The Southwest Chief

Planes, cars, and buses are machines. A train, on the other hand, has a soul. Steve Goodman didn't waffle between "United flight 604 to Shreveport" and the "City of New Orleans" before penning his classic hit describing the American tapestry. And a bus only enters the pantheon of verse in country music, when referring to the low times life has punched you in the gut, taken your girl, and left you with the requisite $37.50 that'll somehow get you from Hell to redemption...or, at the least, Nashville.

No, trains are different.

They're older. They crossed this land when it was wild and new.  They braved the first wooden tressels over great rivers, the dust bowls that scoured the praries, and the rock slides and big snows of the mountains. They have names like the Caliphornia Zephyr, the Empire Builder, and the Heartland Flyer. These iron horses have travelled the same paths for over a century and they invite us to follow their trails.

 Meet the Chief

My wife and I will ride the Southwest Chief on a cross-country journey. We will board in Chicago on a Friday afternoon and the Chief will deliver us to Los Angeles early Sunday morning. The Chief had her start on the Sante Fe Railway, and joined the Amtrak fleet in the 70s. She travels 2,256 miles a haul, through Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Unique to the Chief is her speed - upwards of 90 m.p.h. as she whizzes through the Great Plains and Great Basin - as fast as any Superliner in the United States. As I look at her from the concourse at Union Station, engine running, puffs of exhaust spitting from her engine, streamlined and shimmering silver, I know she is eager to run.

"Welcome aboard, sir." 

I am greeted by a distinguished, graying porter in a crisp, blue uniform. Freddie Adams has been welcoming guests aboard these trains for the last 22 years. "I'll be the man you see if there's anything you need, from coffee to reservations for dinner. Just you let me know." Freddie sets my bag down beside my cabin.

"I've never traveled more than an hour by train," I inform him. "Anything I should expect?"

Freddie smiles. "Well, sir, you're travelling all the way to Los Angeles. I reckon you should expect just about anything." He pats my arm and chuckles a deep, knowing laugh as he walks back up the aisle.

Los Angeles. Movie makers at the terminus of our trip have always known that trains have souls. They have cast them in major roles in countless pictures since the Silent Era.  In some movies they provide the setting, in others the climax. Tom Cruise navigates his way along the top of a speeding bullet train in Mission Impossible. Alec Guiness plunges a trian, along with his obsession, to the foot of a gorge in Bridge on the River Kwai. And Paul Newman and Robert Redford pillage railway cars (while igniting countless female fantasies) in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Yes, something about trains inspires the romantic in us. Several movies seem to summarize my experiences on this day-and-a-half journey and give me insight into trains' place in our culture.

 Murder on the Orient Express

Calm down. The Chief provides the setting for this insight. Not the plot.

On the Silver Screen we have seen countless dramas play out on passenger trains. The stories of mystery by Agatha Christie or the high adventure of Ian Fleming have flourished within the confines of opulent passenger cars. Obviously, the level of intrigue on my journey did not equal that of a scene with Poirot. Nor did the danger parallel an evening with Bond.  But there was that touch of class, that hint of refinement that formed a backdrop for the murder and espionage of those classics.

A train trip offers a chance to experience a slice of that gracious life. You can sleep or relax in a private compartment, then accept the porter's invitation to the dining car to enjoy a steak, roasted game hen, or freshly made rissoto served by an experienced waiter on real plates with real silverware. (There are no "sporks" aboard the Chief.) Finish the meal with a cup of fresh brew and a slice of key lime pie, all while enjoying a view that erases the memory of honking cabs and high rises. Afterward, visit the lounge car for a cocktail and share the polite company of fellow passengers as the panorama continues to unfold. From the Chief, we witness no bleak stretches of Siberian tundra. We see... Kansas.  For quite a while.  One quickly realizes why Kansans love their basketball with such passion. A basketball rolls. And, in fact, staring out at the lush, green-soaked landscape, you quickly realize that is all that rolls in Kansas.

The weary day also provides the potential for romance. Cosseted in your private compartment, the curtains facing the aisle pulled tight, the wine glasses freshly refilled... Outside the evening colors sharpen as the Kansas plain passes by. Shadows lengthen, the train hums, the whistle blows, and your wife nestles into the crook of your arm.

 "Oh James...er, Geoff."

Strangers on a Train

"I'm a tattoo artist; that and I make smoke pipes. Want to take a look?... I'm travelling to New Mexico with my three young children during their Spring Break. The kids love hiking and trails... I hope to spend most of my vacation taking photographs; it's my hobby after all, and the train provides the perfect lens... Ya see, a vacation's what I really need. Hell, just last year I survived a quadruple bypass - damn thing near killed me...  No kidding? You're from Dundee, Illinois?  I'm born and raised in St. Charles, just up the Fox River.  I'll call ya Mr. Dundee from now on."

These are a small representation of the conversations that entertained us on our trip West. Strangers on a train have a strange dynamic. There is an assumed familiarity, the feeling that you share more than the same vacation schedule. People are more likely to open up over cocktails in the Lounge Car. With the prompt of the passing scenery, they are more likely to share a small secret or a lively tale, knowing they can retreat into anonymity when the journey ends. 

A middle-aged businessman beckons my wife and I closer across the dining table. "Flying scares the skin off me.  Put me on a plane, close that door, and rev those engines and I'm throwing a tantrum that would make the Exorcist blush."

As we sip our after-dinner coffees, an old hand on the Chief regails the last reservations with stories of his wayward youth.  "And wouldn't you know it, my old man's not in Wisconsin, he's just down the street. That story he told was all a set-up. And I drive right by him in the family car... all at the age of 13."

The Southwest Chief has a small town feel. It drags you from Seinfeld's rude, cold, anonymous metropolis and places you back in Mayberry; a place where you'll think twice about leaning on the horn because the old gal in front of you is the mom of your next door neighbor...or your tattoo artist. You'll see her again, just as you'll see your fellow passengers over the duration of the trip.

Over breakfast the next morning in the dining car, Mr. Heart Bypass leans in close after his wife excuses herself to visit the restroom. "Any chance you'll share that last strip of bacon?  Doctor and wife say no. But I'm a born and raised Jayhawker.  Just as soon pack it up now if I had to go without some of the little things."  He winks.

"Don't worry," I say with a smile.  "It's our secret."

The Time Machine

Yes, I am well aware that there are no trains in H.G. Wells classic. There is a scene, however, where the time traveller eases back the throttle of his machine, and through the limited perspective of his window, watches the world change before him. Styles on the department-store mannequin across the street change with the season, then years, then decades... and buildings rise and fall.

Americans like time travel. They take a stab at it by doing things like trying to follow the path of the old Route 66 - CHicago to LA; travelling through a world before zoning, the world of the 50s, when motels looked like teepees and billboards promised the biggest and best of everything.  They look at small western towns, the ones that pop out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. The towns with one identifiable street that seems to simply disappear into the lanscape around it. They look farther back still, at undisturbed expanses of the Heartland, at the red hills of New Mexico, when man's artifacts were predeeded by the great shifted, weathered geology of the American West.

Route 66 is gone now, by and large. It appears here and there between urban sprawl and "The God Roads" - the interstate highways. But the Chief still walks the same path: past the workman's towns, past cities old and new, across the desert, through the mountains where railroad laborers blasted and chiseled a path for the track. Through hundreds of indistinuishable miles of Iowa countryside, where cows continue to provide the only scene changes and conversation starters. "I swear, those cattle turned their heads. They are looking at us." Through Las Vegas, NM, the town that more hungover college students have muttered "What the hell?" in than any other American city. Past monoliths of rock that will be here millions of years after us, and billboards for the new Keanu Reeves movie, which certainly will not.

With the Southwest Chief you have an old guide, and it's easy to look through his window and see the past laid out before you.

 L.A. Story

I like that my trip ends in a city known for dreaming.