Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  Karen was my queen.

  ‘I’m a train evangelist,’ she went on, finishing Jem’s crisps. ‘For me the journey is my destination. On my fiftieth birthday I vowed never to fly again and I’ve stayed overland since. My family were railroaders, my grandfather came from Ireland to work on the trains and my dad was a civil engineer who got me a job on board. Railways were unionised from the very beginning, so it was a secure job, a well-paid job, and it was pretty prestigious. Canadian National and Canadian Pacific now only do freight trains and VIA Rail came about to handle passenger trains. You’ve done good getting on this train while you still can.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This route is severely under threat. No Canadian will take it because it only goes every two or three days, and you can’t make plans around such irregular services. I only see young people like yourselves who save up and want to travel, or the sixty-somethings who are retired. Trains are just too expensive for most Canadians who would love to visit the Rockies and national parks.’

  ‘I figured it was a special train as it features on the ten-dollar note,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it was a special train, all right. Local fishermen used to provide the train with fish for dinner. The dining car was really lovely, and had tea in silver teapots and toast in silver racks with the crust cut off. And technically, if a hunter or a traveller steps out of the forest and raises an arm to flag down this train, it has to stop.’

  ‘What? Even now?’

  ‘Yeah, really. It has to stop for these sporadic towns. It can get delayed though. Freight trains always take priority over passenger trains as they cost more and the loss is greater if they’re late. Anyway, you don’t want to be talking to an old person like me, you kids probably have better things to do.’

  ‘Why don’t you join us for dinner?’

  ‘You’re probably down for a different sitting.’

  ‘That’s okay, we can ask to change it.’

  ‘Then sure, that sounds wonderful.’

  Karen arrived at dinner clutching a bottle of Canada merlot with a moose on the label. She’d changed into a black long-sleeved top and hooked in earrings. She also had on a pair of bright red glasses. Over smoky veal chops, Karen revealed herself to be an encyclopaedia of Canada’s railways. ‘You know, they had to build a railway to build this country,’ she said. ‘Each province has two cities, one on the CP line and one on the CN line. And then everything meets at Vancouver. But here’s a stat for you, for every mile of track in Canada there’s a dead Chinese person. They were all brought over to build the railways and then whoever was left was sent back afterwards. They weren’t even allowed to have their families over here.’

  Tracy had told me the same thing when the Skeena had passed Deadman’s Island, describing how Chinese and First Nations workers had been killed in rock explosions, their bodies buried on a little island in the middle of the lakes. ‘First Nations’ was the term commonly used to describe a number of indigenous people of the Americas, rather than ‘Indian’ or ‘aboriginal’ – insinuating their primary position as stakeholders to the land. Unfortunately, that was as far as their power went, and I’d read a number of magazines stuffed into seat pockets that pinpointed Karen’s hometown of Winnipeg – better known as Murderpeg – as the hub of racially driven poverty. The illusion that every Canadian was a saint was fading fast.

  ‘First Nations?’ Karen asked, carefully trimming the fat from her veal, ‘they’re impoverished. It’s so sad. They had their homes decimated. They’ve been driven off their land where they lived off farming and fishing and forced into the city where they can’t do either and they’ve become the urban poor. Traditionally they hunted and fished but the construction of hydroelectric projects and facilities have ruined the reserves and they’re now being forced into the sex trade. Back in the nineteenth century, they were taken from their parents and put into residential schools. They were forced not to speak their native languages, and the Catholic Churches sexually abused them.’

  ‘To get rid of their Indianness?’

  ‘Exactly. Now there are court cases calling it cultural genocide.’

  Karen swirled the end of the bottle and poured it into my glass. It turned out that we were all booked onto the same train from Toronto to New York, a city I had visited but Jem had never seen.

  ‘What’s New York like?’ he asked her. The train chose that moment to jolt, sending my wine onto its side, which was just cause to order another bottle.

  ‘You know, as Canadians we’ve always had this inferiority complex that we’re sleeping next to the big giant who does everything better than us, and so we’ve adopted their food, and their TV … and really all that they’re good at creating is … shit. I’ve been to New York, and I just love that city, I really do. I walk around and think: “What’s this doing here? It should be ours!” I haven’t been to the Deep South. It doesn’t frighten me, it … sickens … is not the right word. But it just … shouldn’t be. I went to DC and I loved it. But I like to guard my prejudices in case they become real.’

  ‘Speaking of prejudices, we got the feeling that a few people on the train were a little, let’s say, peeved, that we’re two young people among a bunch of wealthy retired people, travelling on this fancy train,’ I said, a wine headache coming to settle between my eyes.

  Karen broke into a huge smile. ‘Of course you did. And they are. You know, my mom died a really unhappy person. She didn’t get on with my dad too well, and she said: “When he dies, I’ll be able to live my real life.” And then she died. You should live your life with no regrets. I tell ya, I have friends now and they’re acting old. I called up a friend last week and said: “You want to go to the theatre tomorrow night?” And she said: “What’s the parking like around there? I hear it’s difficult to park.” ’ Karen swirled her wine, raising her glass and her voice. ‘I mean, you’re not going to the theatre because you’re worried about parking? This happens to people. Your thinking starts to age.’ She looked from me to Jem and back again. ‘So, go out. Travel. I tell my three daughters to travel. Not to worry about work. We may not have a house in Florida and Texas and LA, where our neighbours come round for cocktails at five o’clock, but my girls are happy, and healthy, and my husband travels with me and we live happily. You have to live with no regrets. That’s all.’

  7

  Hail to the Southwest Chief

  ‘Amtrak? It’s full of jakeys who’ve had their licences taken away from them or people too fucked up to fly.’

  This, from a Scottish friend who lived in Chicago, was not what I’d expected to hear. Americans are so patriotic about their country that I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t want to ride their railways just for the hell of it, when the list of train names read like a power list of Native American legends: Southwest Chief, Texas Eagle, and Silver Star to name a few. Nonetheless, jakeys and fuck-ups would at least provide more entertainment than a string of resentful retirees. With the exception of the Northeast Corridor, which runs diagonally from Washington DC to Boston – via Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York – few Americans used their railways, and more than half of Amtrak’s total annual ticket revenue was generated along this single route.

  After we’d finished dinner with Karen, I’d spent our final night on board The Canadian inhaling dead skunk and examining the long-distance services, trying to work out how we could test them all. For just under $700 Amtrak offered a thirty-day rail pass, which in theory should have been enough time for at least ten overnight journeys and a handful of day trips, but the company was crafty enough to limit this pass to twelve segments only, so hopping on and off long-distance trains in order to roam around obscure towns would have cut into our allowance. And not every train ran daily, which was fine if we could guarantee ourselves a good time exploring a town of 800 residents, two bars and a Wendy’s, otherwise it would leave us mooching around small-town America for forty-eight hours at a time, hoping not to get shot. Several years earlier I ha
d, on the spur of the moment, taken the Coast Starlight from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a friend’s Halloween party, and spent eleven hours reclining in the sunshine, sharing microwaved hotdogs with a hot guitarist from Pasadena, and watching the ocean crash on the cliffs below. For that reason, we decided to leave out what was one of the most popular trains, and plotted a route that would take us from New York to DC, then through the Deep South to Louisiana, before swinging all the way up to Los Angeles. From there we’d slice right up through the country to Chicago, then travel across the top to Seattle and step across the border back to Vancouver.

  With just one day and one night in Toronto, we skipped the tourist sights and spent the best part of seven hours in 416 Snack Bar, downing a succession of whisky sours with an old friend, which was the surest way to come away in awe of a city – largely because we couldn’t remember very much. What was certain: at some point in the evening everything became hilarious; the Chinese takeout was the best I’d ever eaten; the futon was the best I’d ever passed out on; Jem and I both woke convinced that Toronto was an incredible city and that we wanted to live there, sad that we had an 8 a.m. departure. Unsurprisingly, we found ourselves hungover in the Great Hall of Toronto Union station, silenced by its Beaux Arts beauty. At each end, two four-storey-high arched windows filtered the morning light, throwing celestial blue beams onto the herringbone marble floors. A chill took hold in the shadow of the limestone pillars, behind which I half expected to see Dick Tracy lookalikes spying on curly-haired blondes carrying hatboxes. While digital displays, solar-panelled stations and brand-new bullet trains had revolutionised railway travel, echoes of its classic charm lived on in stations like these, monuments to not just a form of transport, but a lifestyle.

  Boarding the double-decker Maple Leaf, we found seats on the right side of the train from where I could catch a glimpse of Niagara Falls as we crossed the border into America. Prepped for its twelve-hour journey, the train was scrubbed with bleach and spritzed with carpet freshener, neither of which did much to suppress the undertones of old Coors Light. Its interiors looked much like an aeroplane, with forward-facing, huge reclining seats. Few passengers boarded and we pulled out of Toronto Union on time. For the first hour, the train sailed past suburbia, and drab tangles of highway, before pelting through wine country, miles of vineyards flanking the tracks. On the approach to the Niagara River, patches of spray were lit by rainbows, but little else was visible beyond the rough and tumble of rapids. After a two-hour stop for customs and immigration, the train curved through Buffalo, Syracuse and Schenectady, around lakes and tall grass, before making the final stretch along the Hudson River. And with the greatest of anticlimaxes we arrived in New York. Hoping for a full moon dancing Sinatra-style across the skyline, we sat tight as the train tunnelled deep underground, dumping us in the dungeon that was New York’s Penn Station.

  For a twelve-hour journey, my recollections of the scenery were unusually minimal, obscured by the overriding memory of Jem eating a six-year-old girl’s lunch. After ‘de-training’ at immigration, we realised that the previous night’s whisky had soured our brains so much that we had forgotten to pack any food for the trip, save for a bag of stale Maltesers in my fleece pocket. There was a dining car on board serving salads and cold sandwiches, but the card machines weren’t working and we had no cash. Neither of us was hungry at that moment, but the realisation that we couldn’t have food even if we wanted to made us ravenous on the spot. The issue wasn’t helped by the smell of homemade fried chicken carrying over from the seats behind, where a mother with two children was unpacking a picnic that would have put Enid Blyton to shame: crisp golden chicken wrapped in foil, biscuits, gravy in Tupperware, corn on the cob, tomato salad, slabs of devil’s food cake, and a bottle of Mountain Dew. As we peered through the gap between the seats, the little girl fixed us with a pair of round, shining eyes, before breaking into a smile. It was a wise and knowing smile, the kind that six-year-olds use to disarm stupid adults. Without taking her eyes off us, she tugged her mother’s sleeve, wielding a chicken leg like a club.

  ‘Mommy, that man wants some chicken,’ she grinned.

  Flushed with horror, I whipped round in my seat.

  ‘She’s right,’ Jem whispered. ‘That looks so delicious.’

  ‘You can have some if you would like some,’ said the lady, with a wheezy laugh.

  ‘Oh, no, don’t worry,’ I said, kneeling up on my seat to apologise. ‘Thank you for offering, but we’ve eaten already.’ I don’t know why I lied, I would have killed for a thigh dipped in gravy.

  ‘Well, that’s not what his face says,’ said the mother, pointing and laughing at Jem who was now kneeling up on his chair. This was too much for the little girl, who was now brandishing her chicken leg with glee and waving it as though taunting a puppy. Filled with shame, I noticed that most of the passengers around us were now watching the scene unfold with interest.

  ‘It’s fine, we got a lot of food. When you travelling with two kids, you bring enough food for ten.’  The lady pulled out a paper plate and handed it to Jem, who gave me a look that hovered somewhere between an apology and absolute disregard.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said, giving in and hoping he’d offer me a bite.

  On Indian trains, sharing food with fellow passengers is as normal as reading a book or taking a nap, but for some reason I felt prudish and proper, even though this lovely lady was more than happy to share her children’s food with us. Although ‘sharing’ was the wrong word. ‘Sharing’ implied a two-way transaction. In this instance, we were just taking their food with nothing more than a bag of now-melting stale Maltesers to offer in return. Refusing it would now be more rude than accepting it, so Jem tucked in, as the lady fished out a plastic spoon for the gravy. Later that afternoon the card machine in the dining car was up and running, and we were able to buy a couple of rubbery bacon sandwiches that saw us through to New York.

  *

  Robert De Niro was sitting on the sofa wearing a baseball cap. It didn’t come as a huge surprise considering he owned the hotel in which we were staying, but we had no reason to think that A-list hotel owners would actually choose to spend Friday night drinking in their own bars. No one booked lunch at Planet Hollywood expecting to find Sly and Arnie sharing a milkshake. My first thought when I saw him was of the Bananarama song, and I wondered out loud if he was waiting or talking Italian – a reference that was wasted on Jem who wasn’t born when the song was released, and had no idea what I was talking about. Jem’s reaction was plain, unbridled excitement. If you kept your eyes peeled in Manhattan it wasn’t unusual to spot familiar faces beneath their sunglasses and hats, trying to avoid the common man, but often disguised with such comical fervour that they may as well have carried picket signs announcing their celebrity. Just that morning we had seen Jennifer Connelly and her youngest son crossing the road in Tribeca, and now Travis Bickle himself was sitting a few metres away. Given that it was his first time in the city, Jem was granted free rein to savour all the tourist trappings, and I’d spent the day rolling my eyes through Times Square while he craned his neck out of cab windows, and ate hot dogs and pretzels from a cart outside MoMA. Now, he wanted to go over to De Niro and say hello. Sensing that what was about to take place would be best observed from afar, I hovered in the doorway and watched with the same trepidation I felt when David Attenborough narrated the final moments of a young gazelle straying towards a cheetah. Deep in conversation with a man who must have been the general manager, De Niro curled a lip at the sight of Jem approaching, and put up a hand like a stop sign.

  ‘Hey man, I’m off duty!’ he snapped, as Jem performed the human equivalent of a handbrake turn and scuttled away.

  Ego bruised, he pouted through dinner as I reminded him that De Niro hadn’t done a decent film in at least ten years and was probably a very unhappy person, which thankfully, he bought. De Niro was still sitting in the bar when we came through after dinner, so Jem took a wide arc aro
und him, as though avoiding a sleeping Rottweiler, and slipped into the corridor, glancing over his shoulder just in case.

  In the US, taking home a doggy bag is normal, and has none of the stigma that repressed English people feel about asking to pack food that they’ve paid for. However, we were now faced with a minor quandary: unable to finish an entire roast chicken, we had now acquired several containers of meat and vegetables and had no space to keep it in our fridge, which was already stacked with bottles of Fiji water, chocolates and bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale – an unexpected choice of beverage for a De Niro hotel.

  ‘Why don’t we just give it to a homeless person?’ Jem suggested.

  At any given time, there were at least two or three homeless people on every block in New York, sleeping under boxes or foraging in bins, yet for the first time in many trips to the city, it was impossible to find anyone. As Jem and I strolled, bag in hand, down Hudson Street, past the roar of bars and restaurants thronging with aggressive, pretty people, and sexy shirtless joggers pounding the pavements at midnight, I looked at Jem in a new light: few people would voluntarily spend their one night in New York trawling the streets of Lower Manhattan looking for homeless people to feed. Spotting a subway station, we crossed the road and descended the steps to where the floor was lined with tarpaulin mattresses, plastic-bag pillows and cardboard duvets. To these residents, stations and trains weren’t simply portals and a way to get to work; they offered warmth, safety and community. For most of the people down here, tonight this station was home. A tall man with unlaced boots was walking in our direction carrying a torn blanket, so I handed him the bag, suddenly unsure if he would be offended, but he took it and nodded his thanks as we cast one last look around at the unfairness of it all, and returned upstairs to where the rest of Manhattan was carrying on with its night.