Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski

Author:Jenny Diski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

JOURNEY TWO

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A year later, I was sitting in Starbucks on Seventh Avenue opposite Penn Station waiting for the train to Chicago that would begin my railway circumnavigation of America. Back in London after the last trip and poring over the Amtrak brochures, I had discovered that it was possible to travel by train in a circle around the edge of the United States. The Circle Line to end all Circle Lines. The irresistible circle. I couldn’t resist it, and nor could I resist the deliberate repetition of an accidental experience that had stayed with me when I got home. I wanted more, a substantial journey without going anywhere exactly, meetings and conversations which also would go nowhere. Even better than the Atlantic crossing, I could sit still, listen to people talk, travel many miles and end up back where I started, and all for the effort of changing a few trains.

So I made my plans for a second, deliberate journey, tracing a route delineated by a series of romantically named trains. I would start in New York, take the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, and connect to the Empire Builder for the rest of the journey west to Portland, Oregon. From Portland I’d pick up the Coast Starlight down the West Coast as far as Sacramento, California, where I decided that I would take a wedge out of the circle and make an inland detour so that I could visit Bet and her hero in Albuquerque. To do this I had to take the California Zephyr from Sacramento across the Rockies to Denver, Colorado. At that point Amtrak failed me, as it fails most US citizens who want to go anywhere off the main routes: branch lines have been severely pruned in the name of profit. There was no rail connection to Albuquerque either directly from the Coast Starlight, or from the California Zephyr. I would have to take a three-hour bus trip laid on by Amtrak at six o’clock on the morning following my arrival in Denver the previous night, which would take me, via Colorado Springs and Pueblo, to Raton, New Mexico, where I would catch the Southwest Chief to Albuquerque. Since this was America, the land of vast spaces, it was only a hop and a skip to the oasis in Phoenix (four hours, say) by the Southwest Chief, so I could go and visit John and Maria again, before catching my old friend the Sunset Limited in the other direction this time (the ‘Sunrise Limited’, I suppose it should have been) from Tucson as far as New Orleans and then connecting to the Crescent, which would take me from New Orleans back to Penn Station, New York where I first started.

Sitting at my desk in London with the Amtrak timetable and a highlighter pen I whispered aloud the names of the trains as you would a poem or a psalm. It wasn’t enough to read them and think them. Amused, but also beguiled by America’s

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