America's trains: My poignant, torturous track to Utica

I'm what you might call a train buff—not the obsessive camera-toting variety who hangs around stations and crossings snapping “action” shots, but nonetheless a passionate devotee of railroad travel.

Overnight train trips I took as a small child got me started, but I really caught the bug over Christmas vacation in 1966, when my family went on a skiing holiday in Taos. My parents wanted to go the old-fashioned way, so we rode the Santa Fe's legendary Super Chief, from Dearborn Street Station, in Chicago, to Raton, N.M.

No transatlantic voyage could have held more romance for a 10-year-old. I vividly recall the jelly omelette served in the immaculate first-class dining car, the cozy fold-out beds and the distinctive Fred Harvey restaurant signs along the way. Best of all was the bliss of sitting in the dome car at night with my dad, lights dimmed as we glided in hushed silence through Joliet, Ill., past the flaming coke and steel plants. Unlike most other railroads, desperate to get out of passenger service, the Santa Fe maintained its standards to the end, so this was an experience close to the glory days of the 1930s and '40s. It wasn't an experience that you could have in a car or plane, and I was hooked.

Too bad. The government-driven decline of long-distance passenger trains (“whittling away service instead of killing it,” as the National Association of Railroad Passengers puts it) continued unabated through the creation of Amtrak, in 1971, and every train trip I took as a teenager and young adult seemed worse than the last. I doggedly kept trying, back and forth to college from Chicago to New York, trips to the West Coast, but I finally gave up on long hauls. Too many delays, too much bad micro-waved food and the time pressures of adult life ended my long-distance-train-trip idyll.

Or so I had thought until last month. I needed to get to Utica, N.Y., to pick up my older daughter from camp, and the nearest jet service was to Syracuse. I could have fought the traffic to Kennedy Airport and then driven 60 miles at the other end. But Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited to Chicago offered four-hour-and-forty-four-minute service to downtown Utica from Penn Station, and I figured that the hour or so I might save taking the plane wasn't worth it. I hoped that Amtrak had changed for the better.

I jumped in a cab on the Upper West Side at about 2:40 p.m., squeezing through midtown traffic to Penn Station by 3:05, in time to make the 3:20 train. I cut it close, but compared with a nail-biting ride to the airport, plus getting through security, this was a breeze.

Heavy bag in hand, I jogged to the departure board and found an ominous announcement: Lake Shore Limited #49—Delayed. I asked the bored-looking information clerk why. “Amtrak will announce the new departure time,” he replied with practiced indifference. “They haven't told us anything.” Likewise, no one had told me anything, including the nickname for my delayed train: The Late for Sure Limited.

My heart sank. Penn Station is a hideous parody of a train station, a lousy place to kill time. Also, I had hoped to reach Utica at a decent hour for dinner, since I wasn't quite ready to risk Amtrak's rolling cuisine.

We received no further explanation and pulled out of Penn Station 50 minutes late. I grabbed the last window seat in a packed coach car—the all-reserved train was sold out—and settled back to enjoy the lovely Hudson River scenery, hoping we would make up time. If this wasn't the New York Central's crack 20th Century Limited, leaving from Grand Central station and a red-carpeted platform, at least I was on a moving train.

Or was I? At Croton-Harmon the Lake Shore came to an agonizing halt. The engine's computer had failed and with it the electric power. A train engine dependent on a computer?! Of course, said the conductor. Where had I been? Over the PA he announced the “bad news” and the “good news”: “The computer is down but we're not circling at 30,000 feet.” Funny perhaps, but I was beginning to fear one of those trips that wind up in the newspaper, with violent passengers arrested and abused crew members filing lawsuits.

Then—hurray!—the computer was booted up and air circulation was restored. But soon after resuming we stopped again, shunted to a siding. Once a train is late it loses its place in line, and every on-time train seems to get priority. Depressed in the café car, I watched those other trains race by, resisting the urge to drink. I would need my wits about me if I jumped off and hitched a ride to Albany.

Back in my coach, cynicism was in the air. The large, overweight man with the smart feathered hat in the row in front of me remarked drily into his cell phone, “We should make Chicago by next week.” My seatmate, a woman headed for Rome, N.Y., became increasingly agitated. More troubling was that she wouldn't place her bags in the luggage rack, which would have allowed me easier access to the toilet.

“What if I forget my bag when we get to Utica?” she plaintively asked. Who says we're getting to Utica, I thought of saying, but instead promised to remind her when we arrived. She finally moved her stuff.

But using the lavatory was becoming problematical. The toilet was sloshing, not flushing, and the sink was backed up. It was a good thing I hadn't tried to drown my unhappiness with beer, I consoled myself. Then, horrors! We slowed again to a crawl approaching Albany, and I wasn't so sure that my bladder would hold out until the promised engine change and maintenance rendezvous with the plumber.

After we inched into the Albany station, things got worse—and weirder. Between engines, without power, no one was permitted to go near the now cresting toilet. A group of women became desperate and so our heroically patient and courteous car attendant, Leroy Peets, got them permission from the conductor to use the rest rooms in the station up the stairs. I worried: Will this train wait for the ladies to return? Then I worried about me: Feeling a bit like the cowards who sneaked on to the lifeboats on the Titanic, I followed the ladies upstairs, relieved myself and sprinted back down to the platform.

But another crisis was looming. On the platform, a middle-aged, disabled woman with a companion dog could not get her canine aide back on the train. Half Rottweiler, half Border Collie, Bella was evidently terrified of the train. She hadn't wanted to board the connecting train in Boston to begin with. Now, smelling freedom, she wasn't about to continue the overnight journey to Chicago. Ears flattened, legs rigid, Bella would not be cajoled, either by gentle persuasion or subtle force.

Had anyone tried bribery? What did Bella like to eat, I asked the lady. She suggested a hot dog. I hurried to the café car, but the attendant was taking his break, eating dinner in the dark.

“Can I get a hot dog?,” I asked timidly. “I need it to coax this lady's dog back on to the train.”

“Not for the dog,” he replied.

“I'll pay for it”.

“I don't have [microwave] power to cook it.”

“I'll take it raw,” I said, and the man grudgingly rose. I forked over $3.75.

But Bella wouldn't touch the hot dog. Pity poor Amtrak. I decided then I wouldn't be eating in the dining car, no matter how late it got.

Arriving in Utica (by my watch one hour and thirty six minutes late), I wondered at the pathos, and the strange intimacy, of my grim journey, with its poignant ending.

By that point, Bella, who had had finally been muzzled and hoisted onto the train in a kind of plastic wrap, was comfortably ensconced on the floor next to her owner. I was curious about this odd couple, and so just before getting off the train in Utica, I visited them in their seats, where the owner told me part of her sad life story. Clearly intelligent, the woman was moving back to Albuquerque after five years on a farm in Maine and hoping to get some “research work.”

Bella had come into her life when the woman was felled by “anxiety,” diabetes and a disintegrating backbone. “I tried analysis for two years, but Bella is better.”

On the bright side, the woman had a little room on a sleeper car booked on the Southwest Limited the next day out of Chicago, where she would retrace the very same route I had taken 40 years before. The privacy seemed likely to lower Bella's anxiety.

I was tempted to tell her my Super Chief memories, but I didn't want to make our train trip any sadder than it already was.

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