by @anabellebee
One Perfect Day Aboard Amtrak: "There is a certain sense of companionship among train travelers …And it can lead to the most unusual discussions, such as exchanging corn-mush recipes with a Mennonite lady …or discussing about bridges with a couple traveling to Washington all the way from New Mexico. We left soon after mid-day, installed in our comfortable business class seats. It was a very long trip, as most of Pennsylvania was still covered with heavy blankets of snow. But it did offered us the unique opportunity to enjoy the landscapes, to meet people"
Thank you for linking to my story,
ReplyDeleteThe matter of the fact is that I always preferred trains to cars/ buses and even planes. When traveling by regional trains people get in and out, share travel impressions, life stories and even sing and dance. This helps build connections between travelers.
A short story about how deep this connections can run and how much they can matter – I was returning from vacationing in Budapest and I was of course broke. I had a Budapest –Bucharest ticket on a cross country train (in fact it came from Prague in the Czech Republic and went to the Bulgarian sea side). Among the people I was chatting with was this lady, whose name I cannot recall, traveling from her old hometown in North-West Romania to her city of residence in the NE. As there was no direct trip she had to change trains in Bucharest… Meantime the car controller told us that the train does not actually pass through Bucharest and we have to go out in C. and purchase a transfer to get to Bucharest.)…Since I was broke, I started to lament and say that from what I know I bought a reservation on that train all the way to Bucharest so it better take me there. This is when the lady mentioned above told me that she’ll pay for my transfer though she could not verify that I was who I told her I was and she did not even stopped long enough in Bucharest to come home with me so I can repay her…
Of course, the controller was wrong, the train passed through Bucharest (honestly don’t know what was wrong with him; he was one of the worse I ever encountered like some relique from a Kafkian story). I thank her as we figured out from the car controller who got in at the C. station that we need not to change the train and will always recall this story with gratitude …