The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  Barack Obama, during his 2011 State of the Union address, promised to lead America into a green industrial economy, and he committed his administration to a vision of giving “eighty percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within twenty-five years.” In 2009, invoking our history—Lincoln starting the transcontinental railroad while the Civil War raged, Eisenhower building the interstates during the Cold War—and challenging our national honor (“There’s no reason why we can’t do this: this is America”), the president made the argument that “building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper, and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system—and everybody stands to benefit.”

  Trains would help end our dependence on oil as well as our rapid transformation of the earth’s climate and allow us to recreate sustainable communities. Now we would have new trains, fast trains, magnetic-levitation trains that never touch the ground. Not just between nearby cities but across entire states and regions, eliminating the need for new airports and highways, replacing countless barrels of oil with electricity, or maybe using no traditional power source at all!

  Yet by the fall of 2013, plans for any new high-speed national rail system—plans even for seriously upgrading our existing rail system—had been delayed for the foreseeable future. How had this come to pass? We used to value trains, used to imbue them and their stations with all the grace, beauty, and efficiency we were capable of as a people and a democracy.

  To cross the continent by train in the fall of 2013, just as the organized right was about to shut down the national government, was an opportunity to trace our country’s entire fantastical boom-and-bust progress. It was also a chance to glimpse an American treasure that if squandered might never be regained.

  The Lake Shore Limited is not, strictly speaking, a limited train, since it makes 18 stops on its way to Chicago. The name is due mostly to Amtrak’s effort to evoke the great trains of the past, but it does follow the old water-level route around the Great Lakes, advertised as superior for sleeping because it does not climb and descend the mountain grades of the Alleghenies.

  Nonetheless, I’m awakened repeatedly by the banging of cars and the grinding and wrenching of metal wheels along the track. The Lake Shore Limited pulls into stations or onto sidings to let other trains pass, then sprints to make up the time—a constant slowing and accelerating that is characteristic of long-distance Amtrak trains and that makes sustained sleep difficult.

  At half past three in the morning we stop again, and I peer outside into the darkness. There is only a flat little box of a train station visible, and a small parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. A few figures hurry furtively to their cars. I watch as they drive out past a single, towering wind turbine, a tangle of utility wires, and a looming football arena with a sign proclaiming it FirstEnergy Stadium. Only by looking at the Lake Shore’s timetable can I tell that we are in Cleveland.

  “FirstEnergy” is appropriate enough. Cleveland was the hub of America’s first real energy boom, in the original oil fields of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. This is where John D. Rockefeller made his fortune, not so much because of any expertise he had in finding or refining oil but because of a deal he cut with the railroads whereby they agreed to charge all his competitors as much as double the rate while providing Rockefeller with a secret discount and kickbacks on his competitors’ shipments.

  The landscape before me today, a hundred years later, tells a different story of corporate hegemony. The old Cleveland station, where intercity trains stopped until 1977, was an outstanding example of Beaux Arts design constructed in the late 1920s by local brothers named Van Sweringen in imitation of New York’s Grand Central.

  The station is still gorgeous, but trains don’t run there anymore, save for a few local commuter lines. Amtrak couldn’t afford the rent, so instead it lets anyone who wants to go to Cleveland off where we are, at Lakefront Station. Lakefront is what foamers call an Amshack—a building that looks as if it might be a storage facility for the files of an accounting firm that went out of business sometime during the Ford administration.

  It used to be that private corporations could be relied on to build exquisite public spaces at their own expense, not just slap their names on a finished product. American train stations were once the most magnificent in the world. Even in the smallest towns, they tended to be little jewels of craftsmanship. In bigger cities, they were the first monumental modern buildings erected without reference to God or king, built by the people to move the people.

  Most of the leading American architects from the 1890s through the next 40 years tried their hand at a train station, or more than one—Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Charles Follen McKim, Henry Hobson Richardson, Stanford White. What they produced were predominantly Beaux Arts beauties but also pretty much the entire array of architecture practiced in this country up through the 1930s, including some astonishing amalgams of styles.

  Many of the great stations have been ingeniously repurposed and restored as commuter-train stops, shopping malls, museums, restaurants, even movie theaters, thanks to the foamers and the more enlightened city governments stuck with them once the old railroads died. Yet the removal of function from form is an essential societal disconnect. As Ed Breslin and Hugh Van Dusen write in the lavishly illustrated America’s Great Railroad Stations:

  Each station functioned as did the main gate on a medieval town: it was the welcoming portal to that community, and it was meant to impress, comfort, and reassure the visitor. Each station was a focal point of collective pride, a civic monument large or small. All embodied America’s love of, and genius for, commercial excellence. Whether built on the scale of a small chapel, a substantial church, or a monumental cathedral, all of these stations personified and reflected America’s secular spirituality fueled by the belief that life could endlessly be enhanced by aesthetic beauty, industrial might, technological know-how, and creature comforts while traveling in style with alacrity from one point on the compass to another.

  In Chicago’s Union Station, the Metropolitan Lounge is in chaos. The station is one of Daniel Burnham’s surviving gems, but for some reason its grand hall lies empty and still, while long-distance passengers and their luggage are jammed into a drab, undersized basement room. Only Amtrak could turn a luxury lounge into a refugee center. Most of the passengers struggle and sway hauling their baggage down to the train, then up the twisting stairs inside the double-decker cars.

  Gazing out the window in the dappled afternoon light a few minutes before we leave, I see luggage handlers piling bags atop an ancient, wood-bedded open wagon. I might have witnessed much this same scene, even this same equipment, at Lincoln’s first convention, back in 1860, the first in a long line of political conventions of all denominations—Democratic, Republican, Bull Moose, Socialist, Communist—held in Chicago, because it was the nation’s premier train hub.

  Over on the next platform are a couple of antique railcars, a charter doubtless ordered up by some of the wealthier foamers. There are entire associations of private-railroad-car owners and renters who still hook up their cars to Amtrak trains. This is a subtler threat to the future of Amtrak and passenger-rail service than are the budget-cutters in Congress—the danger that train travel will be seen as merely a hobbyist’s preoccupation. But it’s impossible to deny the beauty of the antique observation car I can see from my window: it’s another perfect artifact from the height of train design, full of padded leather armchairs and matching art deco side tables.

  In the 1930s, America was mad for design, especially when it came to machines. Devastated by the Depression, facing their first serious competition from airlines and automobiles, the major railroads completely overhauled their rolling stock. Many trains were converted from steam to cheaper diesel-electric power. All were put in wind tunnels, tested to see what could make them go faster, use less fuel, take turns more quickly and more safely. The most prominent
industrial designers in the country went to work on them. They streamlined trains, lowered their center of gravity, cut their weight, and increased their speeds. The designs alone made the trains seem fast. Amtrak’s observation cars today are built with no equivalent sense of artistry—or any artistry at all—but they are comfortable, maybe the most agreeable means of travel aside from ocean-liner staterooms. One sits up high in the double-decker, at a table or a long row of swivel chairs that run down each side. There are tables and drinks stands at each seat, and the windows provide an almost 360-degree vista as you move through the American countryside. There are no observation cars east of Chicago because of low-hanging wires, but in any case the double-deckers are best served by the West, where you are viscerally reminded of just how vast our country is, how abundant and majestic—where the words of all the old patriotic songs come true.

  Traveling through Wisconsin, we spend the rest of that day passing fields of perfect rows of cabbages, pumpkins, beans. By the following morning we are in North Dakota, and the landscape becomes sparser and more monotonous: miles of shallow marshes and fields of high green grass, occasional rows of old trees planted 80 years ago by the youth of the Civilian Conservation Corps to serve as windbreaks. But all of it is punctuated by breathtaking beauty. A pair of eagles swoop and glide low over a golden field of wheat near Williston. A white horse ambles and grazes its way alone through some marshland. A flock of small black birds rise and wheel suddenly through yellowed grassland. Black cattle stand out against a pasture, muzzles up, watching us pass.

  The company in the dining and observation cars is so amiable that I was dissuaded from asking people’s last names when they weren’t offered. The passengers talk quietly and freely with one another. A pair of children march in with their mother, pretending to be a parade. A young man with an enormous Afro sits alone reading. A group of blustery young white men come in, regaling one another with tales of getting arrested.

  At my table at lunch there is Kate, an English assistant headmistress, just retired. She tells me about how she taught in New Guinea with her husband for seven years, then raised four children by herself after being widowed very young. Now she is finally on holiday, having sent the last child off to university. Kate is fascinated by America’s sheer size, and also by its countless religions: “I think they’re related. When people want to, they simply go off and start another one.”

  The train makes her case for her. In a single afternoon moving through North Dakota, I have conversations with an Amish person and a Mennonite. There are plenty of each traveling on the Empire Builder. Alice, the Mennonite, is a pretty, birdlike woman who owns her own catering business in Canada. Apart from her old-fashioned dress and her hair bun she seems thoroughly modern, showing me a picture on her phone of her congregation’s little blue church.

  Felty Miller is a young construction worker, part of a large party of Amish bound from western Tennessee to a wedding in Washington State. He does not object to my interrupting his reading of a big illustrated Bible in the observation car. Like the other Amish men, he is dressed in a neat dark-blue shirt, pressed black pants, and a vest, and has light-brown, curling chin whiskers. He dandles Elias, his two-year-old towheaded son, over his knee as he patiently explains to me that, yes, he is used to the speed of the train, having ridden in trucks that the outside contractors the Amish work with drive. He speaks of how bad the economy still is—and offers the opinion that more money needs to be put into the national rail system.

  For all the pastoral beauty of the plains states, passenger trains are interlopers here amid the hidden industrial life of the country—hidden, at least, to those of us who live in more crowded places. In Wolf Point, Montana, we watch as a truck heaped with rolls of hay drives by on the cracked two-lane highway. We pass huge grain silos, some abandoned and open to the elements, most still in use, a few houses and barns huddled nearby. Interminable freight trains sweep past us.

  Some of the freight trains are made up of boxcars, some of the oil-tank cars now overwhelming our neglected infrastructure in a series of spectacular derailments and fires around the country. On one freight train alone, I counted 104 tank cars, fat and rounded as big black pigs. They slow to pass us, but still we rock in their wake like a small boat on a heavy sea.

  Freight is the main economic reason why trains—or any other form of mass transportation—exist. “A passenger train is like a male teat—neither useful nor ornamental,” groused James J. Hill, whose nickname, “the Empire Builder,” adorns our train, when he was running the Great Northern Railway through these parts more than a century ago.

  U.S. passenger trains may be, “quite simply, a global laughingstock,” as Time magazine put it a few years ago, but American freight trains “are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world,” according to The Economist, and they still have an estimated 43 percent share of the freight market in the United States—the highest proportion in any industrialized country, and nearly 10 times the total tonnage moved by freight trains in the entire European Union.

  Freight companies also own most of the rails in the United States, which is one reason why U.S. passenger trains lag so far behind high-speed systems in Europe and China, where trains rocket along at more than 150 miles per hour, much less Japan’s new Shinkansen bullet, which runs at 200 miles per hour. All these trains travel on dedicated tracks or in sunken, walled corridors, and so can be built light and fast.

  Amtrak trains, by contrast, must weigh about twice as much as the average European passenger train in order to have any chance of surviving a potential collision on the rails they share with the freights. Even the Acela—the result of Amtrak’s big 1990s effort to build a train that might average 150 miles per hour on the northeast corridor—is so bulky and plodding that the French and Canadian engineers working on it nicknamed it le cochon, “the pig.” The Acela never actually achieves that speed, save on a couple of very short stretches of track in New England. Overall, it manages just about 69 miles per hour—about the same as Amtrak’s regional trains, or the cars on the highways just outside its windows.

  At dinner the first night out from Chicago is Jason, returning to his job laying pipe in North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields. A trim, big-shouldered man who looks younger than his 40 years, Jason just celebrated his twentieth wedding anniversary in Michigan with his wife. The Bakken job pays well and he likes it, having worked in the past as a firefighter and a die maker for “a big company” at which he saved “a documented two hundred fifty thousand dollars over nine years, but never got a penny raise for it.” Now he is part of a 28-man crew in the fields, along with his brother-in-law and his 19-year-old son, whom he says he is glad to have the chance to keep an eye on.

  In North Dakota, Jason lives with three other men in an RV, where he cooks and also raises and cans vegetables from his garden plot. Local food prices are at boomtown levels. For everything else he needs, he goes to the Walmart in Williston, though he reports that demand is so high now that the shelves are often empty, which forces him to travel some 125 miles to the better-stocked Walmart in Waterford Township.

  At Minot, a small prairie city in North Dakota, the porters bring on stacks of the Minot Daily News, which boasts the most risibly far-right editorial page I have ever seen. There are two syndicated columns, one by Rich Lowry arguing that we don’t need any more gun-control laws, the other by Brent Bozell arguing that we don’t need any more gun-control laws, and a column by George Will mocking President Obama for not comparing the civil war in Syria to the Nazi blitz on London.

  Will wrote an equally vitriolic diatribe in 2011 for Newsweek entitled “Why Liberals Love Trains.” In it, he scorned “the president’s loopy goal” of giving 80 percent of all Americans access to high-speed trains, citing the contentions of the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole that “high-speed rail connects big-city downtowns where only 7 percent of Americans work and 1 percent live,” and that the “average intercity auto trip today u
ses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train,” while “high speed will not displace enough cars to measurably reduce [traffic] congestion” and will in any case be too danged expensive.

  All the practical reasons for promoting train travel, which Will sneers at for their “flimsiness,” are in fact of vital importance in a world where every day brings a new report from actual scientists that climate change is proceeding at a pace faster than anticipated. An average freight train expends slightly more than one twelfth the BTUs per short-ton mile as a heavy truck, while, as Tom Zoellner puts it in his book Train, “one trainload of passengers equals about a hundred city blocks of cars.” Amtrak expends an estimated 1,600 BTUs of energy per passenger mile, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, compared with about 3,300 for buses, 2,500 for airplanes, and a whopping 3,900 for the cars that now besiege most American cities and suburbs in hours-long traffic jams. This is not even to mention plane travel—conspicuous in its omission from Will’s rant—in the course of which one is now X-rayed, wanded, patted, groped, deprived of shoes and belt like any other prisoner, then sausaged into an ever more crowded tube, charged for every minor amenity, and dropped at least a good hour and $50 from one of those allegedly desolate downtowns we don’t need to reach anymore.

  Silliest of all Will’s charges, though, is his insistence that trains are “Archimedian levers” designed to make Americans “more amenable to collectivism.” Beyond the immense freedom that Amtrak trains in fact provide the individual to read, work, eat, drink, sleep, or stare out at the beauty of America, what stands out about any Amtrak train, at least in the day coaches, is the incredible diversity of the passengers. The usual categories only begin to scratch the surface. To walk through the Empire Builder at night was to pass scenes of incredible sweetness: couples snuggled together under blankets, mothers with babies in their arms, whole families of every possible color and age and creed strewn out over the seats and snoring uninhibitedly.