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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – I’m glad to have spent America’s 250th birthday on a cross-country train trip.
Chicago and St Louis are the two cities that separate the American East from the West. – cities built solely on our nation’s commerce. The Great Lakes are where America’s harvests are sent east. The Mississippi is where the national goods are sent south. These are the cities where the eastern railroads tie up, and where the western railroads, which bring our nation’s bounty to market, begin.
My journey took me east through Indiana to Pittsburgh, past the mighty steel mills of America. Some still operate; others are abandoned hulks. Western Maryland is bucolic, a land that is largely untouched. West Virginians don’t have much, but I always see them recreating in the river at Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry.
There is no better view of the Jefferson Memorial than on the trestle bridge as soon at the train emerges from the tunnel at Union Station-Washington. The suburbs of Richmond are inviting. Across the Carolinas you’ll see a WalMart a few minutes before pulling through a mostly empty downtown – still immaculately maintained as if empty storefronts might someday be bustling again.
Central Florida, horse country, is filled with small towns that started off as trailer parks. They’re not oceanfront communities. But soon came the motels, and the small but ornate train stations. Each invites you, “get off, stay awhile… vacation here.” Tampa is an unexpectedly large city filled with palm trees, although it is no Miami or Orlando.
These are things you’ll never see from an airplane. And you’ll miss much of it driving from your car. And I didn’t even travel through the Rockies, where train tracks were laid before roads. You’ll need a mule and a backpack to see what’s there.
And the people are different on the train. Floridians, and many are from somewhere else, are slow and friendly people. The people of Georgia and the Carolinas are gentile. Most fellow train riders are talkative in a good way. I rode with Amish bound for Pennsylvania, a black mother and her two children bound to visit family in Rocky Mount, and two troops of boy scouts heading to adventure camp in West Virginia. My car attendant, Kia, was on only her second trip over the road. She probably doesn’t know that sleeping car attendants created the black middle-class a century ago.
And, my train trip was not perfect. My arrival in Florida was 15 hours late and there was no dining car. For a part of the trip back it was 90-degrees and the air conditioning didn’t work. No matter. A trip on a train is a vanishing piece of Americana. It is not to be missed.
Chris Conley
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