Rails Over Roads

The elegance of the rails is alive and well! I needed a ticket from Vancouver back to Seattle (on my way to Portland). It was about $3 more than a bus ticket and even though the train is only now pulling away from the station, it's been worth every penny.

There is a romantic allure to train travel that you simply don't have with plane, bus. or car travel. Maybe it's the bell I can still hear ringing; maybe it's the gentle sway of the double-decker car as it picks up speed; maybe it's the 25% occupancy leaving most seats empty for me to stretch out or the ~3 feet of legroom I have (no joke!); maybe it's the couple making out in front of me; or maybe it's the sun setting over the ocean shore where brilliant fall colored trees descend the mountains. Maybe it's all of this. But the experience as a whole is nearly enough to swear off plane travel entirely.

Ahh! There's the train whistle... And the familiar Ding Ding Ding Ding of the crossing signal as all the cars on the road stop for me. It is grand. It is magnanimous!

Here comes the ticket officer. I disappointed that he isn't wearing the funny little hat, but he's quirky and funny enough to make up for it. He says the customs officer will be through in an hour. Maybe he'll be the one pushing the perfectly-aisle-sized cart with beverage and pretzels. Or I suppose I could just walk to the dining car. There is no "Fasten Seat Belt" sign on a train.

Ahah! There's the conductor with the little hat. He seems to be just chatting with passengers. And that thunderous sound was a sister train going north on the adjacent track.

There's the whistle again. One positive side effect to travel by train is that, since you're still on the ground, you get to see a fair bit of the surroundings. We just drove (trained? rolled? tracked?) past the Paramount movie studio lots. Vancouver is known as Little Hollywood. Apparently, it is often much cheaper to film movies in Vancouver (before the dollar sank). "The Fantastic Four" was largely filmed here. I even ran across a film crew with their cranes and cameras and trailers while walking the streets of Vancouver's Gastown.

The only other time I've covered so many kilometers by rail was in Eastern Europe. This experience is much different here--it's North Americanized. Everyone has their own luxurious separate spaces, all facing forwards. In Eastern Europe, the train cars had separate little cabins with six seats each--three facing forward, three backward. So you're staring someone in the eyes the whole ride. There were no arm rests and chances were good that you would have the head of the smelly Russian next to you in your lap after twenty minutes.

Getting up for a stroll yielded some fine results. The dining car had good food for rather little money. People were sprawled out on the U shaped booths on each side of the car, taking advantage of the lack of passengers. Downstairs, the bathrooms were spacious and cleverly laid out. The drinking fountain came with cups. It's a smart little world in here.

Well, after the most enjoyable transit experience of my life, We roll into the station. I'm reminded a bygone era of turn-of-the-century elegance as the tracks back into the ornate historic station. The heyday of the railway has seen its end, but the end of the line on this rail trip has me on track for its elegance again soon.