Stories from the road: the train experience
Thursday was my first day off: a travel day. A short cab ride and I was in Boston’s historic south station. To my delight, they even had a bookstore in the center of the main concourse.
The train is a better experience than air travel, hands down. The stations are often beautiful old buildings with dramatic large spaces and high ceilings. Getting on and off doesn’t require snaking security lines and obsessive ID and boarding pass checks. Wandering around South station I kept looking up, entertained by the sheer size of the waiting area. They just don’t build buildings like that anymore. Unlike airports, you get a sense that you’re really somewhere, even while you’re waiting to go somewhere else.
On the trains themselves there’s more room, power access and a dining car (the food ain’t great, but you’re choices are better than airplane’s standard chicken or pasta). And unlike air-travel where there’s a rush hour panic vibe and people’s smelly elbows in your face, the train is downright civilized. Plenty of space. Wide seats. Quiet cars. I suspect the 8am train would have been crazier than my 11:15, but I had a most enjoyable ride.
Perhaps I have train envy. In Seattle, where I live, it doesn’t seem we’ll ever have train service of any kind. The history of mass transit here is a tragic tale than spans decades and is simply too sad to get into here. It’s a classic tale of bad project management.
3 hours later I arrived at Penn Station and had my ritualistic thrill of walking up to the chaos of the midtown NYC streets. That energy rush always gets a rise out of me: it’s the lovable insanity of home.
I, too, am a huge train fan. It’s a much more “civilized” way to travel than by air. Unfortunately train travel has played a poor cousin to air travel in this country, and it can be hard to justify taking the train: its certainly not faster, its often not cheaper.
Train travel could be hands-down better. The absolute best train ride of my life was a trip on Great Northern Rail from London to York. I spent most of the trip in the restaurant car eating a great meal. On AmTrack you’re lucky to get a bag of limp potato chips.
You hit on all the reasons why I love business travel in Europe, trains go everywhere and the buildings are big and old. I agree, I wish we had this type of transit in the NW; Portland and Seattle for some reason just don’t get it.
~Kris
I think we’re too late in Seattle: once a city is developed it’s hard to retrofit mass transit of any kind. Watching the arguments about the monorail is just sad: there’s not much in the way of history or reference points to how other cities have done it (Portland, Boston, Denver): just noise and criticism.
But about Europe: I agree with you guys. Some of my best memories of trips to Europe involve time on trains.