Next book on my essays bookshelf:
Before I bought my car, I was a frequent Amtrak traveler. I didn’t really need a car, living where I live, but ever since I bought the thing, I have recognized the benefit. I can drive to the beach. I can drive to Memphis if I want. I can get the hell OUT of the Tri-State Area. But I lived in New Jersey and New York for almost 20 years before I had a vehicle. I relied on trains and busses to take me out of the area, back to Rhode Island, up to Boston, whatever. I had become a hardened veteran of the push of crowds in Penn Station, I had become a veteran in when exactly I needed to travel home for Thanksgiving, I was familiar with the race for seats, the delays, the high prices, the gross-ness of some of the train cars (my sister Siobhan and I would compare stories: “I was literally surrounded by someone else’s garbage”), the slow pace, the unreliability … I mean, anyone who takes trains with any regularity is familiar with all of this. It’s also almost as expensive as flying. So you pay just as much as a flight – and yet the trip is three times as long and 10 times as annoying. Good deal!
E.B. White writes about the history of the railroads in America, but mainly focusing on their decline, especially in Maine, where he lives. He describes certain depots closing, which then completely cut off whatever area it was from being able to get out. You would have to drive 3 hours just to get to the train. He looks back over his life of train travel, comparing speeds and service. He had many fond memories of the train and people in Maine depended on reliable service, not just for travel, but for mail delivery (perhaps the most important element of the railroads). Trains serve multiple purposes, and those purposes compete. Why should it take almost 24 hours to get from Bangor to New York City? How is that even possible? It’s interesting: E.B. White was certainly a man who valued the past. You could even call him conservative in that respect. But an institution that seemed devoted to its past so single-mindedly seemed doomed to extinction. Which, of course, is what came to pass (at least during the course of White’s essay.) Instead of modernizing and changing with the times, the railroads stagnated. People in Maine watched the depots and stations close, watched the railroads whiz by their towns.
It’s a mixed bag, as anything in life is. White loves the trains. White sees the problem with the railroads as an industry. He makes some funny comments about the old-fashioned depots, structures that haven’t been updated or modernized since 1870 or something. The depot in my home town in Rhode Island is the same way – and, like White, I have a conservative streak. I love the past. I can’t stand change, or at least, careless change. I grew up in a town, remember, where the buildings have dates on them, dates like “Built in 1741.” The “main street” is a protected street, it has not changed since the 1700s, except for one stoplight. George Washington slept in an inn on that street. He had meetings in the building that is now the public library (where I had my first job in high school). So. Consider that perspective, which is a very New England perspective. I love our late-19th-century train depot! Please don’t ever change! But lack of change comes with a price. It wasn’t until the last 10 years that my home town in RI finally built a walkway over the tracks so that you could actually get to the other side if you were boarding a train Southward. Before then, you had to wait in the damn depot unit a little shuttle bus came to take you around to the other side of the tracks. My sister and I, who were always going Southward on the train, back to New York, would SEETHE about that shuttle. Because you had to be dropped off at the depot, then stand around, then pick up your luggage again, get onto the shuttle, wait in the shuttle, and then be driven to the other side. It was unwieldy. It was silly. Why couldn’t we just be dropped off on the other side of the damn tracks and remove those 4 or 5 intervening steps? So yes, I love the old train depot with the old-fashioned wooden wagon outside, and the old lamp-posts, and the country feel of it. I am glad it has never changed. But dammit, it’s also good to have that modern walkway (with an elevator, too!) so you can get to the other side. Railroads were once THE symbol of modernity. They changed the world. They opened the continent. They changed everything. George Eliot saw it. E.M. Forster after her saw it. Such change is a mixed blessing. And the railroads, so steeped in their glorious past, seemed to stop being ABLE to change.
All of that being said, I love that Amtrak has started a Writer’s Residency program. So cool! I applied. I didn’t get in, obviously. I will apply again.
As with much of White’s stuff, the piece is part history and part memoir.
Excerpt from Essays of E. B. White
Today, as my thoughts wander affectionately back over fifty-five years of railroading, the thing that strikes me as most revealing about that first rail trip in 1905 is the running time of the train. We left new York at eight o’clock in the evening and arrived at Belgrade next morning at half past nine – a thirteen-and-a-half-hour run, a distance of four hundred and fifteen miles, a speed of thirty-one miles an hour. And what is the speed of our modern Iron Horse in this decade as he gallops through the night? I timed him from New York to Bangor not long ago, divided the mileage by the number of hours, and came up with the answer: thirty-four miles an hour. Thus, in fifty-five years, while the motorcar was lifting its road speed to the dazzling rate of seventy miles an hour on the thruways, and the airplane was becoming a jet in the sky, the railroad steadfastly maintained its accustomed gait, between thirty- and thirty-five miles an hour. This is an impressive record. It’s not every institution the can hold on to an ideal through fifty-five years of our fastest-moving century. It’s not every traveler who is content to go thirty-four, either. I am not sure that even I, who love the rails, am content. A few of us visionaries would like to see the railroad step up the pace from thirty-four to forty, so we could leave New York after dinner at night and get home in time for lunch next day. (I’ve just learned that the Maine Central has a new schedule, effective early next month. Soon I can leave New York after dinner and be home the following afternoon in time for dinner. There’s to be a four-hour layover in Portland, an eighteen-hour trip all told. Thus the speed of my Horse has just dropped from thirty-four miles an hour to twenty-eight. He’s a very sick Horse.)
The slowness of rail travel is not because the Horse is incapable of great speed but because the railroad is a gossip; all along the line it stops to chat at back porches, to exchange the latest or borrow a cup of sugar. A train on its leisurely course often reminds me of a small boy who has been sent on an errand; the train gets there eventually, and so does the boy, but after what adventures, what amusing distractions and excursions, what fruitful dawdling! A railroad has a thousand and one things on its mind, all of them worthy, many of them enchanting, but none of them conducive to swift passage for a seated customer. I think if a railroad is to profit from a passenger run, it will have to take the word “run” seriously and conquer its insatiable curiosity about what is happening along the route. Some railroads manage to do this, and I notice that when they do, their cars are usually well filled, and their pockets, too.
There are other reasons the Horse is so slow-paced. The State of Maine leaves Portland in the evening and trots along briskly till it gets to Lowell Junction, around midnight. Here it leaves the main line of the Boston & Maine and goes adventuring on a stretch of single track toward Worcester, fifty miles away. This piece of track is well known to sleepy passengers snug in their beds. It was built by a Girl Scout troop while on maneuvers. The girls felled the trees for the ties, collected gravel from abandoned guppy tanks for the fill, and for rails they got hold of some twisted I-beams from condemned buildings. Even the engine driver has a healthy respect for this remarkable section of railed; he slows the train to a walk, obeying his instinct for self-preservation as well as the strict safety rules of the railroad. For about an hour, the creeping train is contorted in the most violent way, and the patient passenger slats back and forth in his berth, drugged with sleep, fear, and pain.
Tomorrow night, the last sleeping car leaves Bangor for New York. I shall not be aboard but shall be thinking of it and wishing it well as it rolls through Etna and skirts the swamp. When, the other day, the news broke that the through sleeping car was to be dropped, the papers carried a statement from Harold J. Foster, our traffic manager: “The service was, we hoped, one which would built railroad patronage between Maine points and New York City on an overnight basis. The sleeper has been poorly patronized, although we advertised its convenience in a consistent program in newspapers and on radio.” Mr. Foster’s words are true; the sleeper was poorly patronized, except on the occasions when bad weather grounded the planes, and except by a few eccentrics like me, who enjoy railroading and patronized it well. The convenience of the service was advertised, but not, of course, its inconveniences, which the traveling public was familiar with anyway – its high tariff, its low speed, its luggage problems, and (in my case) its depot fifty miles from home.
