Wednesday 22nd April 2009 – Listening to that Lonesome Whistle Blow

The Amtrak train is not packed. The seats are large, comfortable, and well-spaced. They recline, and have leg-rests which come out from underneath. I get a double seat to myself, so I'm set for a bed-sized space for the night. In fact, one of the seats would be a comfy enough.

Amtrak is very badly named, since the one thing it doesn't own is the track, and most of it's problems stem from that. It's like the British rail we used to know and love to hate. It has friendly staff, who tell us they're going to turn the announcements off so we can all get to sleep, but not to worry, because they know what stops we want to get off at and they'll come and check at each stop. It also has an amazingly cheerful buffet-car conductor, who cheerfully tells us, half-an-hour into the journey that he's off for his meal break and will be back in an hour.

But freight drives the system. I think that's why we got a bus yesterday: they were fixing the track, and Amtrak doesn't count. In all honesty, that's true, because there were only about thirty people booked through to Albany from Boston. As we travel through the night, we are constantly passed by great long freight trains. From time-to-time we pass through huge marshalling yards. And we sometimes have to wait for quite long periods to let a freight train clear.

But the dominant memory of the night (the journey took about 15 hours) was that classic American train whistle. I think they are required to blow it for level crossings, and there are level crossings everywhere. So the whistle is going more-or-less continuously. I find it very soothing, and seem to have got a good night's sleep. Which means I missed almost all the sights, the Hudson River Valley, Lake Erie, the Berkshire Mountains, the Mohawk River Valley and the Erie Canal. But since it got dark almost as soon as the train started, I would have missed them anyway.

I wake briefly to find myself in Toledo, which means I missed all of New York, the little bit of Pennsylvania the sticks up onto Lake Erie (the town or Erie itself, the train schedule tells me, is actually in PA), and all of Ohio. The name 'Toledo' has me drifting back to sleep to the jangle of my spurs on the dusty sidewalk.

I wake up for breakfast in the middle of Indiana. There is a proper dining car, with white table cloths, and the waiter introduces me to a lady truck driver as a breakfast companion. When I say 'truck driver' I mean, as she put it, '18-wheelers', those monsters of the freeway. Surprisingly, she is only twenty-seven, but she has lived all over the US, and proves a most stimulating table companion. She is part Japanese, and we share some experiences of Tokyo.

We trundle through the freight yards of Elkhart IN, where there is clearly a railroad museum. Actually, it looked more like a graveyard than a museum, but there was one huge steam locomotive in good condition.

Then we got into Chicago's Union Station with one last ten-minute wait to clear a freight train. Chicago's commuters have double-decker trains. It is a beautiful, sunny day, so I have no problem figuring north from south and navigating to my hotel, which is only a few blocks away. They want to put me on the third floor so I can check in straight away, but I'm now in the price range of no elevators, so I elect to check my bags and go for a wander and wait for a first floor room to be cleaned.

I have lunch in Berkoff's, at the bar. The man next to me and the barmaid are clearly both natives of the city, and bona-fide US citizens, but he suddenly asks her what nationality she is, and she immediately replies "Italian". I am reminded that Americans don't consider 'American' to be a nationality. Of course, they're American, but they also have to have a nationality, where their ethnicity, their looks, and that sort of thing, came from.