The trouble with writing about train travel

The writer Paul Theroux started something with The Great Train Bazaar, the tale of his adventures in 1972, spanning the globe by rail. I found the book only moderately interesting, and his later rail-travel books pretty tedious, the exception being the account of traveling through central Argentina in utter misery on a steam-hauled narrow-gauge train beset by a dust storm, in The Old Patagonian Express. Since then, others have mined this genre. One well-praised book (by others, not by me) had its author taking Amtrak from place to place and stopping in various cities to have earnest and utterly boring conversations with public policy experts on subjects having to do with passenger rail. That book flew to the trash can pretty fast.

Still, people keep trying. I’ve been reading an advance copy of Train, by Chapman University associate professor Tom Zoellner, to be published February 3 by Penguin. I give Tom an A for effort.

Look, I’ve written about riding a train, and it’s damned hard. Do you describe what you see out the window? Not for long! How about what you are thinking? Nobody cares. The zany people you encounter in the lounge car? I know people who can talk to a lamp post, but I am not one of them, and besides, I’ve had it with zany people. That pretty much leaves us writers with nothing to do but weave history lessons into the travelogue, which is what Zoellner does best in Train.

He starts his travels at the north tip of Scotland, and before you know it he’s in England at the birthplace of railways almost 200 years ago. There follows a history lesson. In Chicago, he gets off the Cardinal at Union Station and walks to Michigan Avenue and 12th Street, where once stood Central Station. There follow more history lessons, first about Steve Goodman’s song “City of New Orleans” (Good morning, America, how are you? Say, don’t you know me? I’m your native son.) and how Goodman approached Arlo Guthrie about recording what became a classic bit of Americana, and then about black migration to Chicago from the South by way of the Illinois Central Railroad. Somewhere he goes into a history riff about George Pullman, who popularized the sleeping car and for a long time reigned as the biggest hotelier in the world.

Parts of this I find thoroughly enjoyable. Clifton Forge, Va., on the Cardinal prompts our traveling professor to recall how a Milwaukee Road vice president once instructed his minions on naming of new towns, demanding: 1. A name that is reasonably short. 2. A name that is easily spelled. 3. A name that in the Morse alphabet will not sound like any other. 4. A name that when written in train orders will not look like that of any other station in the vicinity. 5. A name that will not sound like any other name when being called in checking baggage or freight. 6. A name that will be satisfactory to the Post Office Department. 7. A pleasant sounding name.

And who would not agree with this: “The best part of Amtrak is the dining car . . . Amtrak scrambles the social order three times a day, as did the dining stewards on nineteenth-century railroads. This custom of train travel seems to me an eminently civilized one: a reminder that all of us eat, that we’re all going somewhere, and that we can probably find a few life experiences or opinions in common with just about anybody if we can sit pleasantly together over eggs and coffee.”

Yet I will probably not finish Train. Those of you who are consummate railfans will spot the errors (one being that his Northeast Regional train leaving New York’s Penn Station is being pulled by a General Electric locomotive). He says the Cardinal “chuffs” into Charleston, W. Va., that a roomette on the lower level of a Superliner sleeper is a “lower berth,” that Superliner cars are “carriages,” and that the lounge car is the “observation car.” These are all passable choices of words, I suppose, but they are also off-putting to me.

Mainly, I will probably not chuff to the end of Train because I am growing weary of the history lessons and those zany people found in lounge cars, one of them being a fellow whose life “is currently a complete mess.” And I do not look forward to what the publicity material says awaits me at the conclusion: "a stirring vision to re-embrace the train as a solution to global problems surrounding trade, traffic, and energy. Just as it forged the nation-state and propelled the world into modernity on its iron back, the train can once again shepherd humanity into a future constantly on the move." Argh! I'm gagging before I even get to this mush. So what do I want in a book about traveling by train? Some sex wouldn’t hurt, eh? Or maybe I simply don’t want a book about traveling by train. — Fred W. Frailey