On the Amtrak Tracks

I GOT the idea of riding the Amtrak tracks after watching a TV series called Billy Connolly’s Tracks across America, in which the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly went all round the USA by train.

‘That looks like fun!’, I thought. I loved how he got to meet the people: he was greeted in Montana by country music as he got off the train and met a woman with over 100 pieces of Elvis Presley memorabilia, things like mirrors and key rings! It sounded so interesting and down to earth, and if I did the same thing, I would be able to sit back and enjoy the scenery as well.

For me driving in the US was hard to get used to because it’s the opposite side of the road to New Zealand, and we sure don’t have Interstate Highways like they do in the US! Although having said that, the Interstates are probably safer than New Zealand’s winding roads.

It made total sense to take the train. And so, when I was in Texas, I bought an Amtrak pass costing $900 for a 45-day, 18-segment journey, valid for the more than 500 destinations that Amtrak stop at, in 46 out of the 48 contiguous states of the USA. Amtrak trains don’t visit Wyoming or South Dakota, nor Hawai‘i nor Alaska. Otherwise, you can get to every state and to Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal in Canada as well, though you have to pay a bit extra when running on Canadian track as the Amtrak pass is strictly for US use.

(All prices given in this book are in US dollars, by the way!)

The pass isn’t the same thing as a ticket. You use it to get the individual tickets for what Amtrak call segments, each segment a single journey in which you get on the train and get off or, if no train goes where you are going, an Amtrak Thruway bus. These often run between rail tracks in sections of America where the tracks don’t meet. The pass is valid for getting a ticket on most of these, also counting as a segment.

The price of the pass covers sit-up seating in Coach Class. On some trains, it is possible to upgrade a segment to Business Class or a sleeper. The latter is recommended if you are planning to sleep on the train, as you probably won’t be able to sleep otherwise. The most affordable sleeper accommodation for one or two people is what Amtrak calls a Roomette, which seats two across from one another and converts to bunks.

You can check out all these options on Amtrak’s website, namely, amtrak.com.

I did a heap of research on the American rail system. Rail travel is on the rise across the US because it is cheap, and also, because it is becoming fashionable again in the face of crowded airports and obtrusive airport security checks, which are putting people off flying in a big way. A further advantage of trains is that the main stations are in the middle of cities whereas airports aren’t. And wi-fi and other electronic technologies have also revolutionized the potential productivity of time spent on the train.

The glamour has gone off cars and air travel alike these days. Who would have thought the old technology of the train would come back into vogue?

As the city centres have once more become fashionable and gentrified, this has added to the appeal of the train. All that America needs now are genuinely high-speed trains of the sort they have in Europe and Asia. Outside of the Northeast Corridor, the almost continuously urbanised area between Boston and Washington DC that is served by the up to 150 mph (240 km/h) Acela Express. The Acela is Amtrak’s most glamorous service and the only one with First Class seats in addition to Business Class (there are no Coach Class seats on Acela).

Apart from that, Amtrak services are slow and sedate, considering the distances that are involved. Train speed limits in the USA are mostly 79 mph (126 km/h), a speed limit that dates back to 1947, and American trains often don’t make that speed.

The (relatively) slow speed of most American passenger train services remains a handicap, though it is fair to say that many people ride the rails precisely to get away from a world where everything is in a rush.

Amtrak is a passenger-only service, run by the US Government. It was founded in 1971, when the US Government took over 336 passenger rail routes that had become unprofitable and pruned them back to 184. The Amtrak trains often have to give way to freight trains, and this is another reason why Amtrak services are generally slow.

The exception that proves this rule is the Acela high-speed service between the major cities of the north-eastern seaboard, which reaches 150 mph in places (240 km/h), though only in places as even the Acela has to give way to freight here and there.

Joe Biden, who actually has something of the common touch and more genuinely so than Trump, used to ride the Acela and other Amtrak trains to and from Washington when he was Vice-President just like any other commuter, to the point of acquiring the nickname ‘Amtrak Joe’.

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As Biden got to be more famous his tickets were booked under other names to foil would-be assassins, though apart from that he still kept commuting on the train just like anybody else even when Vice-President, racking up an estimated 8,200 round-trip commutes to the consternation of his bodyguards. Biden regrets that now that he is actually President, it really does now have to be all helicopters and stuff and the old informal days are over.

The hand-me-down nature of Amtrak stands in sharp contrast to the spread of high-speed rail in China, which has expanded from nothing in 2007 to 38,000 km (24,000 miles) of track by the end of 2020, with roughly as much again expected to have been built by 2035.

If America were China, most of the Amtrak tracks I travelled on would be high speed rail routes, and probably all of them by now. That is another reason to suspect that America has seen better days.

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Instead, the Americans seem to attribute a sort of museum-like significance to their railways, with rich people, firms and celebrities trundling about in private carriages, known as ‘private varnish’ because they tend to have a lot of old-fashioned wood panelling.

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Presumably, the longer the train takes to get to wherever it is going, the more the owners of private varnish get their money’s worth.

So, I might have spotted someone famous on one of my train journeys! And a journey some of the rides are. It’s easy to rack up hours and hours on the trains getting from A to B. My first Amtrak segment, a six-hour journey from Houston to New Orleans, was really nothing but a scratch on the surface of America.

Though it plays second fiddle to freight, Amtrak is subsidized so that people can get around cheaply and also, interestingly enough, in order to boost the viability of railways that might otherwise struggle if they were used only for freight.

My pass was strictly for long-distance cheap travel and did not extend to urban commuter trains, nor the Acela, nor to another popular service, the Autotrain, which runs between suburban Washington DC and a station near Orlando in Florida.

The Autotrain enables people from the cold north-east to travel to and from Florida with their cars, while at the same time avoiding an unfeasibly epic drive through pretty much the whole of the Old South to get there.

People I met on the Amtrak trains said it was much cheaper than owning a car. Even so, Amtrak rail travel isn’t just for poor people but for a mixture of people, cultures, occupations, education and ages. You had one lot of people who had low incomes, and then other people who paid $300 a night for a luxury sleeper, all on the train together.

To round off, here are some scenes that I photographed.

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