New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
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(The following article originally appeared in the New York street edition of the New Hope Journal in February, 1992. I had made a trip from New York to Texas in the dead of winter. The train traveled to Chicago then to St Louis and on down to Texas. What follows is an account of part of that trip.)
Joseph Campbell once said of marriage that it was an ordeal. And when he said it I understood the meaning of both words for the first time in my life. An ordeal is this: it is a test of endurance, intuition and wit that is rewarded by wisdom, courage and passion. What Campbell was saying was that any fool can fall in love. Marriage on the other hand is an ordeal. And so is traveling cross-country on the train.
The train from New York to Chicago was scheduled to leave Penn Station at 7:10 pm. When you travel by train you know what train to get on but you don’t know where to get on it until 10 or 15 minutes before departure time. The magnificent Pennsylvania Railroad Station that once stood in the heart of New York City is gone now. Penn Station is just a big room under Madison Square Garden that looks like a food court in a shopping mall with stairwells leading down one more flight to the trains. There is a nice waiting area with comfortable seats mostly occupied by hustlers, thieves, derelicts and the homeless. But it is well patrolled by the police and you can usually find a seat. The only problem is that from this area you cannot see the huge schedule board as it clicks over and posts the gate information and travel status of various trains. You can check your bags any time but if you are on a two day trip like I am, you can never take enough things on board with you; and these you have to cart around until you board the train. So if you are early you sit in the seating area with the hustlers, the thieves, the derelicts and the homeless until 6:45, vigilantly guarding your possessions. Then you move everything out in front of the sign and stand there until you see or hear the boarding call.
Well, at 7 o’clock, 10 minutes before my train, the Lake Shore limited was to depart, the status was changed from “On time” to “Delayed.” About 10 minutes later an announcement was made that the delay was indeterminate due to mechanical problems. At 7:40 the sign was changed to read “Delayed one hour.” We did in fact board about 8:15. The train left the station at 8:35.
I was immediately surprised by the ampleness and design of the seats in the coach. They were like big recliners. Still you felt that you’d need two to be half way comfortable over night. A friendly attendant announced early on that the toilets were “sensitive” so would we please not put anything in them but toilet paper. Naturally right there you knew what was ahead for the toilets.
Donald Itzkoff, in his book “Off the Track,” talks about how the railroad companies deliberately sabotaged passenger traffic in the 60’s. The money always was in freight; but passenger trains had had a golden age in the first half of the 20th century. Now with the hegemony of the automobile, the rising speed and safety of airplanes, the convenience of interstate highways for trucking companies, the trains were in trouble even in the freight department. Railroad managers saw the increasingly unprofitable passenger traffic as a straw that was breaking their backs and it had to go. They did their best to make it awful.
Of course things got so bad that the US government finally did step in and create Amtrak, which now 20 years old has really just turned out to be a poorly subsidized and poorly managed museum piece traveling to a few selected cities across the country to satisfy the romantics.
The romance of train travel, however, remains as real as mountain air and deep white snow and western sunsets. Americans who, like me, are romantic about these things, remain romantic about trains, even though most of us under 50 have had very few really good trips.
Now this train I’m on has a variety of people including a good many children. They all look to me like the kind of folks who would ride the train: foreign students, retirees, mothers with small children, and single men of questionable motives. Except one passenger. An elegantly dressed, pretty young woman I took for a model. Maybe even an actress. In New York you never know. I just couldn’t imagine her spending the night in coach class. As she passed by my seat, still bundled in an expensive top coat and a Park Avenue bowler hat, she appeared tired and somewhat crestfallen. Later I would learn that her mood was actually subdued rage.
I settled down to read my train book and drink Rio Grande Punch, a drink I invented just for this trip, made up of gin and canned Rio Grande Valley grapefruit juice. Illegal of course since I didn’t buy them in the club car.
Eventually, I tried the rest room. You can skip this part if you don’t like scatological criticism. But as in so many other things you’ll see me write about, common sense, or the lack of it is the key to understanding a situation.
Now soft seats and peace and quiet are important on an over night train trip. The availability of food is a nice touch, too, though plenty of hot coffee in the morning was all I expected to buy. I brought sandwiches, canned beans, tuna and of course the punch fixin’s. But bathrooms are not a luxury on a train. They are a necessity. And if they don’t work then the club car and the restaurant and the snack bar should be temporarily closed, and everybody who works on the train from the conductor on down, should have an emergency meeting, plan an attack and get those toilets working properly. Of course that’s not what happened. Here’s what happened.
The attendant who’d made the announcement hadn’t been able to manage her toilets from the beginning of the trip. She knew these toilets had problems from the beginning of the trip. Maybe even from the beginning of her career. She knew these toilets had problems so she is the one who should have been “sensitive.” For in the bathroom nearest to me I found a fresh roll of toilet paper on the spindle, a spare roll and a big busted open package of paper towels lying right next to the toilet. The kind you are not supposed to throw into the toilet. The toilet was already clogged with these paper towels. That was not the attendants fault. But she might have thought to remove temptation. The hand towel dispenser was filled so tightly that all you could get out was one shred at a time. The trash receptacle for these towels was filled to overflowing. So of course the children and the “insensitive” adults were using the hand towels for toilet paper (because they were the handiest) and then after washing their hands, drying them on another paper towel and then throwing them on the floor or into the toilet because there was no place else to put them.
Now the way the toilets were designed made them easy to clog, but just as easy (if undignified) to unclog. Nobody who worked on the trains seemed the least bit interested in this problem. The toilet bowl had a little trap door that opened when you pushed the “flush” button. Toilet paper would wash on through but paper towels were too heavy and would block the little trap door from closing. No water will come in until the little trap door is closed tight. To unclog the toilet you just need to move that stalled paper out of the doorway.
Somebody on every train needs to be concerned about the bathrooms. And the president of Amtrak and his design contractors should have to do it until they figure out a toilet that is either not cloggable or when clogged, un-cloggable with dignity and sanitariness ( or let’s just call it sanity) by passengers or staff. (In fairness I have to note that when I changed trains in Chicago, the new train was newer and had toilets that seemed to work. Toilet-wise, I was on a different planet.)
Plumbing is one of the most lucrative trades in America because everybody is too “sensitive” to think about it. Well I fixed it, used it and went to sleep.
The next morning I awoke at 7:30 to fields of snow, barren winter woods and the frozen grey waters of Lake Erie. Of course the toilet had forty more paper towels stuffed in it and passengers were being asked to use the toilets in two unused rooms in the sleeping car at the rear of the train. I un-clogged my neighborhood toilet again and went looking for a cup of coffee. That turned out to be harder to find than a working toilet. I headed for the snack bar car but as I passed through the dining car I was asked if I wanted to have breakfast. “No,” I said, “ I just want some coffee.” “Well,” they said, “If you want coffee, you’ll have to have breakfast.” “Well, then I’ll just go to the snack bar car,” I said matter-of-factly. “For coffee?” they said as if I’d said “squab under glass,” or something in French. “They don’t have any coffe in the snack bar car,” they said. “Nothing hot.”
Now, without coffee I was defenseless. They had me. So I let them lead me quietly to a table. Table seating in the dining car is as tight as a New York restaurant. Since I was alone I had to be seated with another alone person. And guess who? Miss Crestfallen-covering-subdued-rage. She looked as pretty as she hade the night before. Just as sad. And just as well disguised behind fresh pink makeup, the prim black bowler hat, and a big iridescent blue bow in her firey red hair. She sipped her coffee and managed an official, slightly smirky smile when forced to share her simmering solitude with a shaggy-haired man of questionable motives. “Don’t even think about hitting on me,” seemed to be the message in her eyes.
“How did you sleep?” I ventured, trying to sound as suave as Fred Astaire. “I didn’t,” she said tersely. “I saw you get on,” I said, trying to keep the Fred Astaire going. “I didn’t figure you for coach.” “I was bumped from the sleeping car,” she said between clenched teeth. (“Ahhh,” I thought. Fits right in with the coffee and the toilet maintenance. She was probably bumped so there would be a couple of back-up toilets.) “Well, they announced a while ago that we could use the restrooms in two empty sleepers,” I said provocatively, when I should have just shut up. “I heard that,” she said, tensing her jaw. “It seems those sleepers are not the kind I paid for.” (Catch-22, I thought. Just like the coffee and the toilets.) “
This has been the train ride from Hell!” she seethed.
Turns out she is an airline pilot. (Yep! You read it right.) who sometimes travels by train because she “never gets to see anything but airports.” She usually gets a good night’s rest. But she’d been mysteriously bumped down to coach class with no satisfactory explanation after an hour and a half delay in Penn Station with the hustlers, the thieves, the derelicts and the homeless. She had spent a sleepless night wrestling with her recliner and being badgered by insomniac children. Tonight without sleep she had to fly a jumbo jet from Chicago to Portland Oregon. “The toilets,” she added, “are disgusting!"
Pardon my plumbing terminology here, but this lady was pissed. And as if that weren’t enough, we were now being told that the coffee was being rationed because the pipes had frozen up and we could only have one small cup if we ordered one complete meal. “I’m writing a letter,” she said to the waiter who seemed not to be able to understand why she could be so upset. “I’ll buy breakfast and you can have my coffee,” I said gallantly. She stood up and looked at me as if I were treating her like a lady instead of an airline pilot.
“Thank you,” she said graciously, “But it’s not that good anyway.” And with that she marched, heroically back to her seat to suffer in solitude the six remaining hours between Cleveland and Chicago. I ordered the bad breakfast in order to get the ration of bad coffee and then went back to my seat too. We never spoke again, though I saw her every time I got up from my seat, sitting a few rows behind me in a sunny window seat, always staring out the window at the snow covered fields of Ohio and Indiana. It was peaceful scenery. At times the banked snow drifts must have looked a little like cumulonimbus clouds to her. I’m sure she was wondering too, what the skies would be like over Montana tonight.
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Copyright 2005 by Larry L. Dill
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