Around the U.S. By Train – Part 8

July 28, 2008 Amtrak 7 Comments

During the night, the Lake Shore Limited crosses up-state New York, a corner of Pennsylvania and heads into Ohio. I raise my window shade to the soft light of dawn. We’re in Toledo and crossing the Maumee River just before it empties into Lake Erie.

Breakfast in the dining car is enjoyable because I’m seated with a young man who is on his way back to Chicago after helping a friend move to New York City. They attended an inter-league game between the Cubs and White Sox in Chicago, then loaded a rented truck with the friend’s belongings and drove it to New York. After unloading and with no sleep for two-plus days, he bought a coach ticket on the Lake Shore and headed home. He’s bleary-eyed, but after several cups of coffee and with a good breakfast in front of him, we are soon deep into an animated baseball conversation. He is a devoted fan of the White Sox and, since I have a similar devotion to the Bostion Red Sox, we discover a deep common bond: we both have a loathing of the New York Yankees which, we happily agree, borders on the irrational, but is understandable, justifiable and absolutely normal.

Outside our dining car window, the landscape has flattened out and we’re passing fields of corn, tidy farm houses and barns, most of them in the traditional Dutch colonial design and painted in the classic red.

The Lake Shore slows to a crawl and the conductor announces that we have done so to allow a CSX freight train to cross in front of us. Many of these freights are close to 7,000 feet long and can cause real problems when trundling slowly through these small mid-western towns. Of course traffic stalls at intersections waiting for the freights to pass, but the worst case scenario is a fire breaking out on one side of town and the fire equipment having to wait for a slow freight to clear an intersection before being able to respond. Anticipating that, many of these towns have had to duplicate fire and police facilities on each side of the tracks, effectively doubling the cost of equipment and personnel.

There’s nothing fancy about these little towns. Most have a main street lined with small shops and stores, with houses on the nearby streets modest in size and of simple, utilitarian design – all a reflection of mid-western values and tastes.

Just past Waterloo, Indiana, we pass several huge piles of wooden railroad ties, evidence of the extensive track work being done all along this route.

The Lake Shore rattles along now at a steady pace while outside the houses come more frequently and begin to blend into light industrial areas. Soon, well up ahead but rising well above the other buildings on the skyline is the distinctive profile of the Sears Tower. Chicago is dead ahead.


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