• Tag Archives train

  • The Last Steam Engine

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon

    South Bend, Indiana Room 5, car 2901 at the junction of Eastern and Central Time

    Outside the train with his family is a young boy I encountered about 4:00 a.m. with his head down in the toilet. He looks better now, smiling and happy to be on friendly ground.

    The train carried me through western Pennsylvania and northern Ohio, brushing Lake Erie, as I slept. The sound of a train’s horn becomes a machine age lullaby, the slight rocking of the train a metal nanny rocking you to sleep. I realized on the way down that this has an older association for me. Our home on Canal Street in Alexandria, Indiana sat only a couple of blocks from the Nickel Plate Railroad’s tracks. Each night at midnight the nation’s lasting functioning steam engine came through town and sounded its horn where the tracks crossed nearby Monroe Street.

    It feels good to be headed north where 70 is a more normal high during the day, not at night. The heat and traveling alone began to wear on me on the last day in Savannah. I chose a refueling option with the rental car that made it optimal to bring the car back empty. Near the time I decided to go the airport to drop off the car I began looking for a seafood place for a last lunch. None appeared. Even with the air conditioning on the heat beat against the car. Wanting to shed the responsibility I drove to the airport and by the time I got there I was hot, hungry and bit nervous about my nearly empty gas tank.

    In part this was a reflection of my desire to be quit of this place and, like the young boy, to be back on friendly ground. Back now in the Midwest, riding through Indiana on the way to Chicago, I have gotten there. The train makes travel simple, so I can focus on enjoying the ride.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • Cumberland Gap

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon May 30th, toward evening

    Capitol Limited, traveling through the Cumberland Gap

    We passed Cumberland, West Virgina 15 minutes ago. The train stopped near the Union Rescue Mission. Nearby a man with a sleeveless t-shirt, a gut and a gray beard shrugged. Beside him a four year old boy with no shirt mimicked his shrug. Exactly.

    The Cumberland Gap is a true piece of Americana, the first straightforward path through the Appalachia’s. Until its discovery the west was difficult to reach for all but the most determined. We went through a long stretch of no phone service, maybe 100 miles in western Maryland.

    At supper I met a guy who works for the Bosch company. He says the company has a charitable foundation. No big news there. If it works the way he said it does, though, the reality amazes. He says each year the foundation divides up the profits. The company is wholly owned by the Bosch family. They get 2-3% of the profit. The board which helps them manage gets the same. The rest, 94% or so each year, goes to the foundation for charitable work. Last year the profit was $67,000,000,000. That’s one hell of a lot of money. Or, at least it was before the bank bail-outs.

    A weird thing on the way to the metro to the Smithsonian. I saw a guy that looked a lot like my Dad. He a Red Skins hat on and a Hawai’ian style shirt, but he had the Spitler nose and Dad’s distinctive cheek bones and squarish face. He looked enough like him to make me look twice.

    I forgot about him. Then,while I ate lunch at the Smithsonian Castle Cafe, he came through the hallway beside the table where I sat. This second encounter caused my imagination to leap into high gear. What if it was Dad? Why now? What would we say to each other?

    There was a moment where I pushed myself all the way into that scenario. I allowed myself to imagine actually encountering my Dad father, after all these years. What would our conversation have been like? A frisson of fear shot through me. Dead Dad, after all. I realized the conversation we’d had would have been much like the one’s in life. Interesting, but somehow disengaged, distant.

    It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I would have asked a question or two about the afterlife.

    The train just went around a curve, still here in the Cumberland Gap. I could see our engines and the other cars ahead of us. The sleeping cars come last in the train. I imagine that cuts down on traffic in the hallways.

    I’ll sign off now as the sun sinks down below the Appalachian mount just ahead of us.


    📂This entry was posted in Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • Savannah Train Station

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane         Waxing Dyan Moon

    Savannah Amtrak Station, waiting on the Silver Meteor which the stationmaster said will be 20 minutes late.

    After leaving the rental car to the tender mercies of the Alamo cleaners, I took a taxi from the airport to the Amtrak station. In the process I rode on early 20th century technology to get to 19th century technology, displaced by the mid 20th century phenomenon of the commercial jet.

    When I first arrived at 6:00 p.m., I had the station all to myself. The stationmaster asked how far I wanted to check “this big boy.” All the way to Minneapolis.

    He gave me a new ticket folder because the trip down had crumpled the old one.

    The first additional travelers to arrive were a short, squat man with brill cream slicked back hair, an Asian boy in sandals whom he treated as a son and two short pinch fenced red heads headed back to some school or the other. They were family and had, apparently long ago, mastered the art of conversations in which each of them talked at the same time. It was a peculiar experience. Like watching unfamiliar animals in their habitat.

    Now there are many people in the station, that movement of people in and out of public places that finds them alternately empty and crowded, as tides of passengers or audiences or students come and go. The change is from dead to alive, a space with no buzz to a space filled with the agendas of strangers mixed together for a brief period.

    It may be the relative novelty of train travel, but all this seems more human, certainly less desparate than the airport, even the small one I left earlier today.

    Now there are two Amtrak employees here.

    Every one stays in their small spaces, talking to those whom they know. One thing travelers do is find small spaces they can claim as their own. This space, no matter if its only a plastic seat in a crowded room, provides a refuge from the chaos of others and their unknown purposes. This is one of the chief advantages of train travel, it allows a space with real boundaries, a place you can fall asleep while traveling.

    Yes, it takes longer, but the process has a definite scale to it that seems to match me. Rather than flung in the air by great jet engines, we will glide over the rails, pulled forward by hulking engines with humans at the controls, in fact riding on the engine itself.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • Memory

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane          Waxing Dyan Moon

    Acela Lounge,  Washington, D.C.

    Leg two of the trip begins in about two hours, the Capitol Limited to Chicago.  This is, again, a sleeper.  The first few hours in daylight will take us through Maryland, West Virginia and into Pennsylvania.  As night comes, we’ll travel through western Pennsylvania and Ohio, reaching Chicago at 8:40 a.m. on Sunday, June 1st.

    This morning I saw the Phillips collection again.  It’s strange the way memory shapes expectations.  Two falls ago I went to New York and revisited the Cloisters, once one of my favorite places.  This time it seemed smaller, less magical.  Why?  I can’t say.

    The Phillips collection was the same.  Though there were a couple of Bonnards and Cezannes that drew me in, the Morris Louis paintings, especially his blue column and the Rothko room, the rest left me flat.

    The D.C. metro though was as good as I recalled.  It’s clean, easy to use and reasonably priced.

    I took it to the Freer where the piece that jumped out at me was Whistler’s Peacock Room.  So overdone, but at the same so cohesive and beautiful.

    A meal at the Smithsonian Castle Cafe and I headed back to the station.  It’s the afternoon.  Hot.  I remembered.  Besides it’s also the time when I take a nap.  Which I plan to do right now.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • Last Stop of the Capitol Limited

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    May 16, 2009 Beltane Waning Flower Moon

    The Capitol Limited Somewhere outside Cumberland, Maryland

    9:30 a.m. EST

    Slept last night very well. Early to bed around 10p.m. Tired from early rising and a full day of travel. The train rocked me to sleep as lightning flashed across the northern sky. I went to bed in Elkhart, Indiana and woke up in Pittsburgh.

    In a tunnel right now. I’m not sure if this is the one but somewhere along here the ends of the tunnel are in W. Va. and the tunnel itself in Maryland. I have no idea.

    Took a shower on the train. It was an ordinary enough shower except it moved like an LA bathroom in a mild tremor. There’s a small area with a seat, two hooks for clothing and a mirror, then a shower stall with non-skid plastic. I took my sandals with me, but habit took over and I was in the shower in my bare feet before I remembered them.

    I ate breakfast this morning with a couple from Idaho who have a small hotel near Jhallus, Idaho, the Holiday Lodge. They were nice folks. May go visit since I’ve never been to Idaho.

    I’m writing this in my roomette as we travel slowly through the Appalachian range. \I believe we passed through the Cumberland Gap about 15 minutes ago. A lot of history on this route. After a stop in Cumberland, Maryland we head for Harper’s Ferry. Two stops after that and we’re in D.C.

    The layover in Washington will be 4+ hours. I plan to have a walk around with the camera, then back to Union Station. No museum on the way down. On the way back I’ll have 6 hours and I’ll hit the Freer and the Phillips.

    5:30 p.m.   First Class Lounge, Union Station, Washington,DC

    We got in a little late, but no worries since my train, #97, the Silver Meteor, does not leave until 7:30 p.m.  I’m not sure, but since this is a southbound train starting in Boston, it might be an agist pun.  If not, it oughta be.

    Louisiana Avenue runs at a diagonal away from Union Station toward the National Mall.  I walked in the heat, keeping to the shade of trees and buildings, taking the occasional shot of the Capitol building and angling toward the National Gallery of Art.  Along the way I began noticing what is very old news to inside the beltway folks, but struck me with force.  Every Federal building has barriers to car and truck bombers.  I took some photos and when I get home I’ll add them back into this post.

    They struck me because their defensiveness could not be more apparent.  They seem look like Lilliputian threads tieing down the outsized force of Uncle Sam.

    On the way into Washington we stopped at Harper’s Ferry; John Brown’s body is still a’moltin’ in the grave. (what is molting anyway?)  I got to thinking about approaching D.C.  It would be the same as approaching, in different eras:  London, Rome, Istanbul, Baghdad, Xian, Beijing, Mexico City in the time of the Aztecs. No matter how the US goes down in the annals of future centuries it will still be a colossus that strode, for awhile, as the world’s hegemon.  Its capitol, where I write this, may provide future history channel specials:  Washington in the Time of the  Presidents!

    Those of us who live in the Midwest come to the Capitol as country folks, far away from the deal making and policy wonking that creates buzz here in D.C.  We might have a few clods of earth stuck to our shoes, perhaps a straw struck in our mouths.  At least I hope we do, not because we lack intellectual or cultural sophistication, but because agriculture and care of the land is our heritage and if we do not come to power as our true selves who can replace us?

    I’m gonna stow my bags again and wander around in the Station for a bit.  Talk to you later.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics Travel 📎and tagged

  • Post Garage Sale

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane            Waning Flower Moon

    I’m going to help Kate take down the garage sale.  Then, if it has not started raining, I’ll move yet more daylilies.  Daylilies are the plant that goes on giving.  They will be here long after we are, in fact, they may be our most permanent legacy.

    As the date of the Hilton Head trip comes closer, my thoughts turn to sitting on the train, Kindle 2 in hand, reading as the Midwest, then the east coast and finally the deep south pass by.   I love every part of traveling as long as I’m not flying.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • Leaving on A Slow Train

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                         Full Flower Moon

    A week from tonight I will be asleep or almost so on an outbound train from Chicago to Washington, D.C.  After several hours during the day on Saturday in D.C., the train for Savannah leaves Union Station, arriving around 6:30 a.m. the next day.  Slow travel seems to fit with the life I’ve come to lead, one that waits on the natural rhythms for flowers and vegetables, fruit and honey.

    Travel became a family insignia, we should have trains, planes and ships, buses and taxis on our family crest, the Ellis family crest that is.  We are a peripatetic group.  Mark travels regularly around Southeast Asia, frequenting Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam while basing himself in Thailand.

    Mary will travel sometime this year to Athens from Singapore where she will present the results of her Ph.D. work.  She gets to England now and again in addition to returning to the US.  She will not, however, be able to come this year because the Singapore Government has banned official travel to the US due to the H1N1 flu.  Her travel is official because the university for which she works pays for her ticket and the university is an arm of the government.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Travel 📎and tagged