More Than Just A Train Journey

 

Creative Commons, Wikimedia

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Gina and I once again boarded the Amtrak, this time to Thanksgiving at my sister’s in Minneapolis. We had a roomette sleeper car featuring the tiny fold down bunk beds. What a great way to travel. There is nothing better than going to bed in one state and waking up in another. No stressful long drive, no stressful flight, just relaxing, eating and sleeping, all while moving.

Union Depot in St Paul above is a picturesque neoclassical structure that misses its glory days as the transit hub of a region. Like its still busy contemporary Grand Central Station in New York, it begs to be filled with people again. The grand structure hails from the glory days of American rail in the 1920s before the car began to edge out rail travel, finally laying it to rest in the decades after World War Two. These temples of democratic congress where everyone once crossed paths, struggling to stay relevant in our car-centric, individualized age, say a lot about where we are as a divided nation.

Union Depot is a temple to an American collectivism that we need to return to. The rail age was a time when we committed to a system that provided transportation to everyone on a relatively equal basis. There is less difference between a coach seat and a first-class cabin on a train than the marginal cars many Americans drive because it is all they can afford and the orgiastic apogee of consumptive excess epitomized by the likes of a massive high end SUV. The British have the most apt epithet for these road hogging chariots of excess: Chelsea Tractors. They are the most useless type of tractors.

I think of the transition from collective to individualized transportation as one of the many strands that led us to our current American crisis of toxic individualism splitting our country in two on the right and left. Thinkers such as the economist and writer Richard Florida seem to think the data aligns with this idea.  While The Atlantic points out the absurdity of our car-centric civilization and even how American law favors the car instead of alternatives.

The transition to cars made sense in a pre-World War Two America largely made up of farms and small towns, where the car set people in those communities free. We have come a long way from Henry Ford's spartan and utilitarian Model T. Today, in a world where most live in vast urban centers, the car has become an impediment to mobility, financial prison and forced marker of class and status.

The automobile is the quintessential temple to the individual. It separates you from everyone else inside a box that is the outward reflection of ego or poverty. Inside, you jostle on the edge of road rage against other individualized boxes exposing others' poverty or wealth, while spewing ugly toxins into the air. I often reflect on the guy in the big diesel truck that "rolls coal" on me at a stop light, leaving me in a cloud of black soot. If we were riding together in some shared transport, it would be hard for him to roll coal on me. The road to toxic, individualized transportation has many causes. What roll did racism play in the move away from collective to individualized transport? How was it tied to the "white flight" after WWII? What roll, like so many other areas of American life, from plastics to chemicals, did the industrial need to keep producing the individualized gasoline driven machines that won the war play?

Alternately, rail was the ultimate expression of a societal commitment to the group over the individual. It is the most democratic form of transportation. Our highly subsidized highways (the unseen added cost of car ownership) on the other hand provide more value to those who can afford nice vehicles than those who can't. Individuality and social status were/are still apparent on a train, but everyone is still inside the same vehicle. Whether you can pay for a coach ticket or first class, you are still getting to the same place at the same time and sharing the observation lounge and dining car. It is harder to scream with road rage when the person driving the rusty 1990 Ford Fiesta held together with duct tape and shiny, new 2023 Cadillac Escalade are standing next to each other boarding the train.

While we may never get back to the glory days of rail when someone could get on the train in any tiny North Dakota town and travel across the country, after having looked into the abyss of the toxic beast of individualized civilization we have created, it can only get better.

1925 rail guide showing passenger service twice a day to towns I grew up around, only four of which are still towns. Only Fargo still has passenger rail service.

On our trip, I sat affably next to a guy wearing a Trump hat in the observation car and despite my dislike of the selfish orange oligarch, we exchanged smiles and small talk, while sitting together on the train with several others including my wife, who were not the older white male demographic of the Trump voter. If you could encapsulate the wasteful excess of our current moment,in human form, Trump, the homo sapien equivalent of planet killing luxury goods like Cadillac Escalades, Louis Vuitton bags and other stupid wasteful detritus of toxic individualism, would be it. On the train together for several hours, none of that mattered.

On the train, unlike inside a vehicle, everybody had to face each other's humanity because they were sitting right beside each other for hours on end. We used the same bathroom, ate in the same cafe, and shared the same air for hundreds of miles. How many of these people had cars? How many couldn't afford a car? What kind of cars would they drive if any when they arrived at their destination? For the brief moments we were on the train none of that mattered