The Luxury of Taking the Train

We live in a place where we see a lot of trains each day (I can also see them now from my new office). The Amtrak Capitol Corridor run from San Jose to Sacramento has been successfully augmented; it’s our favorite way to get to the Bay Area. There are fast freights and slow freights. And then there are the two long-distance passenger trains: the Coast Starlight, that goes from Seattle to Los Angeles, one of the most beautiful journeys in the world, and the California Zephyr, which goes from Chicago to Emeryville, just beyond Berkeley.

We just met someone this evening who has come to Davis for a wedding from Virginia: by train. He got the train from Washington to Chicago and caught the Zephyr, three days ago. He has done this round trip five or six times; it’s his favorite way of travelling across country.

What I didn’t know, though, is that there are people—writers, showbiz folks, executives—who take the trans-continental train precisely to relax. Writers can get their books written; people can escape from phones, tv, email, and the like. Sounds like a great recipe for mellowness to me.

I’ve never taken this trip across the U.S., but I often took the train from London to Madrid in my younger days—Folkstone or Dover to Calais or Le Havre, Paris, St. Jean de Luz, Madrid, the different gauges of Spanish and French trains a quaint leftover from the Napoleonic invasion and the consequent 3 am lifting of the whole train off its wheels for a new set at the border. The Puerta del Sol was an institution. It’s been replaced by faster trains, but in general on the train I wasn’t in a hurry.