was one notable exception to this rule), and lost money at it—so much money that by the early 70s, when Amtrak (a government-subsidized agency) took over, nothing but the insistence of the ICC kept most of the country’s few passenger trains running. Amtrak consolidated the passenger equipment of the country’s railroads, fixed up the least worn-out cars, painted them with red and blue stripes edged in white, and began to run passenger trains over a gradually expanding network of routes. Today, still losing money, Amtrak seems to have gathered some courage, building new equipment, trying out new routes, repairing the tracks that make many trains unnecessarily slow, and trying tentatively to capture a new public with small but significant innovations like the USA Railpass.

What brings riders to the train, however, is the fact that over long distances it is the most pleasant way of covering every foot of the ground between here and there, and that is is very nearly a rolling antique. If Amtrak’s PR men advertised the train’s nostalgia value, their business might suddenly double. But no one has yet thought to sell the train as a trip into the past—a kind of twentieth-century Williamsburg on wheels, which could only evolve into a self-conscious performance of itself. Fortunately, no considerations of image are required. Railroading stubbornly refuses to change.

The classic way to travel, of course, is by sleeping car—still known as Pullmans though the Pullman Company no longer operates them. Twenty years of service bring, a railroad car only to the brink of middle-age; most of the sleepers on Amtrak, like the rest of the equipment, are considerably older than 20, and convey another era’s idea of ingenuity and elegance. Sinks that fold out of the wall and drain as they fold back up, toilets that conceal themselves as footrests, the “ice-water” tap in its own tiny compartment, the shoe locker in which you put your shoes overnight in the vain hope that the porter will shine them—such are the pleasures of a roomette, which is something like a hotel room of the 30s or 40s compressed into the smallest possible area. The bed that folds out of the wall occupies the entire compartment, leaving just enough room to enable you to get it down without ending up under it. Still, it is long enough, and to me amazingly comfortable. The motion of the train, like that of a boat, seems to guarantee sound sleep.

Certainly to be able to stretch out on a train is a great comfort, as anyone who has spent the night in a coach seat will tell you; still, the coach is quite endurable, since the seats are very large (at least twice as big as the average airplane seat), they recline, and most of them possess some kind of footrest. The sleeper is also an expensive privilege, and not an entirely unmixed blessing; the privacy of a roomette, delightful at night, can become boring by day. But then there is always the club car and the diner.

Which brings up the dining car waiter, the barman, the porter— the whole train crew. The image of the railroad porter in most people’s minds, I would bet, is a Hollywood image—a middle-aged, gray-haired black man, hidden behind an impenetrable mask of “yes, sir” and “no, sir.” Whether this was ever true except in movies I can’t say; it isn’t true today. Most, but not all, of the train crew is black; many of the porters, waiters, etc., are young, and for the first time, some of them are women. And yet, like the trains themselves, the essential nature of train crews seems impervious to change, though that essence remains very difficult to describe.

In a restaurant at the Palmer House in Chicago, I was once served by a waiter who I intuitively felt must have been a dining-car waiter; when I asked him, he said he’d been on the railroad for twenty years. The identifiable quality must have been his brusque suddenness, a quality which appears to be arrogance but is not, being compounded of skill, a certain style, and an almost complete indifference to whether the diner appreciates it or not. The airline traveller, accustomed to the programmed advances of stewardesses may find himself nonplussed by the porters and waiters of a passenger train. Stewardesses are a form of entertainment; their main job is to try to relieve intense boredom in a crowded and immobile population; but the porters and waiters on a train are servants.

Their job is made more difficult by the fact that we Americans don’t seem to have much ideal of how to deal with servants, We have an unconscious notion that the job of providing personal service to another is somehow demeaning; we treat waitresses and stewardesses, in particular, in ways that show we think this. The members of a train crew, aware that they are performing an essential task under peculiarly trying conditions, can become very disgruntled in the face of the American public; nevertheless, many of the men and women who work on passenger trains have a love of railroading which comes out even in short conversations.

From San Diego, three of Amtrak’s long-distance trains—real trains, unlike the connecting run to L.A.—are easily accessible: the Coast Starlight (to Seattle), the Southwest Limited (to Chicago), and the Sunset Limited (to New Orleans). The first two leave L.A. every day, the last leaves three times a week; all are generally close to full.

The Southwest Limited—formerly the Super Chief and El Capitan—is probably the finest of the three, for its beautiful route through northern Arizona and New Mexico, its well-maintained equipment, and its smooth, first-rate Santa Fe tracks. The Sunset traverses far less interesting terrain, unless you’re a desert freak, but is otherwise very similar, and has a distinctly superior dining car. The Coast Starlight’s route is also gorgeous most of the way from Santa Barbara to the Bay Area, skirting miles of nearly deserted coastline just a few hundred yards from the water. This train also sports an excellent diner and club car, on which I have met some very interesting people, and for a vacation of more than a weekend in San Francisco, should not be missed.

A few words of advice on taking the train:

1. Make a reservation reasonably well in advance if you want to travel the long-distance runs.
2. Tip—neither grudgingly nor extravagantly. It’s part of the relationship—the usual for the waiter or barman, something for the porter when he or she takes your bag off at your stop.
3. If you are going to spend more than one night on the train, and you can afford it, get a sleeper.
4. Don’t order the most expensive item on the dining-car menu, whatever it is—particularly steak. The medium-priced staple item is usually the most reliable. If you have doubts about the diner you’re in, order fish. I don’t know why, but the Amtrak cooks don’t seem to make serious mistakes with seafood. (And remember that they have their problems, too—they’re cooking on wood stoves behind those stainless steel walls.)

And finally an anecdote. This past summer I returned to San Diego from the midwest by taking the Panama Limited to New Orleans to catch the Sunset Limited. The Panama (definitely a train to avoid) was two hours late, and as a result 1 had the frustration of watching the Sunset depart on an adjacent track as we crawled toward the station. Things did not look bright for the rest of my trip, particularly since the Sunset runs only three times a week. But the station personnel at New Orleans instantly provided me with an airline ticket to Houston (and free transportation to and from the two airports) so that I could catch up with the train that bad service had caused me to miss. I was not only relieved but surprised, as this would never have happened in the waning days of passenger service, on the private railroads. And once I was on the plane itself, crossing western Louisiana at 22,000 feet, cramped, bored, and with no one talk to but the stuffed bear strapped into the seat next to me, I realized that this flight was not just a restitution of what I was owed, but a subtle stroke of public relations. I couldn’t wait to get back on a train.