The Best Part of Long-Distance Train Trips

Amtrak dining cars feature communal seating, which means you’ll be taking your meals with other passengers unless you’re in a party of four. And that, for my money, is one of the best things about traveling by train, especially long-distance trains. During my many train trips, I have met a host of interesting people, including …

· A Japanese doctor doing research on organ transplants in Boston and, like me, a Red Sox fan,

· A man from El Paso who is a railroad engineer for the Union Pacific,

· A Yale history professor, an expert in the very areas through which we were passing at the time,

· A high school physics teacher from England, who was seeing America by rail,

· A real estate agent from Los Angeles who told me the best part of her visit to Paris was touring the Bastille. (It was torn down in 1789.)

On one occasion, while crossing the Rocky Mountains on the California Zephyr, I was chatting with a very nice man for at least a half hour before we discovered that for some 20 years we had lived within a quarter-of-a-mile of each other in the town of Kailua on Oahu. (All together now: What a small world!)

I’m really not sure why it is, but those unique personal exchanges almost never happen when you travel by plane.

On a flight home to Maui after a recent trip to the mainland, I sat in silence for five hours next to a woman in an adjacent seat. I had made some tentative conversational overtures as we were leaving, but got almost nothing in response. As we were coming to a stop at the gate, she finally turned to me and said, “What hotel are you staying at?”

“I live here,” I replied.

“Well, have a nice day,” she said. And she headed for the exit.