Travelling through the land of the free

When you tell most Americans you are exploring their country by train, their response is a shrieking and disbelieving, “You’re doing what?!” For while on the African continent leaders have plans for a high-speed, cross-continental train within the next half-century, in the United States it is the reverse.

The American dream of better long-distance passenger rail travel is now a mere contrail in the sky, if it has not been choked to death by motor vehicle fumes already. Greater investment in aviation and road means that rail travel is trailing far behind in competitiveness.

The Amtrak story

Founded in 1971, Amtrak is a government-funded passenger rail service that does long-distance and medium-distance journeys. Choosing to use the service is not the rational thing to do. Most of the trains are old, so rail travel is not fast, which means that it is not the first choice for those who want to get to their destination on time.  Passenger trains in the US are an afterthought to the business of freight trains. Judging by the carriage’s steely sturdiness and navy-blue interior, they date from somewhere in the 1980s. One gets the feeling that they have seen better days. Perhaps, then, it’s a bit like their democracy…

View from the train window in the Cascades. Photo: Carien du Plessis

Living on the wrong side of the tracks

(New York City to Chicago on the Lake Shore Limited:
959 miles, 19 hours)

At 3.40pm sharp, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited slowly pulls out of what feels like the ghost of New York’s Penn Station platform. Because boarding is done from outside the ticket office above, similar to when you are boarding an airplane, the usual bustle of the station platforms is eerily absent. When I peer out of the window, I see dusty carriages loitering gloomily in the dark on the other tracks.

Whatever your reservations are about travelling by rail, at least you have been spared the latter-day paranoia of airline security: There are no bag searches, no sniffer dogs, nor X-ray machines. Considering this laissez faire attitude to security, it is just as well that it has not yet occurred to terrorists to blow up trains. This does not mean that the train service is tolerant of mischief or crime: Troublemakers are unceremoniously downloaded along the way.

After almost 21 hours, factoring in a three-hour delay due to a derailed freight train, we arrive in a rainy Chicago. I know, a flight would have been shorter than the time of the delay, but I am a romantic; the journey is the destination. A solid seven days and 12 714km lie ahead for me on the trains. For good measure, this includes a 480km overnight trip on a Greyhound bus.

Given the rather quaint absence of WiFi for most of the way, I had the opportunity to ponder how the looming presidential election was about ‘making America great again’.

Chicago skyline reflected in The Bean sculpture on the public square. Photo: Carien du Plessis

But before I even got there, I had a neighbour in economy class – or what Amtrak calls ‘coach’ class – to consider. Spread out on the ridiculously ample economy seats, just across the aisle from where I was sitting, he was scruffy, with a punk hairstyle and a rattail and his whole life in a dirty backpack next to him.

He tells everyone who cares to listen, repeatedly, how this is untold luxury compared to his usual freight-hopping – an illegal and somewhat dangerous way of travelling the country for free by jumping aboard freight trains. Still, it seems safer than the train-surfing that happens in places like South Africa, Russia and India.

Throughout the journey, the freight-hopper sips from a bottle, which could have contained either beer or bile. He also helps himself to the food that four Hispanic women in the seats up ahead share with him. I’m not that charitable.

It’s difficult to say whether his bumming lifestyle is out of choice or necessity. But jobs are not impossible to find, as unemployment in the US is down to 5%, from 10% seven years ago, so it might be out of choice.

Our conversation, which never progressed much beyond freight-hopping, is cut short when, a few hours into the trip, he is pulled out by the conductor, apparently for trying to snatch a wallet out of one of the women’s handbags while everyone was sleeping. He might have tried to smoke pot on the train too, where lighting up is illegal.

Even ice cream brands like Ben & Jerry’s took a stand in the elections. San Francisco Photo: Carien du Plessis

Doug is more charitable. He is a middle-aged, white civil engineer from San Francisco who appears in the seat next to me overnight. He says one shouldn’t judge. Despite his rational approach to life, politics and his forgiving attitude towards our pot-smoking, long-fingered freight-hopper, industrial decay sends him into fits of romantic nostalgia. That’s why he prefers to do a three-day trip home from New York state by train, rather than fly. It could also be that he is skeptical of planes.

As the train passes through Pennsylvania and the north of Ohio and Indiana, eventually skirting Lake Michigan, he points out the remnants of old steel mills – and a few small working ones – and speculates about what would have gone down in the boarded-up factories. In the morning rain, there are train platforms in ruin (Erie on the Ohio/Pennsylvania state line was a railroad hub in the 19^th century and still builds electric locomotives), and in Sandusky, a major coal-shipping port on the Great Lakes, there is the world’s biggest roller-coaster park – but we can’t see it from the train because of the weather. On the train in Cleveland, the cultural hub where the term “rock and roll” was popularised, we see mostly no-name industries. The train doesn’t really pass close enough to the lakes for a good view, although every so often an expanse of water that looks as big as the sea peeps out from behind some bushes to the right of the train.

Here and there gentrification has saved a building from ruin, although Doug explains that restoring some of the old buildings and painfully purging them of hazardous chemicals is more expensive than demolishing them and throwing up a few concrete slabs.

Through the train window we spot a road sign for Arcelor Mittal, the Indian steel giant, and Doug winces. “The US used to provide steel to the world, but now it all seems to come from India and China.”

Enter Trump

Donald Trump’s campaign has been capitalising on this sentiment. Could someone like Trump make America great again? I ask. After all, a huge part of his constituency is the disillusioned middle classes who formerly worked in these factories.

“Trump really is from the democratic centre, and he’s saying crazy things to get popular support. I don’t think he means what he says, or even believes in it,” Doug explains. In short, Doug doesn’t think Trump really has an answer, but he isn’t wildly enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton either.

Doug doesn’t think Trump really has an answer, but he isn’t wildly enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton either.

In Chicago, later that evening, I sample some of the hundreds of local craft beers in the trendy Revolution Brewing bar, together with a cocktail-sipping Guinean-born fellow, Caro. Over a drink he tells me of his touristic adventures the day before, trying to explore Chicago’s gang areas, which amounted to nothing as he could find no action at all. Probably just as well; I would not be drinking with him if there had been… Eighty percent of last year’s 500 homicides were gang-related, making Chicago the murder capital of the country. “I wonder if the gangsters will vote to make America great again,” I say wryly. Caro sniggers. “I don’t think they care about being part of the system,” he responds.

Illinois is all Democrat and President Barack Obama’s family home from his time as senator is in Chicago. “Who knows? The gangsters are probably Democrats too,” I speculate.

On the other side of midnight we bump into a fellow African who takes us to one of the city’s late-night spots. It’s eerily quiet. “Almost everybody is on drugs here,” Tumi says with a little sigh. She’s a performance artist and has been living in Chicago for a year or two, doing odd jobs to make ends meet. Still, she’s wildly enthusiastic about Chicago, which is where the arts are happening, and where things are shaping up for her in her free time.

Red signals for the country’s future?

(Chicago to Seattle on the Empire Builder: 46 hours, 2 205 miles)

For two days and two nights of travel, the train chugs along the Canadian border and then cuts through the grassy plains of North Dakota and the Big Sky Country that is Montana to the spectacular Cascade Mountains and Columbia River Gorge in the Glacier National Park. The track snakes through the mountains past spectacular fir and pine forests before going under Stevens Pass through a 12,5 km tunnel, built in 1929 and the longest in the country. Autumn has turned the leaves of some trees golden and red against a backdrop of evergreen conifers.

We also traverse Native American tribal land, and although I’ve heard that Amtrak sometimes makes unscheduled stops to pick up locals (as a condition for using their land), these stops, if they happened at all, were unannounced.

Presidential candidates are unlikely to splurge their resources on trying to woo the 3 million or so Native Americans, as they make up such a small percentage of the vote (America’s total population is 319 million). Most are Democrats, however, and in sparsely populated constituencies their vote sometimes makes a difference at state level, so they are not completely irrelevant politically. But controversial new voting rules passed in the last three years, amongst others requiring the use of new IDs, which many can ill afford, mean that some Native Americans could be disenfranchised completely.

Sleepless in Seattle early on a drizzly Sunday morning, a few hours before boarding the next train, I encounter a 30-something US Marine in Washington Redskins regalia in the touristy Starbucks in Pike Place – where the first branch of the chain was established 45 years ago. Ricardo the Marine is nervous ahead of a big football game later that day, and he attempts to explain the game to me. “They say our team’s name is racist,” he complains, making reference to sentiments by some Native American pressure groups that the name amounts to ethnic stereotyping, “but I don’t think that’s right. I love this team.”

The original Starbucks logo in the first Starbucks store in Pike Place, Seattle. The logo has changed throughout the years to show less nipple. Photo: Carien du Plessis

Besides the game, Ricardo is also worried about the upcoming election. “Really, as Marines we aren’t supposed to get involved in politics, because we must serve whoever is in power. But for the first time I feel I have to be interested.” He continues, “This past year I had to learn 200 years of history, just to understand what is going on. How did we get here?”

A possible Trump presidency worries him greatly, although he’s not a huge Clinton fan either. Trump’s plans to build a wall on the Mexican border is ludicrous, he believes. “Closing the border with Mexico won’t solve those problems. Most undocumented immigrants come through our northern border anyway.”

Getting people back on track

(Seattle to Los Angeles, with a stop-over in San Francisco on the
Coast Starlight: 35 hours, 1 377 miles)

San Francisco catches me on a bad day. I’m irritable, it’s raining, then windy, then sunny. It’s like the weather can’t decide on one mood.

At the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station there’s no human being to assist with ticket-buying. A sympathetic local says this is the company’s way to save money. He recalled the day of the 9/11 attack, when he arrived at the station to find it completely deserted. He had no idea what had happened because he had worked night shift and slept through the terrorist drama of the planes flying into the World Trade Centre on the other side of the country. What if something worse happens? he muses.

San Fran’s Fisherman’s Wharf area drags me down further because it seems so overly commercialised and touristy tacky, but a Halloween poster in the window of a candy store provides some comic relief: “Trump or treat,” it says.

Halloween poster in sweet shop window, San Francisco Photo: Carien du Plessis

Seven kilometers later, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, America seems great again. California got its Golden State nickname from its grasslands, the 19^th century gold rush and this spectacular bridge.

I am brought down to earth again when I get on the bus, Some grumpy old growler in the back of the bus impatiently yells “Let’s go now” when I and a Bulgarian tourist take too long to produce the exact $2.20 fare for the ride. Gentle people, my ass.

Amtrak’s ride to Los Angeles the next day is spectacular, following mostly the old Spanish mission route through the Santa Clara Valley. Agricultural crops, vineyards and even a pumpkin patch fly by. This place is a veritable food basket and also produces wine, which Amtrak offers exclusively to business class travellers to sample.

There is also San José, considered the capital of Silicon Valley, home of the booming tech industry. The technology economy here has helped cushion the decline in California’s manufacturing industry, but it means job security is limited to the highly skilled, while some unskilled people resort to seasonal farm labour.

Later the train finds itself right on the Pacific coastline, passing by some quiet beaches and lines of recreational trailer homes parked in front of good views and big barbeque fires.

Teri, a local white academic on her way to visit her daughter and granddaughter, sits next to me in the packed train and tells me Trump is a playground bully and a sexist. “What I don’t understand is these Republican women. How can they vote for him?” She also generally disagrees with his policies. “He tells lies about his tax and now he wants to cut taxes for the rich because, like, they really need the money!” She says, rolling her eyes.