Riding the Rails
Off to a dinner date in New
York City. This presents me with a choice: to drive, or take the train.
My house is 36 miles from the Empire State
Building as the crow flies, so I am far beyond the reach of the subway
system. If I want to ride the rails I
depend on the Long Island Rail Road. Driving
in for an evening date like this one, I may be able to find a parking
place on the Manhattan streets, but more likely will end up spending $20
on garage parking. Add in $5 for gas and I
am way over the cost of a train ride — $15 round trip to Penn Station.
On the other hand, as a driver I have my
freedom. I can leave the event when I please and drive straight home.
Taking the train, if I time my departure
wrong, I can be sitting an hour in Penn waiting for a train.
But then, on the other other hand, there
is the near inevitability of a stressful traffic jam and a late arrival .
. . I decide to take the train.
I can never ride the Long Island Rail Road nowadays without a smug,
holiday sort of feeling. For seven years I
rode the wretched thing every day to a job in Manhattan.
Seven years! — more than three thousand trips on a packed
commuter train, in full business kit! Now,
thank God, working for myself, in my own home, I ride only if I choose to,
and generally in off hours. I go to the
station now like a soldier returning in peacetime to one of his old
battlefields.
Battlefield it sometimes was. I recall at
least two fights with fellow commuters. (The
word “fight” here is to be understood in the context of middle-class
suburban gentility. These were shouting
matches with, at worst, some rude gesticulation, garnished with
suggestions that the other party, being plainly too exquisite a soul to
endure the conditions of a crowded train without bursting into tears,
might perhaps be better off taking a coach and four to his place of
employment.) Both my opponents were
boorish idiots — Democrats, I feel sure. One
was so obese he slopped over into my third of the three-across seat,
obliging me to assert territorial rights by jamming my left elbow into his
blubber. Another, seated next to me,
leaned over to read what I was typing into my laptop computer, without
even a pretense that he was doing anything else, and made a childish fuss
when I told him to mind his own stinking business. Militavi
non sine gloria.
There were occasional fatalities, too. Anna
Karenina’s example continues to inspire, and more than once my commuter
train was slowed or stopped due to a “fatal incident” on the track.
One of these occasions was in the depths
of winter, so that from my window I could see bright splashes of blood in
the trackside snow as we eased past, leading to something hidden from
sight beneath a bright yellow plastic shroud, something smaller than an
intact human body. My homebound train was,
too, one behind the train on which Colin Ferguson went berserk and shot 25
fellow commuters, killing six of them, in December 1993.
Our train was held up for over an hour,
and we had no clue what had happened, this being in the era B.C.P. —
before cell phones. My wife, watching the
TV news at home, was frantic with worry, though kind neighbors came in to
keep her company. (Telling me about it
afterwards, she reported that: “People kept saying the same thing: ‘It
must have been a black guy. If it was a
white guy, they would have told us.’” So
much for the careful sensitivities of the U.S. media.)
These commuter trains are, of course, little more than glorified subways.
This is especially true on the L.I.R.R.,
which does not go anywhere. The lines
north and west out of New York City were genuine railroads going to
distant cities — Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore. Their
commuter function was grafted on to a history of real locomotives hauling
real people to real places. The L.I.R.R.
never went anywhere, and there is something slightly bogus about its staff
of uniformed conductors, its printed timetables, its high-flown
announcements about “station stops” and “brake tests.” Hey:
If you’re a real train, give us a buffet car. Otherwise,
why don’t you just integrate with the city subway system?
Even those better-appointed commuter lines going north and west are still
not trains in the full sense. A real train
has compartments and corridors. My English
childhood was full of these wonderful conveyances. With
very little difficulty I can still summon up the warm, dusty smell of the
seat fabric, the little framed pictures of seaside resorts or
mountainscapes that decorated the compartments, the fold-up tables you
could race toy cars on, the strenuous finger-crushing maneuver with a
leather strap that you had to execute in order to open a window, the
drafty, ill-lit shabbiness of a waiting-room all fugged up with cigarette
smoke . . . Robert Louis Stevenson’s book
A Child’s Garden of Verses was a great favorite in my family, and
we all knew the clattering trochees of “From a Railway Carriage”:
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches . . .
My own children were denied these pleasures until we all went off to spend
a summer in China two years ago. Then they savored the luxurious delights
of “soft sleeper” class (two bunks on each side of a closed compartment)
and the gymnastic adventure of “hard sleeper” (three bunks on each side of
a compartment open to a common corridor). These experiences were, to judge
from the children’s subsequent reminiscences, far more thrilling to them
than the Great Wall or the Summer Palace. They are spoiled for the Long
Island Rail Road now, though. A weekend trip into Manhattan used to be a
treat to look forward to. Now, they can’t be bothered.
On this particular evening the ride into the city is uneventful, but I
mistime the end of my date horribly, and end up with 45 minutes to kill in
Penn Station. It is a miserable place, the one bookstore closed at this
time of night, the magazine outlets patrolled by vigilant Pakistanis who
stand behind you making dramatic throat-clearing noises if you browse a
magazine for more than ten seconds. I slink off at last to the waiting
room, just behind a noisy swarm of sports fans from some event at Madison
Square Garden. By the time I get in there, all the seats are taken.
At
11:30 p.m. on a weekday, I cannot sit down in Penn Station!
Glumly, a little tipsy, I stand there waiting for my train.
My mind
wanders. I recall a trip I made to Alabama just ten days ago.
I had a
rented car and drove all round the state for a week. Major sporting events
aside, I was never once held up in bad traffic. When people ask me for my
impressions of Alabama, the first thing that comes to mind is: “Wonderful
roads!” I don’t know anything about the trains in Alabama, but with roads
like that, who needs trains? Someone remind me, please:
Why do I live
anywhere near New York City?
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