The Bloodstained Rise

National Review, Nov 10, 2003 by Andrew Stuttaford

These commuter trains are, of course, little more than glorified subways. This is especially true on the L.I.R.R., which does not go anywhere. The lines north and west out of New York City were genuine railroads going to distant cities -- Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore. Their commuter function was grafted on to a history of real locomotives hauling real people to real places. The L.I.R.R. never went anywhere, and there is something slightly bogus about its staff of uniformed conductors, its printed timetables, its high-flown announcements about "station stops" and "brake tests." Hey: If you're a real train, give us a buffet car. Otherwise, why don't you just integrate with the city subway system?

Even those better-appointed commuter lines going north and west are still not trains in the full sense. A real train has compartments and corridors. My English childhood was full of these wonderful conveyances. With very little difficulty I can still summon up the warm, dusty smell of the seat fabric, the little framed pictures of seaside resorts or mountainscapes that decorated the compartments, the fold-up tables you could race toy cars on, the strenuous finger- crushing maneuver with a leather strap that you had to execute in order to open a window, the drafty, ill-lit shabbiness of a waiting-room all fugged up with cigarette smoke . . . Robert Louis Stevenson's book A Child's Garden of Verses was a great favorite in my family, and we all knew the clattering trochees of "From a Railway Carriage":

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches . . .

My own children were denied these pleasures until we all went off to spend a summer in China two years ago. Then they savored the luxurious delights of "soft sleeper" class (two bunks on each side of a closed compartment) and the gymnastic adventure of "hard sleeper" (three bunks on each side of a compartment open to a common corridor). These experiences were, to judge from the children's subsequent reminiscences, far more thrilling to them than the Great Wall or the Summer Palace. They are spoiled for the Long Island Rail Road now, though. A weekend trip into Manhattan used to be a treat to look forward to. Now, they can't be bothered.

On this particular evening the ride into the city is uneventful, but I mistime the end of my date horribly, and end up with 45 minutes to kill in Penn Station. It is a miserable place, the one bookstore closed at this time of night, the magazine outlets patrolled by vigilant Pakistanis who stand behind you making dramatic throat-clearing noises if you browse a magazine for more than ten seconds. I slink off at last to the waiting room, just behind a noisy swarm of sports fans from some event at Madison Square Garden. By the time I get in there, all the seats are taken. At 11:30 p.m. on a weekday, I cannot sit down in Penn Station!

Glumly, a little tipsy, I stand there waiting for my train. My mind wanders. I recall a trip I made to Alabama just ten days ago. I had a rented car and drove all round the state for a week. Major sporting events aside, I was never once held up in bad traffic. When people ask me for my impressions of Alabama, the first thing that comes to mind is: "Wonderful roads!" I don't know anything about the trains in Alabama, but with roads like that, who needs trains? Someone remind me, please: Why do I live anywhere near New York City?