Crowded coast to Crescent City - train trip from New York, New York, to New Orleans, Louisiana - America by Rail

Sierra, May-June, 1995 by William Poole

There comes a time near the beginning of any journey when you know you are on your way. It may come as the jet hurtles off the runway, or when you slip from city traffic onto the interstate. If you are traveling by train, it may come--as it recently did for me--when the conductor demands "tickets, please, tickets," and you give him a pile of them and he tears off the top one and hands them back with an appreciative "Well, you're going to do some traveling, I guess."

Yes, I was going to do some traveling. Four trains, twenty-five states, six days, four nights, five thousand miles through four time zones. From Boston down the coastal underbelly of New England, through the eastern urbanopolis and the Deep South to New Orleans; then an overnight dash to Chicago, a lope across the prairies, the plains, two mountain ranges, and a desert to my San Francisco home. Too brief a journey to court the heart of America (and who knows if the nation has a single heart or spiritual center these days?) but a chance to trace my fingers across her splendid, if intermittently sullied, face.

I wanted to stretch out, leave the driving to the engineer and watch the country go by--to get off the land-gobbling highways and out of my fuel--guzzling vehicle for a while (trains use about half as much energy per passenger as either airplanes or automobiles). Ah, train travel, I thought: not only relaxing, but environmentally virtuous, too.

"Providence. Providence, Rhode Island. Providence next stop," the conductor called. Native country for me, a Massachusetts boy from Rhode Island stock, traveling on the November edge of fall. We dashed through russet marshes thick with bursting cattails, and scrubby forests of maple, birch, and pine. Meeting the water at Long Island Sound, we slid past embayments of feathery pampas grass and orderly little towns overseen by white church steeples, with houses perched on stilts by the water's edge. Night herons hunched to their breakfast in trackside mudflats. Here and there, a blazing sumac clung stubbornly to the season, its leaves whirligigging in the wind. "New Haven, New Haven next."

At New York City, I boarded a sleeping car on Amtrak's Crescent and handed a new conductor the next ticket from my stack. This daily train is named for New Orleans, the "Crescent City," its final destination. An official route guide had been left on my seat, and I traced our progress as we rolled south through the industrial lesions of northern New Jersey and into a landscape dominated by big rivers and big cities. We soared above the Schuylkill, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and rumbled through Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore--past thriving business districts and bustling city centers, past gold-domed statehouses, white-columned museums, richly landscaped parks, all surveyed from an elevated track. But we also crept through the blighted butt-ends of these towns, mile after hopeless mile of decrepit housing and the burned-out shells of vanished industries.

"Too bad this train runs through Virginia and the Carolinas at night," said Mike, the sleeping-car attendant, on learning that I was less interested in where I was going than in what I would see along the way. We were out of Washington by now, the Capitol dome and federal office maze fading to a twinkle in the dusk. A Virginian himself, Mike was biased on the question of southern landscapes, but otherwise seemed a trustworthy source. He was worried about Amtrak's federal funding, decreased over the last two years. "Trains are so much fun," he said. "Sure they're slower than planes, but so what, they're so relaxing. You go to Europe, they've got trains that run 200 miles an hour. With all our technology, why can't we do that here?"

I was glad enough to see the Carolinas by night. From the darkened sleeper compartment my focus shifted from landscape to humanscape, to illuminated snapshots along the tracks. A child at a lighted window. A tired-looking man in a battered pickup washed by the pulsating glow of a railway crossing-light. Lovers caught arm in arm in a tavern doorway. Images only, mine to complete, wondering what had happened before and what would happen next and what it might be like to be those Americans five days before election day, 1994. At Charlottesville, a stadium was ablaze with lights for a high-school football game. At Greensboro, a few cars crawled through prosperous neighborhoods at one o'clock in the morning.

At breakfast in the dining car I was seated with Rod, a retiree from California, whose stack of Amtrak tickets rivaled my own. He had come east to Chicago on the Southwest Chief and then to Washington, D.C., on the Cardinal. Along portions of their routes, each train carried a guide to interpret the landscape: a Navajo aboard the Chief across Arizona and New Mexico, and an amateur historian through the Shenandoah Valley along the Cardinal's route. Here was Amtrak playing to its strengths, I suggested. Even the fastest long-distance train will never outrun an airplane, but try pointing out historic buildings from 30,000 feet.