I’m away in a few hours for my Qatar flights home.
I wasn’t able to take advantage of some spare hours in Philly this morning. My back was a bit crook and I didn’t want to risk it blowing up on the day of departure.
Thankyou for your readership and comments. I had a blast.
I put together my trip and booked it direct with Amtrak and Via Rail, as well as the necessary hotels, from my Oz home in the sticks, after taking into account your input, gleaned from the pages of this site.
Part of the reason for posting details of my trip were to add to the range of information and advice for subsequent travellers. And as a bit of a payback for the advice and help I received from these pages.
I hope future travellers have as much fun on the rails as I did, and that the on-train services I encountered are continued.
The first joy of travelling by LD train is seeing the country in a way that is not otherwise possible. The second is making contact with, and learning the stories of, your fellow passengers. I was privileged to learn some wonderful life-stories; remarkable, astonishing, life-affirming ones, from colleague passengers, who just like me, were ordinary folk, living ordinary lives.
As my travels commenced, I realised I was making an editorial decision not to refer to anyone’s ethno-religious background or race unless it was a key part of their story. So I sat with this policy deliberately.
The two nuns on the Capitol Limited, the young Amish travellers on the Empire Builder, and the now London-resident Kenyan Portugese Indian family trio on The Canadian I think were the only times I did so, because without doing so, I did not think it was possible to tell their stories. In just about every other case, this was not relevant, so I thought it would be gratuitous to do so.
I loved meeting my fellow passengers and having a chat with them. If you take a LD train trip and seek to isolate yourself from your travel-companions you will miss this important aspect of train travel. If you only make contact with people who look like you, you’ll also miss out.
Reach out - say “G’day”.
Governments and others who insist they speak for us assume they can control how we think of each other based on crude generalisations. Make them irrelevant in this matter - that’s for us to decide when we get a chance to have a conversation with a fellow member of the human race at a meal table or in the sight-seeing car.
Learn something - share something. And the LD train is the perfect place to do so.
