Five Tracks From Book Of Travelers, Gabriel Kahane

August 24, 2018 4:41 AM

How the Amtrak Dining Car Could Heal the Nation, a NYT article by Gabriel Kahane (you might remember his piece Empire Liquor Mart, which was chatted about here a while back) whose train trip inspired a live show [NewYorker] and has culminated in the release of his latest album, Book Of Travelers. Five tracks have had official videos released: November, Baltimore, Model Trains, Little Love, What If I Told You

The Pitchfork reviewprovides more context (and reads better than the number it assigns).

posted by hippybear (16 comments total)

"Where much of the digital world finds us sorting ourselves neatly into cultural and ideological silos, the train, in my experience, does precisely the opposite. It also acts, by some numinous, unseen force, as a kind of industrial-strength social lubricant. "

I've taken the train from Savannah, where I live, to NYC, my home town, and back several times in the past decade. I love the random serendipitous encounters. I love feeling like a pariah as I smoke my cigarette on the dark platform with other pariahs. I love the backyards, the abandoned industrial buildings, the places you don't see from the highway.

I'm a librarian at a small state college in the rural south. Yesterday was the first day of the semester. A history professor gave the students in his an empty map of Europe, the Middle East, and north Africa. Their assignment was to put places like Athens and Alexandria and the Alps onto the map. I helped them find some atlases. I showed them the big, sadly outdated, globe that lives in front of my desk. I must have helped 6 or 7 students with the same assignment and it became clear that they had no experience using maps. I asked one young woman what her hometown was, and then asked her to show it me on a map of her state. She was earnest but totally clueless. I gently prodded her to tell me nearby larger towns. We finally found it. She couldn't find the town the college is in, so I showed her and showed her the shortest route to home- her folks drove her here.

I don't have a garmin or any of those apps that tell you when to turn. (I don't even have a smartphone.) I wonder how much reliance on those is narrowing people's views of the world around the. On a map I can see that, for instance, there's an interesting state park just a little off of my route from point a to point b. I can stop and ask people for directions. I can stop in little towns a mile off the interstate and eat a good diner meal. I can get lost and wander aimlessly until I find someone to help me out.

If you've never taken a long train ride take one. If you don't know how to read a map, come on by and I'll teach you how.
posted by mareli at 6:22 AM on August 24, 2018 [10 favorites]

When my brother and his wife lived in Chicago, and when the secret trick to getting a cheap superliner Roomette® on the Capitol Limited still worked, I traveled between Maryland and the city of broad shoulders by train instead of on the vile flying fartbus, and it was the second greatest writing environment I've ever known. When the train would stand on the sidings with grim Indiana framed in the big window of my room on the long stretches of letting one freight train after another bump us out of circulation, I'd plug in my headphones, fire up my battered old laptop, and produce flurries of words without effort. In the overnight hours, I'd sometimes wake and retreat to the sci-fi salon of the observation car and write, or just sit and watch the lights of the world outside passing while I listened to music and wrote in my head. It was a fertile environment, and something I miss now that my brother and his family are living in my neck of the woods again.

The dining car, though—

I am naturally a bit uncomfortable with strangers, and I've a long history of maintaining and protecting my boundaries, but in the dining car, you're offered no choice, and if you want the surprisingly fine food and the civility of tablecloths and proper flatware, you sit with strangers, as assigned, and it is a nervous, uncertain, and entirely regenerative environment. The diversity is tempered by the fact that you're all on a train because you're train people, so there's a unifying force for those of us who disdain the vile flying fartbus, but I have encountered conversations that would have never come to mind prior, and those interactions have all added to the library of lives I've encountered. It is an atavistic spectacle, but while it lasts, I'd advise everyone to try, at least once, to give it a try.

And while it's a lesser thing, even the coach on a long trip will open new avenues. I took the train from DC to Hinton, WV, and found myself seated in the center of a large family of Hutterites, and the conversation was absolutely fantastic. I would have never sought out a long conversation with Hutterites, and that is why the random connection is so important. It's so easy to avoid any chance of being around people unlike yourself, until you're on a train.
posted by sonascope at 6:51 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]

GPS is great for getting you somewhere, but I also like using it to explore: Turn it off. Go somewhere. Turn down every interesting looking road, and when you come to a fork, pick the road that looks most enjoyable, or just flip a coin. Don't worry about getting lost. When you've done about half as many miles as you want to do that day, or whenever you start to get nervous, turn it on and see how long it will take to get back to the base. When you are ready, let the GPS bring you back. Make the GPS into a security blanket that lets you confidently forge into the deepest unknown.

Also, go solo. When you travel with other people you wrap yourself in a bubble you carry with you, engaging most with your travel companions. When you go alone, you're more present, more available to the serendipitous encounters of the road. It sounds like the train intensifies that. I think I need to take some train trips!
posted by elizilla at 6:52 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

sonoscope: When my brother and his wife lived in Chicago, and when the secret trick to getting a cheap superliner Roomette® on the Capitol Limited still worked,

And that trick would be....?
posted by dr_dank at 7:08 AM on August 24, 2018

And that trick would be....?

Amtrak used to have an odd system where accommodations were massively discounted if there were vacancies just before the train was due to depart, so you'd buy travel and accommodations in advance, then cancel the ticket and rebuy immediately at the discounted rate, or, if you're a gambler, buy the roomette upgrade on the train itself. I'm told that loophole is closed, and I wasn't nervy enough to try the on-train upgrade the last time I took the trip.
posted by sonascope at 7:13 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

Here's a link to an oldish article on the subject.
posted by sonascope at 7:14 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Unfortunately, on some routes, Amtrak is actually testing removing the dining car, which promises to be irritating as hell.
posted by mephron at 8:01 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

I love taking the train, and have done so (in coach and with a roomette) solo between Los Angeles and Chicago.

As an introvert, though, being forced to sit and eat and chat with people I find exhausting -- especially the older white racists -- makes it something I'm reluctant to do in the future unless I can bring three other people with me to occupy a full table.

It is particularly annoying that the forced shared seating is a policy, not a mitigation for crowded trains; on every train journey I've taken, half of the dining car on every meal I ate had numerous empty tables.

Honestly, if Amtrak changed this forced-social policy, I would have taken many more trips than I have.
posted by davejay at 8:24 AM on August 24, 2018

Train rides are great, especially when they go "off road" in the routes. Small quibble: I wish Amtrak had not discontinued the Grey Poupon mustard packs in the dining car. That, and the extra sturdy individually-wrapped black plastic flatware (also discontinued) definitely featured in my value equation. Still, trains are my preferred mode of transportation, because I am near Grand Central Station, and the centrality of the stations balances out a lot of the time-savings for flying.
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:34 AM on August 24, 2018

Now, that being said earlier, I've taken some long distance train trips - NY to Toronto to Chicago to Dallas to Atlanta to NY; NY to Seattle, and then another one back again.

The first two I enjoyed; the last one was painful (I have since developed severe arthritis of the knee , and the train was packed to the gills so there was very little room to stretch out, and my wife's back had her nearly assaulting me for the terrible idea after the first knight, and let's not even discuss the trip from Pittsburg to DC due to a derailed train in Pennsylvania and having to switch to a bus). The first night of the trip we had dinner in the dining car, which was lovely and pleasant and rather expensive, so we decided to survive on snacks and stuff from the snack car instead the rest of the trip (and then when we got to Philadelphia, we had for the first time in four years decent pizza).

If ever done again, I am so making sure we can afford a room for the trip.
posted by mephron at 8:49 AM on August 24, 2018

Also a mention of how trains are so much better at the arrival side of the trip: Being centrally located, you can sometimes take convenient public transportation to the home of your local hosts, and if they do want to pick you up in a car, it is close enough that you can call on arrival, instead of making pre-arranged plans; If your arrival station is Boston, no pressure on the pick-up, you can spend hours browsing books at the central book store, and even peruse books at the cafe tables; Most importantly, you are free to adjust the length of your visit, so if -- just hypothetically -- their teenage son gets expelled from college for cheating and drugs, and then arrives home storming around the place blaming his parents for ruining his life by not loving him, well, you can just pack up, call a car, and wave off with a "see you later".
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:52 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't have a garmin or any of those apps that tell you when to turn.

I spent a couple of years working as a radio dispatched point-to-point courier across the entire Phoenix metroplex. In 1999-2000 ish. Pre GPS, pre smart phone... It was all Thomas Guide (which was like 500 pages thick) and learned area knowledge. It was actually thrilling and felt like a skill.
posted by hippybear at 2:25 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

I just did the trip from Emeryville to Boston on the California Zephyr and the Lake Shore Limited. The dining car on the Zephyr was truly amazing, and this is a good reminder that I need to write it up. Most of the conversations I had were wonderful; sadly, my final one descended into really unpleasant politics, with one person declining to say another word to me after I revealed I worked to improve inclusion in journalism.

Unfortunately, it's true that the dining car on the Lake Shore Limited has been discontinued - although the meals are a little better than airline food, and there's still a dedicated space to sit and eat. (The bigger deal with the Lake Shore Limited is that the roomettes have toilets in them, next to the seats / where you sleep. It is gross.)
posted by bwerdmuller at 9:06 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

I would love to take the train more often, but because they are secondary to freight there is no guarantee of being on time. I was recently scheduled take Amtrak in Texas and it was 1.5 hours late going south and 4 hours late going north.

That isn't reliable transportation.
posted by ITravelMontana at 10:28 AM on August 26, 2018

Amtrak leaves Spokane at some ridiculous hour like 2am no matter whether you're going East or West. It's inconvenient and difficult and I wish it were better because trains are awesome. I lived in Europe for a year back in the 80s and public transit there was utterly magical. Here, however, it's always an afterthought and is never well thought even at that.

(Granted, West Germany, an entire country, was about the same size as New Mexico, my home state, so the spaces being considered and covered by public transit were much smaller than the US as a whole. But still...)
posted by hippybear at 1:32 PM on August 26, 2018

I took the train from Seattle to Portland last year to see the eclipse. The train itself was lovely, and meeting a variety of people in the dining car was nice, but the food situation was bad. We were in a roomlette, so were able to get a reservation for the dining car, where we found that vegetarian options were nearly non-existent. The train ran out of the pre-made sandwiches they were selling in coach entirely, long before everyone got a chance to say whether they wanted one or not. The overall impression I got was that Amtrak cannot be trusted to actually be able to feed you.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:53 AM on August 28, 2018