My Thoughts of Trains

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008

I do not know why I’ve been thinking about passenger trains so much in the last week.

Strike that, as we like to say in court when we want to take something back. I actually do know why I’ve been thinking about passenger trains so much in the last week, but I’m not going to tell you. I initially thought I would use that earlier bit of obfuscation to distract you, but I checked with the editors and it turns out I am not allowed to lie in print. Unless, of course, I am writing about the new Coatesville city finance director’s qualifications, and then the sky’s the limit.

But I have indeed been thinking about passenger trains lately, mostly about how much I love them and how I haven’t had the pleasure of taking a trip on one in quite a while. It’s something that I miss.

My fist rain rides came early in life, when my mother would put my sisters and me on a train in Cincinnati for a trip to her family in little Batavia, Ill., an hour or so west of Chicago. The train was called the James Whitcomb Riley, after the once famous “Hoosier poet” who celebrated all sorts of Americana. (Did you know that he wrote a poem called “Little Orphand Annie” that was the inspiration for the carton character of the similar name, and that years later my one-time neighbor in Cinncinnati, Sarah Jessica Parker, of “Sex and the City” fame, played Annie on Broadway? I didn’t either.)

I loved the fact that the train we rode on to see my mother’s aunts and uncles was named after a person, even if I did not know who that person was. I loved that when you tried to walk on the train, you swaggered back and forth like you were three sheets to the wind, and nobody minded because they were lurching around as much as you. I loved the peculiar aroma that came from the dining car and the fact that the tables had tablecloths on them and the silver water pitchers had small beads of water perspiration on them.

I also loved the fact that when we got to Chicago, we had to walk across town from Central Station, where the Riley came in, to Union Station, where we would catch the Chicago & Northwestern commuter train to Geneva, Ill., which was just up the Fox River from Batavia. I loved the fact that the commuter trains had an upper seating area where you could look down on the heads of passengers who were taking the train home after a hard day of work in Chicago.

As a grown up, I’ve ridden trains to Washington, D.C., and home to Cincinnati. I’ve ridden trains to New York City and to Boston. I’ve ridden trains to Philadelphia and Trenton, N.J. I’ve ridden a train from Dublin, Ireland, to Galway and from Sligo back to Dublin. I rode a train home from Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1992 after personally witnessing state Sen. Andy Dinniman wearing a tuxedo. I rode a train back to Exton from Lancaster, where I heard uber-lawyer Richard Sprague argue a case on behalf of Judge James P. MacElree II in March 1997.

In the courtroom that day, I listened to the argument Sprague made and interviewed him afterwards, then walked a few blocks to the Lancaster train station and hopped the Amtrak Pennsylvanian in the late afternoon. I sat in a seat facing back towards Lancaster as the train rolled towards Chester County.

I thought about the story that I was going to have to write when I got back to the office, mapping out the lead paragraph and mentally going over what to include in the story and what to omit. I looked out the window of the train and saw the sun going down over the farm fields of western Chester County that were furrowed with the promise of the coming spring. I’ve ridden in a lot of cars and flown in a lot of planes in my life, but I’ve never enjoyed the peace of travel as I did that day.