SUNDAY, August 6
Somewhere in Indiana to Braintree, Massachusetts
Although probably easier than on a bus or plane, sleeping on a train is still not an easy task. It is especially challenging when a train full of people have left the station late. It seemed as if everyone on the train was walking back and forth to the lounge and dining cars and everyone in our car was going to the restroom. There are automatic doors between the cars, and all night long we heard them opening and closing. The restroom doors creak when they open, and the toilets themselves flush with a loud whoosh. Beyond the noise, it's difficult to find a comfortable position to sleep in. The car attendant passed out tiny pillows to each passenger, but one small pillow hardly softens a hard seat and arm rest. I tossed and turned, but it was far from a restful night.
Before 6am Eastern time I was wide awake. I went to the restroom, shaved, and changed into clean clothes. By the time I returned Margaret was also awake. When Ira had made his annoying announcements last night, he had said the dining car would be opening for breakfast at 6:30. Since we were utterly famished, promptly at that hour we headed up to the diner. When we got there, there was nobody in the car. We waited around a bit, and eventually an employee showed up and asked us what we wanted. When we said we were there for breakfast, he snapped at us and said there would be a wait. Apparently they had changed the breakfast schedule because they had been open until 2:30am serving dinner. No one had made any announcement to that effect, though, nor had they posted any change of schedule at the entrance to the diner.
We went to the lounge car and had coffee while we waited for them to start serving breakfast. While there we visited with a woman who had boarded the train in Waterloo, Indiana. There is no actual station in Waterloo, just a glorified bus stop with no shelter. She told us the train was no running six hours behind schedule, and she had waited in the rain for those six hours before the it finally showed up in Waterloo.
I had assumed by breakfast time we would at be well into Ohio. In fact, we were just at the Indiana/Ohio border. We finally got to Toledo while we were eating breakfast. Everyone who had taken this train before noted that while being a little late was common, six hours was very unusual. We found later, though, that lateness tends to compound itself. The biggest problem Amtrak has is that it doesn't own most of the tracks the trains run on. The tracks are owned by the freight railroads (CSX, Norfolk Southern, and BNSF), and freight trains take priority. When Amtrak runs close to schedule, it has built in slots that allow it to move through signals with relatively little interference. However, when it departs unusually late, like we did from Chicago, it is thrown out of the loop. The late trains have lost their slotting and are given absolute bottom priority in movement. Apparently we had just waited on the tracks in Indiana for an hour and a half while freight trains passed before we were allowed to move.
Our breakfast companion was a young actor from New York City who had been in Chicago to meet his girlfriend's parents. His girlfriend had flown to Chicago, but the actor was apparently afraid of flying. The two had apparently arranged their schedules so they would get back to New York at about the same time, but now it was certain that the girlfriend would arrive well before him.
Many guide books speak well of the dining car cuisine on Amtrak. Apparently the chefs are trained at famous culinary institutes, and it's all supposed to be top gourmet fare. I must say, though, that I was rather unimpressed with the meals we had. This morning I had French toast and bacon. Both arrived cold, and both were rather flavorless. Margaret had an omelet, which I gather she liked a bit better. Other meals seemed to feature quickly heated pre-prepared meals--very similar to the type of things they serve on planes. On planes, though, the food is free; on Amtrak you pay fairly expensive restaurant prices for rather mediocre food.
The service is also rather inefficient in the dining car. I've worked as a waiter--one of the many hats I wore at the Iris Restaurant years ago--and I have a fairly good idea of the work that is involved in that job. In this Amtrak dining car there were two waiters and the maitre d' to serve the car. That meant each waiter had about six tables of four--a fair load, but less than many waiters in real restaurants serve. While the waiters always seemed to be in motion, they really didn't seem to do much of anything. They simply took your order and brought your food--no refilling coffee or water or asking if everything was all right. The maitre d' didn't seem to do anything other than seat people and handle money. There was a long wait for virtually everything (the guide books describe it as "leisurely dining"), and overall I was unimpressed. I would have left a minimal tip; but Margaret was paying, and she was a bit more generous than me.
It was mid-morning when we finally got to Cleveland. I had been here a year and a half ago on an Easter weekend getaway. The train came in on the exact same route the Cleveland transit trains took to get from my hotel to downtown. I saw the hotel where I had stayed (the Baymont Inn near the airport) and familiar points of interest such as the West Side Market, the new stadium, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Most of Cleveland is hideously ugly, but they've renovated the tiny downtown area (which is where the train stops) into a tourist destination. The place was virtually deserted on Sunday morning--just a few joggers--precisely the same thing I experienced when I was here before.
Sitting across from us on the train was a family from Missoula, Montana--a mother and her three sons. The mother was obviously divorced (she kept speaking vaguely of "the father of my children"), and she was very uncomfortable with raising her kids alone. Whatever her reservations, though, she was doing an excellent job. Rarely have I seen better behaved children. It's hard to keep kids entertained for one hour, let alone a four-day journey from Montana to the East Coast. These kids alternated between listening to music on their headphone CD players, playing cards, and reading. Mom divided her attention between the kids. She would have each kid read aloud to her, and she would question them about what they had seen on the trip. She had packed a seemingly endless supply of snacks, and whenever a child was about to get cranky, she'd dig out the food as a diversion. Train travel is interesting for a while, but any long journey gets boring fast. I was amazed at how well these kids acted all through this trip.
At 10:30am we reached Erie, Pennsylvania, a place I would describe as "classic rust belt". I'm not sure Erie ever was all that prosperous, but today any good days it may have known are long gone. We saw factories with their windows knocked out, downtown buildings that were boarded up, and row houses covered with graffiti. It's really a depressing place, and I was glad when the train started moving again and we headed off into the woods.
Beyond Erie I started feeling the first ties to my ancestors that I would experience repeatedly on this trip. The Lake Shore Limited runs through the extreme southwest corner of New York State--precisely the area where the ancestors on the Burrow side of the family lived before they came to Iowa. As we entered Chautauqua County, I gazed all around to see just what the area looked like. As I had noticed other times I had been to upstate New York, the place looked a lot like eastern Iowa--gently rolling hills with neat fields separated by stands of trees. The one big difference was that in addition to the requisite corn, many of the fields here were actually vineyards, with grape vines instead of soybeans. In spite of the odd crop, though, I could definitely see why my ancestors felt at home in the Hawkeye state.
We had two amusing announcements on the P.A. this morning. First, Ira from the dining car announced breakfast. He was just a loud and obnoxious as last night, but this time we did get a bit of a laugh out of his patter. Most funny was his reference to the train as the "LATE Shore Limited"--in fact, what he actually said was the Late, Late, Late, Late, Late, Late Shore Limited ... one "late" for each of the hours we were behind schedule. The other amusing announcement came when the conductor announced "our next station stop will be in Buffalo in 1 hour, 20 minutes--or more". The whole train burst out laughing when he tacked on that "or more"--but it was hardly surprising given our luck so far on this train.
When we finally got to Buffalo, we had even more delays. The schedule calls for a 15 minute stop at Buffalo, but we were parked at the station (which is out in the middle of nowhere northeast of the city) for a full 45 minutes. We were in the middle of a freight yard with "beautiful" views of a power substation on one side of the tracks and a parking lot on the other. We finally left in the early afternoon--now six and a half hours behind schedule.
We passed more corn and grape fields, many of which were being irrigated in the middle of a long dripping rain. Eventually we got to Rochester, a handsome old city that is obviously wealthier than many of the places around here.
Ira called lunch at 1:45pm (2 hours and 45 minutes later than it was supposed to start). We made reservations, but again there was a delay before we could eat. While we waited in the lounge car, the conductor gave us the Buffalo Sunday paper to read and let us snack on a bunch of grapes his wife had given him. We finally began our lunch at 2:45pm, and we didn't finish until 4:15. Margaret had a chicken pot pie, while I had a chicken strip salad. Our luncheon companions were a yuppie couple from Boulder, Colorado. The woman commuted from Boulder to Cheyenne, Wyoming, while the man apparently worked for an architecture firm in Denver. As we ate we passed through the pleasant old city of Syracuse and the decrepit dump of Utica. (It's interesting that much of upstate New York seems to be named after places in ancient Greece.)
On our way back to our coach, I happened to notice a notebook on one of the lounge tables where the conductor was sitting. It was opened to a page called "Delay Report for Amtrak Trains". The entire page had been filled out, detailing the reasons for delay after delay for our train. We could only wonder what would happen from here onward.
The Lake Shore Limited is the successor to the famous Twentieth Century Limited. In the days when trains were trains, this was the primary connection between east and west. The route is also called the "water level route", because it follows the shoreline most of the way--first along the shores of the Great Lakes and then along the Erie Canal. The Great Lakes were hardly lovely scenery; Ohio and Indiana are heavily built-up and industrial. The trip along the Erie Canal, though, really was beautiful. Most of the area is quite rural, and the land got much more rugged as we headed east. The farms got fewer and fewer, until all we had was lush forest and fields of wildflowers. Most people don't think of New York as one of America's most beautiful states, but the area we went through was absolutely gorgeous.
At 5:30pm the conductor began a series of endless announcements about the fact that the train would be splitting at Albany. The Lake Shore Limited is actually two different trains, #48 and #448. The two trains run together most of the way, as a single train. Then at Albany, #48 (the front part of the train) turns south to New York City while #448 (the back few cars) heads straight east to Boston. Before you get to Albany they seal the two sections off, so you can't pass from one part to the other. It's important that everyone return to their seat before they seal things off, so you don't get caught in the part that's going to the wrong city.
While the conductor was making the announcement, the train stopped dead in the middle of nowhere, somewhere east of Schenectady. We were apparently caught behind a red signal, and we waited and waited and waited and waited before bring allowed to move. Eventually a westbound Amtrak train passed us, and at 6:20 we finally started off again. (I suppose they figured everyone on this train was already about as upset as they could be, so they would keep the people on that westbound train happy by letting them go first.)
Albany is a strange town. It looks as if they completely abandoned what used to be the city center and re-built a new downtown southeast of there. The old part is really run-down, with lots of boarded up buildings. One of the strangest sights we saw was a building that had no windows at all on its lower seven stories. Only above there (where presumably the vandals couldn't reach) did they start putting glass in the solid brick walls.
We crossed the Hudson River around 6:50 and stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere a few minutes later--now seven hours late. We were supposed to reach Albany at lunchtime, but by the time we got to the station the restaurant there had finished supper and was closing. We had a layover in Albany while they split the trains, so we left and went into the station. Shortly after we stopped the New York half of the train left the station. Then they added a new engine and cafe car to our Boston train, re-fueled the engine (why they couldn't have done that in the previous seven hours, I don't know), and did safety tests before pulling back into the station. During the layover I called our motel in Boston to let them know it would be extremely late when we got there and to double-check that the reservation was still confirmed. I then read through the Sunday Albany Times-Union (which was interesting) and New York Post (which was worthless) while we waited some more.
At 7:45 they finally called our train for boarding, and we finally left Albany at 8:00pm. East of here the tracks run through the Berkshire Mountains, and I was disappointed that we would be covering what was probably the most beautiful part of the trip in complete darkness. At least we were moving, though.
The schedule called for six more hours from Albany to Boston, which would have us arriving at 2:00am. Our original plans were to take the subway from Boston's South Station to Braintree, where our motel was located. I knew, though, that the last subway trains left central Boston shortly after midnight--and even if the trains were running, neither of us wanted to take an unfamiliar subway in the wee hours. I asked the conductor whether we could get a cab at that hour, and he assured me we could. I also asked how much it would cost, and after some thought he estimated $25 to $30. I think he thought I might be destitute--which I was perfectly willing to let him think. After all these delays, if Amtrak wanted to pay for our cab, I was only too happy to let them.
Amtrak did conjure up one more apology for the endless delays--dinners for all the Boston passengers. They called everyone to the lounge car and provided us with box lunches with a sandwich, chips, and pop. This was probably about $3 worth of food, and it hardly made up for seven hours of delays. We certainly weren't going to turn it down, though.
Around 8:30 they announced a "smoking session". On larger trains, there is a designated smoking section that is open all the time. From Chicago to Albany this was a glassed off section of the lounge car. For almost the entire trip the same group of teenagers seemed to be sitting in there. When the train split, though, we lost that lounge car. On a short train like we now had running on to Boston, they handle smoking through periodic scheduled sessions. During those half-hour periods, smokers can go to the lounge car and light up. At other times, the there is no smoking anywhere on the train.
The ride across Massachusetts was lively. Everyone was keyed up from the long journey, and absolutely no one slept. We were entertained by Kevin, a sleeping car attendant. Kevin was a portly black man who wore sunglasses indoors at night. He told the Montana kids about life on the rails. Apparently they are scheduled to work a continuous three day shift, making the round trip between Chicago and Boston. Once back in Chicago, they have three days off before working again. The crew is put up at the Suisse Chalet Lodge in Boston, but they would only have about six hours there before they had to check out and go to the station to set up the train for the trip back to Chicago. Kevin told a lot of interesting stories about train work. We found out from him that the death on the L.A. train wasn't all that unusual. Almost anything you can imagine happening does happen at one time or another on Amtrak; the train crews have literally seen it all.
At 11pm I went to the lounge car and picked up some nuts and ginger ale. We gradually made our way through a string of small industrial cities in Massachusetts (most notably Worcester--which is pronounced in the proper British manner, WOOS-ter). Finally the forest gave way to very dark suburbs, and then to the city proper. We finally arrived at South Station around 1am--having made up time since Albany, but still six and a half hours behind schedule. There was a long wait for luggage, but at least we were finally here.
Amtrak had gone out of their way to make arrangements to deal with people who had missed connections due to the delay. At Framingham four taxis were waiting to shuttle passengers who had missed a train to Providence. Other passengers received Greyhound tickets to their final destinations, and two were put up overnight in Boston while they waited for a train that would be leaving the next day. There was even one passenger who was headed to Bangor, Maine, to be with his father during surgery. Amtrak agreed to pay for a cab to take him all the way from Boston--a fare we found out was more than double what his ticket had cost.
While they really didn't have to, Amtrak also treated our missing the subway as a connection problem. Instead of paying for a cab, the man whose title is "Supervisor of the Lake Shore Limited" (basically the "buck stops here" man for this route) personal drove us to our motel in his minivan. He, like almost every Amtrak employee we dealt with except those in the station in Chicago, was very pleasant and helpful. When we mentioned the rude staff in the Windy City, he gave an understanding grunt and said that Chicago was probably Amtrak's biggest problem. He apologized for them, but I will also be writing a letter to Amtrak to make sure their management is aware of the problem.
We drove through an endless series of traffic circles (called "rotaries" here), and all the while police cars wailed their sirens and flashed their lights around us. None of the cops seemed to be in any hurry nor after any vehicle in particular, but they all seemed to be running "code 3". We made it past all the cop cars and took the Southeast Expressway down to Exit 17, the Union Rotary at Braintree. Just west of the station was our motel, the Motel 6--Braintree. The Amtrak man let us off, and we checked in around 2am. We found our room, settled in, and finally around 2:30 went off to sleep.
MONDAY, August 7
Greater Boston, Massachusetts
I was up around 9:30 this morning--after getting a very refreshing rest. I went out exploring the neighborhood, which is mostly an industrial park with a couple of strip malls thrown in. I picked up a few supplies at a K-Mart in one of the strip malls, and by the time I got back to the motel Margaret was just getting up.
We left the motel at 10:30. From a transportation point of view, the Motel 6 couldn't have been better located. While we had chosen it primarily because it was the cheapest place in an extremely expensive city (the only place we could book for less than $100 a night), it was wonderfully located. The motel was literally across the street from the Braintree "T" station, the end of a subway line to downtown and a major commuter rail hub. From Braintree it was about a half hour ride downtown--mostly at ground level, with a nice view of various residential parts of the city.
Boston's "T" is very heavily used. While it's worst at rush hour, there really is no time of day when the trains aren't crowded. It doesn't help that they have very minimal seating space. All the trains have sideways-facing seats with wide aisles down the middle. They can probably seat thirty or so people in each car, and most of the time many more than that are standing. It was fortunate that Braintree was the end of the line, because going into the city we always had seats. The next two stops were in the affluent suburb of Quincy, and by the time we passed them it was always standing room only.
They use a wide variety of equipment on the "T". The red line, which runs to Braintree, uses a combination of old and new cars for its trains. The newer ones make electronic announcements about the destinations, while on the old cars the driver calls off the stops. Our inbound destination was always "Alewife" (pronounced like a beer and a spouse), which is apparently named after some fish. En route we passed Quincy Adams, Quincy Center, Wollaston, North Quincy, and JFK/Umass (where you can connect with buses to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the University of Massachusetts). Shortly after JFK we ducked below ground into the subway. We passed Andrew and Broadway stations and then entered the real downtown area.
At one of the downtown stops we were joined in our car by a group of Naval cadets. These Annapolis men stood out to me, because they wore name badges on their uniforms that announced they were part of the Class of 2003. A former student of mine, Mike Reel, is also in the Naval Academy Class of '03. We never really spoke to the guys, but it would have been interesting to find out if they were acquainted with Mike.
Margaret was amused by the hat etiquette the Annapolis boys exhibited. It is, of course, proper to remove one's hat indoors. There seemed to be some debate among the men as to whether the subway counted as indoors or not. About half of them had their hats off, while the others retained them. I was amused by the one nearest me, when he took his hat off. Tucked inside it were several tourist brochures, mostly advertising bars in Boston. I guess college life is the same everywhere--even in Annapolis.
Both we and the Navy men got off the train at Harvard Square, the collegetown district named after America's oldest university. Margaret had brought along much of the genealogical work my brother Paul has been working on, and I was interested in getting a copy of it myself, so we stopped at a copy store and I fed some nickels into the machine. We then had lunch at a pleasant Chinese restaurant and then checked out the Harvard bookstore.
Next we walked around the Harvard campus. It intrigued me that this snootiest of all schools looked like--well--a college. While it's old, most of it really isn't as old as you might think. They had a fire in the 1700s, and what's there today is pretty much the same collection of red brick buildings you'd find at the University of Anywhere. On our walk we met up with a guided tour of the campus, and the guide (an over-enthusiastic Harvard student) was describing a statue of the "Mr. Harvard" for whom the college was named. He described it as "the statue of three mistakes". The first mistake was that they got the date wrong on when the college was founded. I don't remember exactly, but it was sometime in the 1600s and a few years off from what was on the statue. Secondly, they described Mr. Harvard as the founder of the college. He wasn't; instead, the college was actually founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony--sort of a colonial version of a state university. Finally, the person shown in the statue isn't Mr. Harvard at all. No one knows what he looked like. Instead he's a former president of the college, who was asked to model for the statue.
The guide added to this story by mentioning that most of the campus buildings are generally named after former college presidents (names like "Adams House", "Folger House", etc.). They apparently ran into a problem in honoring a President Hore, because "Hore House" didn't seem like a very appropriate name. So instead of being immortalized in a building, President Hore became the model for Mr. Harvard.
After seeing Harvard, we got back on the subway and headed to Kendall station. Guide books call special attention to this station because of a series of "kinetic sculptures" there that are named after famous scientists. Subway riders can pull levers on the platforms, and the sculptures move and sound musical notes. The sculptures themselves are the worst sort of modern art--steel shapes that are hardly artistic. Beyond that, two of the three levers were broken, so we were only able to get "Pythagoras" to make any music. So much for that "must see" attraction.
We had originally planned to see the MIT Museum, but that would have been a long walk from the station on a very hot day. We opted instead for a quick visit to the MIT bookstore, where Margaret seemed to buy out the store.
We returned to the subway, and our next stop was at Massachusetts Avenue (which is invariably abbreviated to "Mass Av" by the locals, both in speech and writing). Just outside the subway stop is a rowhouse where Martin Luther King lived when he was a divinity student at Boston College. It's interesting that King chose to study here, because Boston is a virtually all-white city. In fact of all the major cities I've ever been to, even Minneapolis and Winnipeg come across as more racially diverse than Boston. I'd guess 90% of the subway riders were white, and the second largest group is probably Asian. Blacks are a very small minority--I'd say their percentage here is not much larger than it is in Iowa.
After seeing King's home, we went downtown to the State subway station, which is located directly under the old Massachusetts State House. Once we exited, we had a nice view of the historic district from a big plaza outside the station. Beneath the plaza was the main entrance to Boston's City Hall, and out front of there was a display of street furnishings--things like a model bus stop and a model public toilet, all done in Victorian metal. I don't know if the city is considering purchasing these to spruce up the downtown or what, but it made a fascinating display in front of City Hall.
Across from City Hall is one of the oldest buildings in America, Faneuil Hall (FAN-yule, like someone who likes Christmas), which was built as a public meeting place in colonial times and is named after one of the early city fathers. It was here that many of the plans for the Revolution were made. Today the place and its neighboring buildings have been turned into a big shopping mall--with downtown locations of Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, Waldenbooks, and all the other upscale suburban retailers. Margaret and I looked around the place a bit, but there's really not much to see except mall stores. We ended up having an expensive cup of coffee at a place called The Red Barn (a local imitation of Starbucks) and were quickly on our way.
In back of Faneuil Hall is Quincy Market. This is three long buildings that once served as a European-style marketplace. Guide books say they still serve that function, but what they really are is the food court for the nearby mall. There's every kind of ethnic fast food you could imagine, with a few sit-down restaurants besides.
CONTINUED IN PART 3
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