On Trains
An Exploration of On-the-Tracks Explorations
Here’s the thing about trains: they represent adventure, mystery, exploration. They’re romantic and full of possibility. And yet there is zero ambiguity about where your train will go. Down to the millimeter, the train you embark on will follow an exact, predetermined path and arrive at your destination at a mostly-exact time. Your only chance of getting lost would be boarding the wrong train entirely.
It’s this paradox that makes trains so compelling. Despite the predictability of the destination, so much adventure and mystique still lies behind those sliding doors, down those wooden or metal (or sometimes magnetic, hovering) tracks.
I remember reading Atlas Shrugged when I was 19. The book was so romantic and inspiring to me then – a powerful woman protagonist running a huge railroad company, who works hard, discovers a sexy metal guy (the material, not the music genre), and retreats to a creative utopia. The trains in the background of that story felt alluring and badass. I later learned more about the messages behind that book, and the obnoxious stench of libertarianism that so many tech bros identified with, and have an entirely different feeling about Ayn Rand’s masterpiece now. But the trains… ❤️
The first train ride I remember was when I was four: the train that took my mother. That sounds completely dramatic and traumatic, and for me then, it was. But don’t worry – mom is fine.
We were on a train that drove onto a ferry to cross from Denmark to Germany, which I’ve now learned was called the “bird flight line,” even though there was nothing airborne about it. You could get off the train and walk around the ferry, which we did. But my mother enjoyed that excursion a bit too much. She was running towards the train doors, then trying to pry them open, as my father and I stood on the inside, helplessly begging the train conductor to let her in while the voice overhead repeated (probably in Danish), “Doors are closing.” They couldn’t save her – it was too late. My mother was on the other side, and I cried like a young Johnny Cash as the train took my baby (mother) away.
Mom had to ride back, wait for the next train, and meet us at our destination. Other than the fact that I can still picture her face on the other side of that glass door to this day, everyone turned out totally fine.*
I once read something about how we use the most complex technology we can fathom to describe the human brain. These days, brains are compared to computer algorithms; but before that, they were compared to steam engines. The way steam would move a piston back and forth as heat expanded and contracted – at the time, we couldn’t imagine much more advanced technology than that, so naturally it must be how our minds are able to process such complex decisions and operations, how the build-up of feelings and ideas result in big emotions.
Most of the trains I’ve ridden in my life were very intentional decisions that I made with my steam engine of a brain. “A train would be a romantic way to travel across Europe.” “We can get through the border faster if we take a train up to the Vancouver Olympics.” “It will be easiest to get from Pennsylvania to New York by train while I’m on my book tour.”
But my most memorable train trip was more of a thing that happened, rather than a decision that I made.
I was staying at my grandparents’ house in Swampscott, Massachusetts in September 2001. The plan was to visit with them for a few days, so that Grammy could make me tuna sandwiches (“you’re too skinny, Rebekah!”) and Grampa could sing me snippets of opera songs, before flying from Boston to New York to visit my friend Megan on the 12th.
I woke up the day before my NYC trip, September 11th, to my grandparents watching the first twin tower being hit. Then we watched the second one. Sitting in their musty olive-green den, watching it unfold with them, was terrifying and surreal. I called my parents, and my mom told me where she stashed a bottle of vodka in the back of their freezer, which helped take the edge off a tiny bit – but of course not enough.
The days passed as I waited for flights to resume so that I could go home to Seattle (obviously my New York plans were off the table, as that city heroically navigated tragedy). I was getting more and more anxious and sad over events, and Grammy tried to calm me down by telling me I was being too dramatic – which of course didn’t help. When I heard that Amtrak was honoring airline tickets, I took the MBTA to downtown Boston to claim a train voucher. I was finally heading home.
Everyone on that train was in shock. Most had, like me, not planned to be taking a 3-day cross country train ride at that point in their lives, and all were reeling in their own ways from the horrific violence that our country had experienced. The first several hours of the trip were quiet, as we all sat in the non-reclining seats we’d spend 75 hours in. Then came the unifying words: “Bar car is open.”
In the bar car, my co-travelers and I drank whisky out of 1.7-oz bottles. There was an older, larger Black woman sitting by herself in the corner of the car, and she started singing what sounded like gospel songs (unfamiliar to this Jewish-raised girl) in the most deep and enchanting voice. Everyone paused to listen, and a few tried to sing along with her. I remember the feeling that I was living through something completely unique and powerful, but feeling stuck in my scared, tired, wanting-to-be home skin at the same time. This moment, like the one where my mother was stuck on the other side of a train door, is one of the visuals that I can still conjure vividly, without photographs or other people’s stories to remind me.
The next day, as we rolled through the flat, endless landscape, I walked through the train cars, looking for new views of a part of the country I had never traveled by land. A train conductor saw me and asked if I needed help with anything. When I told him that I was just looking for good views, he said, “I can show you the best view.”
As the conductor opened the cab of the train, the engineer almost had a heart attack. Obviously, after three planes had been hijacked that week, it makes sense that he might have been on guard for intruders. But once he recovered, that old engineer (I wish I remembered his name) was one of the coolest people I’ve met. He invited me to sit up in the cab with him for hours, and taught me how to “drive” the train. Spoiler: you don’t really drive a train. But he showed me how to adjust the throttle, and the patterns to ring the bell as we approached crossings – two long, one short, one long.
My train engineer friend had been driving trains for 30 years. And in that time, he had killed 12 people – a stat I asked him, and was shocked at the double-digit response. It turns out, if someone has decided to be run over by a train, there is literally nothing a train engineer can do about that. By the time they see the person, it’s too late to stop. Damn!
I’m glad the kind of engineering I went into doesn’t have a high likelihood of involuntary killing. Although it took years for my mother to stop saying “choo choo” when I told her I wanted to be an engineer.
At night, we mostly slept sitting up. A few people decided to lie down in the aisles – the indignity and dirt being a more appealing option than crunched vertebrae. There was a guy sitting next to me, whose name I don’t remember. He was wearing a white t-shirt (that became increasingly off-white as the trip progressed), was about my age, and seemed nice. We ended up holding hands the entire last night on that train – an act that sounds so intimate, but I think it was just strangers grasping onto each other in a moment of being unmoored. I never encountered him again after that trip, and wasn’t disappointed by that. The entire cast of the train ride was meant to be contained to that moment.
I still dream of trains. Literally – I recently had a dream of traveling across the country in a sleeper car (how luxurious!) and woke up to research where I could do that. The reviews were mediocre, but I’m still intrigued. As I write this, a train just sounded its way across an old steel bridge down the river from my campsite, and I smiled at the serendipity.
When most adventurous decisions could land you anywhere, the fixed-destination adventures of a train offer both comfort and excitement. Where you go is your decision, but what you experience along the way is anybody’s guess. All aboard.
*Author’s note: after showing this draft to my parents, I was informed that it was actually my dad and I on the outside of the train, and my mom who had boarded without us… apparently she told us to wait for her outside and then forgot that and left us behind. But I’ll keep this memory as-is since it’s still the way I remember the event, just like the other memories in this piece.