The railroad less traveled

A couple of weeks ago, I was staring down the double barrels of the 4-lane Pennsylvania Turnpike, facing cross-state journeys for meetings on a rough-and-tumble freeway I've traveled so much--too much--over the last year-and-a-half.

This in and of itself is nothing unusual, particularly in the fall, when the academic calendar kicks in, and, as part of my job, I have conferences to attend, meetings to conduct, people to visit, and places to be, mainly along the old Main Line and its offshoots between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. I generally like this part of my job, actually--meeting people, talking up cooperative projects, seeing where colleagues work, and how people live in different parts of the region. But it does mean hours on the road and in airports, days in meeting rooms, and nights in hotels. Very little downtime. Very little me time. And all during autumn, my favorite of the four seasons.

This week was looking especially challenging and grim. As originally planned, my only activity was a conference in Cincinnati at the end of the week, returning to Pittsburgh today and back to work on Monday. But then a "vital" meeting came up in Philadelphia on Wednesday, an early-morning-and-all-day meeting, which meant, if I and everyone who had to spend time with me that day knew what was good for them, I'd have to travel over on the Tuesday before, so as not to be wrung-out and extremely crabby.

It is possible to fly from Pittsburgh to Philly for a morning meeting and back in the same day. However, given the distance of the Pittsburgh airport from home and work (a cool 25 miles through two tunnels and one downtown), the vagaries of contemporary air travel, and the luck-of-the-draw scheduling of SEPTA trains once in Philly, it can make for a very long, very fraught day. I've done it before, and I'll do it again, but if I have my druthers, I'll always fly over early for a good night's rest before the day of meet-and-greet begins.

So add Philly to the Cincy mix. And then add Harrisburg. The vital meeting in Philly was joined by an equally important meeting in the state capital--100 miles or so to the west of Philly--on Thursday. Thus, at one point this week, it was looking as though I would need to fly to Philly on Tuesday, somehow get to Harrisburg (car, plane, train?) by Thursday morning, return to Pittsburgh no latter than Thursday evening, only to head out to Cincinnati by Friday morning, returning to Pittsburgh on Sunday, and then starting it up all over again the following week. Talk about wrung-out and crabby.

I'm game, and I like to be a good little trooper in the workplace, but this just sounded insane and destined to make me (more) insane along the way.

So I canceled Cincy--even though it was the trip I was most looking forward to, as I've never been to Cincinnati before, and I have a peculiar sense of what constitutes an exotic getaway. Instead, I focused on getting from Pittsburgh to Philly to Harrisburg, then back to Philly for my plane trip back to Pittsburgh. Yes, you can fly between Philly and Harrisburg and Harrisburg and Pittsburgh--just not cheaply at the last minute ($500 or a pop, one-way). My employer is generous with travel expenses, but this seemed, morally, an airplane ticket too far. Thus my convoluted west-to-east-to-central-to-east-to-west approach was the only viable option, at least if I wanted to keep costs down and avoid driving.

Or so it seemed at the moment. But then Amtrak, of all things, came to the rescue.

It's easy to make the trek from Philly to Harrisburg and back by train--there are something like 10 train trips per day, back and forth, and while the line isn't exactly the TGV, it has been greatly improved over the last couple of years, making for a faster, more reliable journey.

Getting from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh (or Pittsburgh to anywhere) by train is trickier, though, and can require more effort than one should have to put forth. Ask my friend, the Gladman, who traveled by train in August from the Baltimore-Washington area to our own Iron City, via Philadelphia ferchrissakes, at the breezy clip of 8 hours, a trip that, by car is a mere 4 to 5 hours and doesn't require a sidetrip through the City of Brotherly Love. (Not that the Gladman would have objected, if you get my drift.) Despite Harrisburg being the state capital and Pittsburgh the Commonwealth's second largest city, reliable passenger travel in the post-Pennsylvania Railroad age is difficult, with only one train per day in each direction.

Traveling cross-Commonwealth has always been a challenge, though. Turn back the clock to the early 1800s, and you'd have to go by some combination of stagecoach, foot, canal and river barge, and "portage railroad" system--basically, dragging the barges over the Allegheny Mountains, across the Eastern Continental Divide, to westward flowing rivers into Pittsburgh through a series of inclined planes.

Things didn't improve greatly, even with the introduction of rail, as the Alleghenies, at least until the 1850s, proved too great an engineering and geographical conundrum to surmount. Train cars and engines still had to be dragged across the mountains to make connections westward.

In 1854, however, the Pennsylvania Railroad devised the engineering marvel that is Horseshoe Curve, west of Altoona, which created a bridge along the mountains that allowed trains enough of a low-grade path to surmount nature and make it through the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh. Travel across the Commonwealth was suddenly reduced from 1 week to 12 hours. Not only was travel across state facilitated, westward expansion in the U.S. was greatly improved. This is the modern world. And Pennsylvania says you're welcome.

The great era of American rail travel steamed forth and billowed ahead until at least the 1950s. I have heard my mother, Vivien Leigh, tell of taking the train from Eastern North Carolina to south-central Kentucky in the 1950s, to visit with my Dad's relatives while he was away fighting the Cold War fight in Korea. She didn't drive then; air travel was a luxury and not likely to be available anyhow; and rail, even in the South, was a viable form of conveyance. Imagine that--being able to get from one small corner of the U.S. to another without benefit of car or plane.

And then, in the space of twenty years or so, it all quite quickly went away. The Pennsylvania Railroad, once the largest railroad in the U.S. by traffic and revenue, once the largest publicly traded company in the world, posted for the first time a net loss in revenue in 1946. By 1970, due to changing transportation needs and financial mismanagement--as well as the withdrawal of a rescue loan by the U.S. government--the PRR declared bankruptcy, with its lines and resources divided between Conrail and Amtrak.

* * *

I could go all bitter Pennsylvanian on you about the failure of a unified transportation policy in this country, the slavish devotion to the auto, the dismissal of short- and long-range planning, the denial of the needs of the carless and planeless.

Why shouldn't I be able to get from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg or Philadelphia in fewer hours than it takes to drive? Why shouldn't I be able to get to Washington or Baltimore other than via Philadelphia? Why shouldn't those without cars in my town have to rely upon a shaky, constantly retrenching mass transit system that tossed out streetcars in favor of buses? Why should those who live in the suburbs have to catch the last express bus by 6 pm? Why should Pittsburgh--an old industrial giant, simutaneously sprawling and sardine-like; a ramshackle topographical map with an overlay of cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods; an over-the-river-and-through-the-woods, you-can't-get-there-from-here metropolis, a crazy-quilt conglomeration of rivers, ravines, and rocks--be stuck in some sort of suitable-for-the-Sun Belt transportation nightmare?

But no, I won't go all bitter on you--that would just be too Socialist for Sisterdale, wouldn't it?

Instead, I'll focus on the merits of a very Pennsylvania journey.

Through the impromptu taxi service provided by a colleague, I arrived at the Harrisburg station early in the afternoon. I checked the board and saw that the next train for Philly didn't leave for another two hours and would get me into 30th Street Station at 5:30 or so. If I wanted to make the 7:25 pm flight home, I'd have to cab it during rush hour to Philadelphia International Airport, something I wasn't sure I could do, especially as I was scheduled on the 8:55 pm flight, and the 7:25 is often completely booked. Thus, if I stayed on course, I'd still have to wait for the later flight and probably wouldn't get home from the airport until 11 pm or so. I'd have spent the entire day, from 6 am onward, in motion and in company. And I just didn't think I could face that.

Instead, as luck would have it, the next train out was to Pittsburgh. I had arrived just in time--if I so chose to do so--to switch my Amtrak ticket to head west. I could cancel my Southwest flight from PHL to PIT, saving the fare for another day. When I arrived in Pittsburgh, me and my luggage could take the East Busway home, arriving a little after 8 pm. The next day, I could take the bus to the airport to retrieve my car, safely stationed in long-term parking. And aboard the train, I could be alone and quiet. No sparring for space, no lugging of luggage, no jetting and jostling, being above it all and not enjoying any of it.

Normally, I'm not that spontaneous, too afraid that if I deviate from the plan, some sort of ill-defined chaos will ensue. I'll be stranded and abandoned. I'll get stuck, I'll become lost, I'll look foolish. Fear rules me more than I care to admit, but then it's never been an easy ride (so to speak) for me. Too much can go wrong--and has--and as a result, I've learned to become vigilant, hyper-vigilant, even hyper-hyper-vigilant. Self-reliant, self-possessed, and self-contained, yes, but to the detriment of taking a few risks along the way, even on something as seemingly benign as taking a different path home--in a physical, mental, or metaphysical manner.

However, this time, my need for quiet, solitude, and home, outweighed my devotion to the standard motion. For a few dollars more on Amtrak, I was able to take a slow-but-steady train home, riding the rails for just under five hours, enjoying the private time, sitting in internal if not always external silence with room to spare, despite there being a healthy ridership all aboard.

Along the way, I leafed through Pennsylvania Magazine and The New York Times. I started reading (finally) Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, a quick pick I'd made at the snacks-and-mags shop at the Harrisburg station, putting aside for now Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald's dense tome, The Way the Crow Flies. I was entertained by the exuberant, Germanic chatter of Amish travelers sitting around me. I savored the autumn scenery as the train surmounted the Alleghenies, the leaves almost at peak color, the sky, dramatic and intense with the coming of stormy weather. I texted a friend in England, and another in Nevada. I thought about a Mallo-Cup I'd had earlier in the week and the pierogies I'd had for my lunch that day, instead of the semi-healthy snacks I'd assembled for my travels. I saw Altoona and the Horseshoe Curve; Johnstown and its notorious flood plain, along with the inclined plane that takes you--and your car--to higher ground in Westmont; Pittsburgh and its still rumbling and smelting steel works, the Strip District, and dahntahn.

And I wished for a moment that I could stay on this train and in this mindset forever. Out of my normal time and place, above, through, and beyond the day-to-day that gets me down or stresses me out. Yet in a very Pennsylvania space, one that isn't completely lost or abandoned to age and modern foolishness.

Maybe there isn't a Pennsylvania mystique, the same as there is for Texas. There is cold weather, short summers, cloudy skies. Old buildings, a creaky infrastructure, a shaky economy, and faded industrial glory. There are too many billboards, above-ground pools, trailer parks, and adult bookstores. It's tradition-bound, clannish, hardscrabble, and, yes, perhaps even bitter at times.

But there are just as many reasons for why we live here. Spring. Fall. Trees. Snow. The mountains. The rivers. Voices. Food. Culture. People. Home. Pennsylvania.

I won't stay here forever. At least I don't expect that I will. I miss Texas. I'm fond of Kansas. I love Chicago. I fantasize about California. And I still think about Canada, with or without an election looming. There's too much of the world to see, too much of life to experience, to stay in one place for a lifetime.

Be that as it may, my life is pretty good here. Maybe not what everyone would want. Maybe not entirely what I would want, if money were no object and commitments to people and duties no small thing. But good, solid, enjoyable, satisfying. But it's here and it's mine. And here is home. Why would I want to be anywhere else?