Rail riding still not appealing

The Lady of the House and I were thinking of taking a train trip to visit family in northern Minnesota. Once we checked into it, it was obvious that ridin’ the rails ain’t what it used to be.

We’d start at Las Vegas, N.M., on Amtrak’s “Southwest Chief” and, according to the schedule, arrive in Chicago after riding 23 hours in coach. That means sitting up all the way. And we’d be getting there an hour after our connecting train rolled out to Minnesota. So a 23-hour layover would be needed.

Now if you look at “The Girls and Boys Big Map of the United States of America” you’ll see that Minnesota by way of Chicago is a waste of about 500 miles. I think the dudes who set the train routes are the same ones who set the airline routes. You know, like you have to fly from Clovis to Albuquerque to get to Dallas.  

When I was a kid it sure seemed like train trips were simpler.  You’d hop on the train in your hometown, slip into a sleeper car, hit the sack for the night and be in New York City the next day.

I once went on a train trip with our family’s spinster aunt, Aunt Maude. This was big stuff for a 5-year-old kid. There was the busy-ness of the big train station with all the people and the loudspeakers announcing the big cities like New York, Buffalo, Chicago and Atlanta. 

And we got to ride in a sleeper car. I thought it was pretty neat how the beds folded into the walls of our compartment.  We’d get dressed up and go to the dining car for supper. The table had a nice white tablecloth, the napkins were folded and silverware was really that … silverware.

That night I went to sleep to the constant “cl-clacka-clack, cl-clacka-clack” of the train rolling on down the line. Somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up and everything was quiet. I wondered why we weren’t moving. I slipped out of bed, lifted the curtain and peeked out the window. There was track after track and hundreds of boxcars and coal cars and tanker cars and engines. This was pretty neat stuff to a kid like me who really liked trains.

I woke up in the morning to the familiar “cl-clacka-clack, cl-clacka-clack” over and over again. Gone were the towns and perfect row after perfect row of stuff growing in fields along the track. We were now rolling through the mountains along rushing rivers. Rock walls shot straight up above us, whitewater was below us. We were passing through country where highways feared to tread.

I haven’t been on a real train trip since that one. Oh sure, I’ve been on excursion trains like the one near Tombstone, Ariz., or the Cumbres & Toltec in Chama. They aren’t quite the same as an honest-to-goodness grab-your-luggage-and-get-on-board train trip. 

Even with 21st century gas prices it still costs more to ride the train than to simply drive. And it doesn’t really seem to save any time or hassle.

“You know a round trip to Minnesota in our car would cost about 500 bucks,” said The Lady of the House. “We’d be there in two days.”

“Oh, so you’re going to help drive?”

“I’m the navigator and I provide road commentary.”

“So you’d help drive?” I asked again.

“No, I’m going to pretend I’m on a train.”

Grant McGee hosts the weekday morning show on KTQM-FM in Clovis. Contact him at:

blisscreeknm@gmail.com