Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Did you know that Hitler managed to give every German man, woman and child a yearly vacation at either the mountains or the sea?

Give a man two weeks’ R&R, and you can get away with just about anything.

Did you know in Norway, even the welfare mothers get paid vacations? And that if you are a farmer, the gubmint (except in Norway, I think it’s pronounced gahoovhhamarnaheht) will send someone out to milk your cows? Yeah, that’s what happens when you’re sitting on a lovely pool of beautiful crude but make your own wind power instead so you can sell your oil to assholes like us. Also? I don’t think Norway spends $493 billion a year on defense (not counting veterans’ benefits; nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production; and Iraq) – and in fact, I know they don’t, because we are spending as much as the rest of the world combined.

So what does that have to do with your vacation? Quite a bit, actually, because thanks to the flabbergasting sleight-of-hand that’s been perpetrated by el Prez, you can’t go anywhere this year. Why? Because we done spent all our money and are having a depression, that’s why, and all the $150 billion stimulus bills in the world are only going to make the Wal-Mart heirs $150 billion richer. Also? You don’t have a job. So at least it’s like you’re on a permanent vacation!

But perhaps you are one of the precious few who do have jobs, and who do get two weeks off, and you would like to spend the last of your cute American money while it still has something akin to a monetary value and before it takes a wheelbarrow of greenbacks to buy an egg. So whatcha gonna do? Road trip? You’re as adorable as the American dollar. Didn’t you know oil’s gonna go to $200 a barrel? And that we’re not even at what any college Naderite can tell you is Peak? That means each gallon of gas in the tank of your GMC Yukon (you stud!) is gonna run you a cool $7.50.

Guess what? It should.

Are you going to fly? Sure, if there’s an airline left.

So what should you really (really) do? Take the train, baby. Take the train.

Now, the train’s not cheap either, unless you get Amtrak’s North America Rail Pass, which is 30 consecutive days of unlimited travel for under a thousand bucks (hitch: to get that fare, you must at some point go to Canada, where they will hold their sides in laughter at your hilarious money; payback, indeed is a bitch). Or you could get seven days in California for $159, now that I look it up on the Internet, which actually is completely awesome.

I take it back. The train IS cheap! The only thing cheaper is your mom or the bus, and anybody who’s ever seen a movie or Six Feet Under knows that buses are the modern metaphorical equivalent of the boat on the River Styx, i.e., buses = death, what with the way the camera always watches you from across the road while you’re sitting at the bus bench, and after the bus pulls away you are gone (sorry, but Luke Wilson totally died in The Royal Tenenbaums, just like Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show, which you probably didn’t know either, except his version of the boat on the River Styx was actually a boat, but whatever, he’s still dead and also schizophrenic); yes, the bus is death, while everyone who’s ever seen a movie knows too that the train is sex, what with all the tunnels and stuff, and we are not to do as the French do and conflate the two, so which do you pick, sex or death? Take it easy, Michael Hutchence: not both.

Take the train, is all we’re saying. And we’ll see you in two weeks.

Human Cargo

A Rube’s Rules for Riding the Rails

~ By Andy Klein ~

In the wee early hours of Monday, August 31, 1970, I hopped on a freight train in Oakland, California, together with two acquaintances,

looking forward to a speedy 48-hour ride to Chicago. Four and a half days later, shabbier but wiser, I found myself wandering through the Galesburg, Illinois, rail yards, trying to figure out how to traverse the remaining 200 or so miles to my destination, so I could catch a flight from O’Hare to Logan and wallow in the bourgeois amenities – bathing, for instance – I had so rashly forsaken.

It was a grand adventure, and, like most grand adventures, not nearly as much fun in real life as in the movies (my basic source of information about everything). Plus – you will be shocked to hear – I am not by nature an adventurer. If somewhere in Switzerland there exists a Standard International Lee-Marvin-to-Woody-Allen Scale, I would fall very, very much closer to the Woodman, in culture, appearance, neuroses, and damned near any other way you could imagine.

Still, back then, I was prone to choosing experiences that I thought might look good on a book flap some day; and I had already gone cross- (or semicross-) country by hitching, driving, flying, and bus, so it seemed mandatory to dip my moronic big toe in the romantic effluvium of the hobo life. The result was a festival of comic humiliations way too long to catalog here, but it might be worthwhile to impart the few precious gems of wisdom this goofball exploit contributed to the hollow, echoing chambers of my Wisdom Vault. Of course, it’s possible that the passage of nearly 38 years has obsoleted all my tips, much as it’s done to such carefully preserved skills as changing typewriter ribbons and centering 45s on a turntable when you don’t have an adapter. (I’m a very versatile fellow.)

1. Bring a jug of water. Food is nice, too, but water is essential. I didn’t fuck that one up, but I did fuck up ...

2. Bring a sleeping bag. In all my hitching days, I fared very nicely, thank you, snuggling in my sheepskin coat and using my knapsack as a pillow. Besides, we’re riding through the desert in August. How cold could it get? Pretty damned cold actually, particularly if it’s the middle of the night, and you’re going 60+ miles an hour, and you failed to ...

(above) Through the mists of memory: Our intrepid itinerant,
flanked by counterculture cohorts, circa 1970. photo by Jake Fratkin.

3. Find an empty boxcar to ride in. Boxcars are the Presidential Suites of freight trains, followed by gondola cars and those piggyback flatbeds that carry truck trailers. Guess which type we ended up with? You might be able to get some shelter between the trucks’ gigantic tires, but basically you’re out in the open, going a mile a minute on a flat surface with nothing between you and the punishing air but your rapidly diminishing pluck. At least it would only last two days ... or so we thought: Our train, we had been assured, was a speed demon that could make it from Oakland to Chicago in two days. Unfortunately, at the end of 24 hours, we realized we had only covered about 35% of the distance. Real hoboes would have known that ... .

4. You shouldn’t trust anything the local railway guys tell you about anything outside of their own yard. “Sure,” a sincerely helpful yard assistant had said, “That’s the one you want. They call it the Ghost! It whizzes by at top speed and makes almost no stops and should be pulling into Chicago in 48 hours, maybe 50 if you run into any problems.”

It felt to us more like Marley’s Ghost, dragged down by chains, lumbering across the California-Nevada line in the blisteringly hot August sun. (Of course, it picked up speed again at night, so I wouldn’t miss another chance to be blast-frozen.) Why would you expect the railroad guys to have a clue what happens after the train leaves the yard? Luckily, we only suffered this sweat/freeze cycle for one day, because we ignored warnings to ...

5. Avoid Ogden, Utah, at all costs. Remember eleventh grade history, when they taught you about the Central Pacific laying track from the West Coast and the Union Pacific from the Midwest, until the twain met near Ogden and joined the tracks with a ceremonial golden spike? Sure you do. As a result of that historic day, the Central Pacific (now morphed into the Southern Pacific) owns the line as far as Ogden, at which point the trains come under the jurisdiction of the Union Pacific.

In 1970, at least, Southern P. had a nonchalant attitude toward hoboes; you could get onto the train more or less out in the open. Union P., on the other hand, was a tad stricter, maybe more than a tad, well – let’s face it, those guys were Nazis. We had been warned by a few hoboes we met during one of the many stops the “Ghost” (yeah, right) wasn’t supposed to have made that day. “Don’t go into the Ogden yard,” they said. “You’ve got to get off right before the yard, then figure out a way to get to the other side and get back on the train,” they said. “You really don’t want to get busted there,” they said.

“Sure,” we replied, each of us thinking to himself, “I’ll just hide real real good ... on this 817 open air flatbed ... totally invisible between the giant truck tires. No one will see me, because I won’t move a hair. And I’ll be as quiet as a little church mouse. I will be ... Mr. Invisible!” In Ogden that night, our faith wasn’t shaken a bit, despite the flashlights shining right in our eyes ... despite the voices saying, “Hey, look what we got! Three hippie hoboes!” ... despite the yard bulls banging on the truck axles and yelling, “Hey! Come on out of there!” They can’t see me. They’re bluffing. Because I am ... Mr. Invisible!

Our faith did take quite a substantial hit, however, when they said, “Okay, if you don’t come out, we’ll just fire a few shots in there and let ’em ricochet around a little.” Hello! I tossed off my apparently faulty Cloak of Invisibility and basically teleported off the train. “Jeez, Earl, that li’l hippie sure moves fast, don’t he?” “He?” Earl said, pointing at my hair. “Heck, I thought that was a hippie girl, but you’re right: It’s another hippie boy.” “No, maybe you’re right. All that nice hair, sure looks like a hippie girl to me. Well, except for the moustache. Maybe hippie girls have moustaches.” Oh, shit, I thought, if they think hippies are so damned funny, what happens if they figure out we’re all Jewish?

Earl and Jesse checked our IDs, packed us into a Jeep, and started arguing, sotto voce, what to do with us. “It’s a slow night,” Earl said. “I think we should take ’em out in the desert and have some fun with them.” “Come on, Earl,” Jesse whispered. “I thought we weren’t gonna do that stuff any more. Remember how messy it got last time? Let’s just take ’em downtown and turn them over to the police.” “Ohpleasepleaseplease, Lord!” we were all thinking. “Please let us be arrested and booked and thrown in jail!”

For a brief moment it looked like the fun-hungry Earl was going to insist, but he relented. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou, Lord,” we thought. “Hot dog! We’re goin’ to JAIL!” The Jeep eased into Ogden. Earl pulled the car up to the curb of a downtown street and told us to get out. We looked around, baffled: There was no police station in sight. What were these guys pulling now?

“See that building halfway down the block?” Jesse told us wearily. “That’s the passenger rail station. You go in there, and you stay in there until the next train comes in, and you buy a ticket, and you get on that train. But” – voice getting scary again – “don’t even think about sneaking back to the yard and hopping another freight. We catch you again and you really will be doing 30 days in the county jail.”

I sure wasn’t going to argue.

Oops. Time’s up, and Unca Andy’s only made it through one day and five rules. I really wish I could tell you about our adventures in Ogden. About how we were treated to breakfast at an all-night diner by a guy who claimed (rather convincingly) to be the nephew of America’s most prominent racist, Gov. George Wallace. About sitting in the terminal at 4 a.m., when an unannounced train stopped, and a guy in makeup and paisley bell-bottoms got off to walk his chihuahua, while a dwarf and the buffest woman I had ever seen shared a cigarette. (Only when the train was pulling away did we see the legend “Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus” on its flank.) And about finally getting up the nerve to take a bus to Salt Lake City, where Union Pacific held no sway, and boarding another freight for three more days of Semi-Thrilling Adventures.

Day Trip!

Oh, I know exactly what you think of Orange County – it’s there in the tender curl of your lip, the flaring of your elegant nostril, the cadence of your whining as you bitch about the yokels who reside in its limits. You, my dear, are better than it, and I can’t say as I blame you.

However! You may also want to shut the fuck up and just enjoy something for once in your superior life, because if you get on the train, have a bloody Mary, and exit in San Juan Capistrano, you will have a fabulous, delicious, sun-soaked (and liquor-soaked) day to remember or not.

From the moment you step off the

Surfliner in San Juan, you’re surrounded by the oldest neighborhood in the state, the Los Rios Historic District with three original adobes among its 40 homes on its lush little roads. There’s a petting zoo, and a little adobe museum that looks like a prison cell, and a teahouse where you can sip elegantly on tea from pretty china and nibble delicately on a scone, all while having perfectly dreadful conversations about ass, if you, like my old boss, are someone you can’t take anywhere. You could do that. Especially the petting zoo. And the ass.

But the real place to be is at the Ramos House Café, for a fairly pricy but exquisite breakfast or lunch under a tin roof on the patio abutting a working garden where they grow the herbs for their cocktails and fine American cooking. (There is no inside seating, because the owner, John Q. Humphries – who is a little bit delicious himself – lives in it.) I once had toast there that I would have paid $9 for, while floating through the air were the tolling of the mission’s bells, the clang of an oncoming train, the chimes from the house itself, and a sound system out of which wafted Fishbone and the Pogues.

After you’ve got a foundation on which to lay your booze, you can walk a block or two to the Swallow’s Inn. There, felons, Marines, rednecks and Apaches take turns smacking their girlfriends while you are doing the Boot Scoot Boogie (or else standing in the middle of the floor doing your hippie dance instead; I for one don’t believe dancing should have rules). Afternoons are good and drunk at the Swallow’s, but nights are better, because that is when old men with wooden legs (for serious) will ask you to dance from all the way across the room just by looking at you and cocking an eyebrow, and you will answer just with a widening of your eyes, and then meet them wordlessly in the middle of the floor. But this is a daytrip, and the last Surfliner returning northward is at 10:40 p.m. on weekends and 9:40 on weeknights, and you will probably be having so much fun that you miss your train, and we can’t be having that.

Or can we?

If you remembered to do something cultural before you ran off for your slumming, the Mission San Juan Capistrano would have been a good choice. You have to pay to get in, and the exhibits are sorta eh – lots of Orange County’s beloved plein air – but you can also take a few moments in the Serra Chapel, which dates from 1783 and is absolutely lousy with fancy gilding applied by Junipero’s Juaneno slaves. Also? Their ghosts!

—Rebecca Schoenkopf

California Coming Home

Take your time along the California coast

There’s precious little in this world to wholeheartedly endorse – In-N-Out Burgers, rainbows, Luke and Owen Wilson, spending the weekend in bed, and Cool Hand Luke are really the only things I can think of about which there are no niggling doubts, no critical exceptions, no It’s-almost-perfect-but … .

But when it comes to our precious vacation days, we do have a wonder of the world right here, one we can vouch for with full faith and credit: The California coast is everything it should be and nothing it shouldn’t, unless you count the poo off Aliso Creek in Orange County or the mean old rich people in Carmel. Carmel, or as I like to call it, “Palm Springs by the Sea,” is a sight too precious and a lot too persnickety, and I will never forgive it for the one old mean rich lady who informed me, when asked if there were rooms to let, that my well-behaved, then-toddler son might not enjoy himself in her twee little hotel, and please to be careful of the door and our ass.

The California coast is one of the finest driving routes in the world, with Pacific Coast Highway bending in gentle curves just to add to your performance. There are fine little areas like Point Reyes, just north of San Simeon, to pull off the road by the gray sea and stop and smell the elephant seals.

But seeing the ocean out the window of the train is a fine way to do it too – and if you don’t get Hearst Castle, you at least get a bar car. And with Amtrak’s seven days of travel for $159, you can stop and take as much time as you like, as long as “as much time as you like” is equal to or less than 21 days. From San Luis Obispo northward, Amtrak cuts inland – you can’t take it through the peaceful glories of Big Sur, for instance, although it does light down again in Salinas – and so we shall ignore it.

SLO has its very pretty little downtown that somehow still feels rustic despite its boutiques, and you will stay at the Madonna despite the datedness, general shabbiness, and awful expense. South of San Luis, you’re cutting through places like Solvang (the Disneyfied and delightfully kitschy village where you will stop for a night or two and buy expensive cheeses to enjoy in your windmill-shaped room) before you get to Santa Barbara. Stand on your principles: Get the fucking merlot.

Santa Barbara is its own delight, of course, though State Street lately is as chichi as Rodeo Drive – there are no more homeless with signs inviting you to contribute to their party fund, just taut old blondes with boob jobs and a whole lot of duck lips. Santa Barbara has become a small bit disturbing. Actually, I no longer recommend Santa Barbara, but if you do go and you do have the scratch, the Villa Rosa downtown is exquisite, all snobby and tiny (just 18 rooms) and just like you like it. Plus? Free wine nightly. With snacks! As for the rest of Santa Barbara, just pick up an Independent. They’ll tell you what to do.

Let’s skip right over L.A. and O.C., yes?

If it’s after July 16, stop at Del Mar and join the douche parade at the race track. Get hammered, get groped, and then get back on the train to a quieter, groovier scene.

The beach cities of northern San Diego County remind me of Topanga in the ’70s – before the yuppies put up their gross mansions. There’s that giant transcendental meditation temple, a gourmet Peruvian slow-food restaurant (Q’ero), and lobster tacos for like seven bucks at El Callejon in Encinitas. (To get to Encinitas, you’ll get off the train in Solana Beach, where you will grab a cab.) The beach cities are filled with Brazilians (the people, not the grooming style) (but probably the grooming style too), and Surfing editors, and good-looking young folk who all probably have weed. If you can finagle an invitation to a party there, especially in the sweet bliss that’s Leucadia, for the love of Sweet Mary, go.

You have choices once you’re off the train in San Diego proper. If you’re a trust-funder and a moron, you’ll want to stay at the W, both for its boutique décor and the South Beach-style party that elbows you in the face when you’re trying to cross the lobby at night. If you’re not a trust-funder (but still a moron), you can stay at the second-worst Motel 6 I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet (the worst was in Waco, for sure). It’s yards from the train tracks and right under the flight path, and every 20 minutes all night long, you will wake up and cry.

Settle in, have a drink, and grab a cab to North Park (with a little jaunt to South Park) before you retire to the bikini models frugging in the lobby – or to the whistle of the train all night long.

There are a few boutiques with ugly, ’spensive shoes and odd housewares; a terrific, woman-owned sex shoppe; fancy delicious restaurants that are daring and transformative like you might see from an ambitious Top Chef contestant; and the delightful Pink Elephant, property of one of S.D.’s best-loved musicians, John Reis of Rocket From the Crypt.

In neighboring South Park is Hamilton’s Tavern: The ultimate neighborhood bar, where regulars bring their well-behaved dogs inside to loll at everyone’s feet, Hamilton’s is a beer bar with excellent draughts and a jukebox that moves from the Pogues/Rocket From the Crypt/Roky Erickson and New York Dolls to Howlin’ Wolf/Faces/Son House and John Hurt. And all of it, all of it, is rock. Play a game of pool, slurp down some of the world’s finest ales, and don’t step on anyone’s hound dog.

Fuckin’ tourist.

—Rebecca Schoenkopf

Weekend Getaway

Bohemian Grove

~ By Ron Garmon ~

Like the location-crazed auteurs of the silent-movie 1920s, moguls of the underground party set are beginning to find L.A. a bit cramped for their ambitions. Despite vast tracts of hidden urban space, cops with better things to do, and a near-Nietzschean will-to-party, it was inevitable the scene would take in surrounding hill and dale. Most of the party elite consist of Burners, who assemble a scratch utopia every year out in the Nevada desert just for fun, so Lightning in a Bottle, held May 23-26, is a pleasant, pastoral As You Like It romp by comparison.

This happening, staged annually at Live Oak Campground in the wooded hills above Santa Barbara, has grown from a preliminary gathering of the Burner clans into a sprawling festival in its own right, with attendance last year springing, magic mushroom-like, from a little over one thousand to well past four. The whole is the creation of downtown arts collective the Do LaB, whose magic misting garden-cum-disco is a perennial hit at Coachella. I spoke to Dee Dee, who along with twin older brothers Josh and Jesse oversees much of the LaB’s far-flung party interests from a warehouse space on Bay Street.

“It started about eight years ago as a one-night mountain birthday party for Jesse and Josh, always on their birthday weekend,” says Dee Dee. “The first year, we had a hundred people, the next year 300. By the fifth year, it was a 24-hour party on a ranch outside Los Angeles, then we wanted to make it grow. We took a year off to find the proper location, found it and we built what became Lightning in a Bottle Music and Arts Festival out of that.

“If you’ve never been to this festival or never been part of this community at large, you’re gonna see some things you’ve never seen before,” Dee Dee continued, running down a Burning Man 101 primer for civilians: “Clothing you’ve never seen before and a lack of clothing in a public event. Your eyes will be opened and hopefully you’ll come with an open mind to accept all that. This is a group of people who are more friendly than you’re used to – people who’ll go up and give you a hug just because. People have conversations with you without having an ulterior motive. Different sounds, an eclectic mix of producers, musicians and bands. I think the thing that makes this different, apart from the art we provide, it’s the people that bring the magic. We just provide the canvas for the art they bring with them, whether it’s their personality or their physical art or the music or clothes they share with us.”

Besides the weird dada and bric-a-brac hauled to the site by volunteers (which in 2006 included a nightclub shaped like a 1960s-era Boeing jetliner, complete with stripper pole and “cabin club”), expect performances by West Indian Girl, Bassnectar, the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque and many more, including DJ sets by the cream of the art-party underground. The campsite is literally miles from any civilization and so petty customs like curfews, social inhibitions and expectations of hired flunkies to direct you to the party are best left behind. In this remote and sylvan locale, you are the party.

Of course, that does worry some. “The more the county is aware of what’s going on,” Dee Dee grins, “and they are aware, as I go through the steps with the sheriff’s office and the Highway Patrol, but the more we grow, the more their eyes twinkle, as in ‘What can I get out of this?’ But Santa Barbara county has been a great host so far and it’s absolutely worth it.”

www.lightninginabottle.com

The Cruel Desert Wind Hoax

Rescuing Amtrak from a journey to oblivion

~ By Alan Mittelstaedt ~

In 1999, Amtrak threw a giant party near the Las Vegas Strip to announce the imminent return of train service from Los Angeles to the city of lost personal investment. The usual turnout of train buffs, still bitter about the demise two years earlier of the romantic Desert Wind line from L.A. to Salt Lake City, with stops in Vegas, joined Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn and Senator Harry Reid at the affair. With coffee in hand, they toasted the custom-designed, European-style Talgo train that they were all promised would soon make several daily trips.

When will people learn not to count their train cars until they’re lined up on the track? Nine years later, passengers are still clamoring for what would be a popular, filled-to-capacity line for thousands who would gladly board the train for the five-hour ride to Las Vegas and forsake the hellish traffic on Interstate 15 or being stuffed in one of Southwest’s bulging commuter planes.

Today, the line is officially in limbo. The press release advancing the December 14, 1999, party has since been removed from Amtrak’s website, but the crime against the rail-riding public cannot be so easily erased. To make matters worse, the money that could go to needed track improvements for the Casino Special is being squandered on studies for the unrealistic Maglev train, which levitates in an electromagnetic field at laboratory speeds up to 600 mph. Some $45 million has already been gobbled up by Reid and other fanatics who swear by the fantasy of slightly slower 300 mph trains that would make the L.A.-Vegas jaunt in 90 minutes. They’ve been staring at their cards too long if they believe it.

The one huge problem: None of the realists think it will ever happen. “Maglevs are not working in China or Germany,” says Richard Silver, executive director of the Rail Passenger Association of California. “It’s just a bureaucrat’s dream. They’re wasting tons and tons of money looking into it. It’s a failed system both in terms of technology and interconnectivity. That time and money would be better spent on expanding already existing systems. It might be the wave of the future, but it will take generations to develop.”

Silver was referring to the Southern California Association of Governments, the region’s No. 1 cheerleader of the Maglev system, which is studying a hub of local routes that would eventually connect to Las Vegas, say, by the time you figure out how to beat the house at blackjack. A leading proponent over the years of Maglev has been L.A. Councilman Greig Smith, who rides Metrolink from his home in the Valley to City Hall once a week and is sincere about his faith in the technology. “The Maglev train would really bring Southern California into the 21st century. It would allow us to move a great number of people at ultra-high speeds, outside of our congested freeways and with zero emissions.”

Aside from this little problem of getting the Las Vegas service back on track, Amtrak’s achieving a level of success not seen since the second heyday of train travel came to an end in the 1950s and ’60s. Some 26 million passengers boarded trains last year, with 20 percent gains in traffic in California’s three heavily traveled corridors. “The biggest challenge is ridership is going through the roof and not having enough money to put cars in need of repairs back into service. It’s pretty much a national thing,” says Ross Capon, executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. “In the summer months, because of the size of the fleet it might not be possible to keep up with demand.”

The train analyst cites the prediction by Goldman Sachs energy strategist Argun Murti that oil could reach $200 a barrel within six months. If that happens, and motorists must face $8 gas, the demand for train travel will be even greater. “Trains are such an obvious answer as the price of gasoline is expected to double,” says Capon. “Put it this way: The higher the price goes, the madder the public will become that politicians are basically doing nothing.”

Now’s the time to prepare for the onslaught of passengers. The Bush administration is doing the exact opposite. For the second year in a row, Bush proposed cutting Amtrak’s budget by more than 40 percent, to $800 million.

It’s not like Amtrak is seeking special treatment. The federal government subsidizes all forms of transportation, and rail gets the short end of the deal. Last year, the feds dumped $40 billion into the national highway system, $15 billion into aviation. The idea that the private sector can successfully develop and operate any transportation system, including Maglev, is far-fetched. Says Capon: “The biggest subsidy in transportation goes from the airline shareholder to the airline passenger.”

But politicians have failed Amtrak, forcing the system to live “day to day, year to year,” with little long-range planning, says 75-year-old Ed Von Nordeck, a train buff who used to hang out at railroad stations instead of dating when he was growing up. He got his first job as a Southern Pacific reservations clerk in Colton and is now a railroad historian enjoying his retirement in Riverside. He remembers his first day on the job in the ’50s. “It was a highly competitive business. From here to Chicago, you had three railroads and they all had their signature trains on that route, vying for customers.”

Train travel was most popular in the ’20s before the advent of the automobile. Then the Great Depression hit, wiping out many of the railroads. More boom years came immediately after World War II through the 1950s, the decade when jet travel lured many off the tracks. But it wasn’t until the late ’60s that doomsday arrived.

“The crowning blow was in 1967. A lot of trains existed to haul the U.S. Mail and that saved many a train,” recalls Von Nordeck. “But by 1967, truckers and airplanes got all of the business. Overnight, trains were just chopped, chopped and chopped because they were no longer needed.”

By the time Amtrak rolled around in 1972, many major cities in the U.S. were served by only a fraction of the lines. You could still get to most big cities, but on greatly reduced schedules. “It was just a steady decline,” says Von Nordeck. “Now it’s starting to come back.”

And, the Desert Wind to Las Vegas would face better odds of making a comeback if Sen. Reid would return the $45 million blown on the Maglev pipe dream.

No, Don’t Take the Train!

Pinch your pennies till they scream

~ By Alfred Lee ~

The last time I went to San Francisco, I took the bus. I was waiting for one to pick me up at Union Station when an old man leaned over to me, eyes-a-glitterin’, all but ready to launch into a rendition of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Instead, he asked, toothily: “Did you pay one dollar?”

I hadn’t. He turned to the girl sitting next to me. “Did you pay one dollar?” She had. He nodded conspiratorially, as if they were fellow members of La Résistance.

The Megabus that I boarded with them that day couldn’t have been carrying many more than a dozen people, and so the discount bus service may still seem something of a relative secret, passed on mostly via word-of-mouth: At Union Station, for instance, a couple blink-and-you-miss-them signs discreetly nudge you out and around the back to the pickup point. Hailing from the discount-travelin’ ways of Europe – Scotland, to be exact – Megabus began running intercity routes to and from L.A. last August, with seats as low as, yes, $1, and then going up depending on how late one books or how popular the route may be (which is how I ended up paying a still-low $25 for said seat). Currently, they’ll also take you to Las Vegas, Millbrae, Oakland, and San Jose.

They may have hit onto something, however. In March, Greyhound started a competing service, BoltBus, to go head-on in the $1 seat game with Megabus in northeastern cities such as New York, D.C., Boston, and Philadelphia. “We basically saw a different consumer segment that we thought would really enjoy this service,” says BoltBus spokesperson Dustin Clark. “The majority of

Greyhound’s costs are tied up in terminal maintenance and employee overhead. Fuel costs are only a small percentage of our overall costs, and so by doing all our booking online we’re able to pass on our cost savings to our customers.” He thinks the company could look at expanding out to California after monitoring its success in the northeast first.

According to Clark, BoltBus sees the airline industry as a competitor, and not rail. George Hobica, who runs low-fare listing site Airfarewatchdog.com, agrees that the discount bus model could be a legit alternative to rising airfare costs: “It definitely has an impact in the markets that they offer it – Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles is one – the same way that in Europe the shuttle train had an impact on airline travel from Paris to London.”

Meanwhile, ultra-low-cost airlines similarly derived from European models (think Ryanair) have found mixed results. Skybus, which cut domestic fares to as low as $10, ceased operations on April 5, leaving the likes of Spirit Airlines (currently offering seats from LAX to Detroit at $39) to carry on the ultra-low flame. “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Hobica says. “It would appear that only Southwest has been able to make this low-fare business model work.

“We’ve definitely seen fares go up, but airlines are still having unadvertised sales,” Hobica explains. “I suggest that people sign up for the widgets that American Airlines and Southwest have to offer. You can get discounts up to 25% on popular routes. We’re finding that airlines are doing a lot more private marketing to people who are loyal customers or who sign up for their programs.”

As for where this leaves the likes of Amtrak, senior marketing officer John Stierwalt points to the popularity of the California Rail Pass plan, which for $159 allows for seven days of travel in California over a 21-day period. But mostly: Take the train if you, um, like the train. “We don’t really go directly head to head with those,” Stierwalt says. “We feel like we have a fairly unique product that offers a different travel experience.”

When That Train Rumbles Through

But I still look for you/When that train rumbles through/That’s a sound I know you’d understand.

–The Knitters, “Someone Like You”

A short schedule of readings for embarking upon a search for the railroad sound.

• Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of the Little

Jehanne of France, Blaise Cendrars.

This is where the literature of train travel begins. This mad, swirling, decades-ahead-of-its-time tapestry of words penned in 1913 by an inveterate adventurer and writer — and hero of Henry Miller — hurtles across all kinds of geographical and metaphysical boundaries. As Cendrars writes in his unremittingly intense ode to restless and relentless motion: “I deciphered all the scrambled texts of the wheels and rearranged the scattered elements into a violent beauty/That I master/and that drives me.”

• The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux.

“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it,” writes Theroux, the poet laureate of transcontinental train travel. “Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.” Some Theroux fans prefer The Old Patagonian Express or Riding the Iron Rooster, but Great Railway Bazaar was the author’s first classic railroad travelogue.

• Riding Toward Everywhere, William T.

Vollmann.

In 2007, Vollmann describes taking up jumping railroad cars at age 47, defying not only the constraints of legal authority but also, after having broken his pelvis and suffered a few small strokes, his own doctor’s orders. In his ecstatic search for freedom, the author distinguishes himself from the hobos and the citizens (whom he places in italics) who might not comprehend the personal and political nature of his actions.

I ride freight trains in the belief that I can trust myself, that I deserve to be trusted even to be a reckless fool if circumstances so turn out – and, after all, if I am dead as a result of my own folly, I am no worse off than if I died safely and soberly. The most cogent thing to be said about trainhopping is that it is the unauthorized borrowing property of others – corporations, to be sure, not fellow citizens who would be inconvenienced; I am a microbe hitching a ride upon an elephant’s trunk! – Besides so many of my proudest deeds have been unauthorized by somebody that I now subscribe to an aphorism of Lukács’s: Breaking a law is approximately as weighty a matter as missing a train.

–Anthony Miller