Stories from the road: the train experience
Thursday was my first day off: a travel day. A short cab ride and I was in Boston’s historic south station. To my delight, they even had a bookstore in the center of the main concourse.
The train is a better experience than air travel, hands down. The stations are often beautiful old buildings with dramatic large spaces and high ceilings. Getting on and off doesn’t require snaking security lines and obsessive ID and boarding pass checks. Wandering around South station I kept looking up, entertained by the sheer size of the waiting area. They just don’t build buildings like that anymore. Unlike airports, you get a sense that you’re really somewhere, even while you’re waiting to go somewhere else.
On the trains themselves there’s more room, power access and a dining car (the food ain’t great, but you’re choices are better than airplane’s standard chicken or pasta). And unlike air-travel where there’s a rush hour panic vibe and people’s smelly elbows in your face, the train is downright civilized. Plenty of space. Wide seats. Quiet cars. I suspect the 8am train would have been crazier than my 11:15, but I had a most enjoyable ride.
Perhaps I have train envy. In Seattle, where I live, it doesn’t seem we’ll ever have train service of any kind. The history of mass transit here is a tragic tale than spans decades and is simply too sad to get into here. It’s a classic tale of bad project management.
3 hours later I arrived at Penn Station and had my ritualistic thrill of walking up to the chaos of the midtown NYC streets. That energy rush always gets a rise out of me: it’s the lovable insanity of home.