Writing the Rails

My little corner of the Internet has been abuzz all day with the news of the Amtrak Writers' Residency. The company will be giving 24 writers a round-trip ticket on one of their long distance routes to write ("room" only—you'll have to come  up with the "board..." and I'm okay with that). The competition is going to be fierce—almost every writer I know has already filled out the online application (and it was only announced two days ago). It's open to all disciplines—although a composer friend of mine wondered if he could be a viable candidate... in looking at the guidelines,* it would probably be difficult to provide the work sample (maybe a 10-page PDF from a score?).

As I've said before before in this blog, I'm a huge fan of train travel and this residency has given me the idea of creating a site specific piece for a train. I have no idea how it would work for the audience... or the actors, for that matter... or how to rehearse it... but I've never let that stop me in the past!

*It's important to point out that there is a lot of concern—and it is justified—about Amtrak's Official Terms and this point in particular:

6.   Grant of Rights: In submitting an Application, Applicant hereby grants Sponsor the absolute, worldwide, and irrevocable right to use, modify, publish, publicly display, distribute, and copy Applicant’s Application, in whole or in part, for any purpose... 

I decided to go ahead and agree to this point—although I'm sure the Dramatists Guild would slap me upside the head for it—and submit anyway. Legally, it's not very smart of me but since almost nothing I've written is very commercial, I weighed the experience I would gain with the potential "loss of income" and the experience won; I know that others will not agree with me on this point but it's how I feel. I hope that Amtrak will reconsider this point and make their rights request a little more reasonable.

Why I'm a Railfan

While some of the people in this Times article clearly have a passion for rail travel that far eclipses mine—at the very least, many of them have an enthusiasm for documenting trains that I understand but don't share—I would still say that I qualify as a railfan. Catherine and I far prefer taking the train over any other mode of transportation; fortunately, since the Northeast Corridor is both the most active and well-serviced passenger service in the U.S., we're able to indulge our preference.

In 2004, we celebrated our 10th anniversary with a vacation to Paris, Cornwall (where the Navy had posted Catherine's brother, Brooke, and his family for three years) and London. The key to the trip was, of course, planning and scheduling our train connections—a somewhat daunting proposition since I didn't know anything at all about how the system worked in Europe. I wouldn't say that visiting the Eurail website did a lot to alleviate my apprehensions—there are many ways to use the system and a variety of package offerings at different price levels. And since we'd be taking the Eurostar from Paris to London, I wasn't certain if that would be included in any of the passes I was considering (I suspected—correctly as it turns out—that it wouldn't).

After several visits to the site, I'd narrowed it down to a couple of options that I thought might be right for us and called Eurail: oh, what a difference a phone call made! After I explained our goals to the very helpful sales associate, she steered us to the perfect option: a pass that gave us four trips over two months (we only used three, including the train we took to Gatwick Airport to come home, but it was still cheaper than individual tickets) that also allowed us to purchase our one-way Eurostar ticket at the lowest price. I think it wound up being about $300 each so renting a car would probably have been cheaper but it would also have been far less relaxing—at the time, I found the prospect of deciphering maps, trying to figure out exits and entrance ramps to highways, and the inevitable "we're going the wrong way" moments too irritating to even consider. As it was, apart from the somewhat harried taxi ride from Waterloo Station (the Eurostar terminus at the time) to Paddington, we couldn't have asked for an easier journey (there were other trains leaving shortly after our target, if we'd missed it, but they all had more stops and would have gotten us to Cornwall well after dinnertime).

Riding the Eurostar was a particular joy: Paris to London in just over 3 hours can't be beat.* It was an easy taxi ride to Gare du Nord, we sailed rather quickly through customs and were comfortably in our seats less than an hour after we left our hotel in the 7th arrondissement. Catherine had worried that she might get motion sick on the high-speed train but the route through northern France, where the speeds were greatest, was almost entirely over flat farmland—the ride was so smooth and she could see such great distances out the window that she never even felt queasy.

Coincidentally, while I wrote this post, Catherine has booked us train tickets to Boston. Amtrak is offering a special price: $49 each way on their regular service (which is fine with us: Acela shaves, on average, less than an hour off the four-ish hour trip but it costs more than three times as much). So for our 16th anniversary, we'll be seeing the Punchdrunk adaptation of Macbeth, Sleep No More. It's a whirlwind trip—we leave Penn Station at 10am on December 12th and come back the following evening at 5pm—but for just over four hours both days, all we have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.

*Actually, it can now: in 2007, they finished upgrading the tracks in England and changed the London terminus to St. Pancras; the train now arrives a mere 2 hours and 15 minutes after it leaves Gare du Nord

Eurostar photo: Lauritz B., 300km-h.net

The Only Way to Go...

I love traveling by train. Catherine and I took a trip this weekend to see a production of Blithe Spirit in Suffield, CT directed by our friend Rob Lunde (more on that in an upcoming post). We'd looked into renting a car but, fortunately, it was cheaper if we took Metro-North to New Haven and then switch to Amtrak on into Springfield, MA (where Rob lives, just across the state line from Suffield). Granted, the only way this worked was that Rob has a car in Springfield—otherwise, we'd have had no way to get around once we arrived except taxis (expensive, I'm sure) or buses (workable, if you know the schedule... and if the buses go where you need to go, when you need to go there). But the actual journey was so easy and much less stressful than driving or flying*. 

Of course, train travel requires adhering to a stricter schedule: we had to make sure the train we took to New Haven arrived in time to make our Amtrak connection, which had to arrive early enough in Springfield so that Rob wasn't rushing to get us and then get us over to the theater; coming back was similar because Catherine and I both had appointments here last night. If you agree with Sartre that "Hell is other people," you'll find a wide variety of demons on mass transit to confirming your beliefs. And Metro-North offers relatively few amenities: the seats are not that comfortable, the lighting is bright and harsh, the bathroom is not very clean (but at least there is a bathroom) and the commuter rails stop quite a lot. But it's also $28 each round-trip off peak, as opposed to Amtrak at $32-$96 one way, depending on schedule. Amtrak offered a much better deal (and our only option) for the second leg of our journey: $34-$48 round-trip. So all in all, our weekend travel expenses were less than $70 each—compared to $125-$200 for a rental car, plus gas (at least another $40-$50, I'd imagine).

We're fortunate in this part of the country: the Northeast Corridor is just about the only profitable Amtrak route, so service is relatively frequent and inexpensive here. I noticed that the Texas Eagle from Ft. Worth to Austin leaves once a day, takes over 4 hours and cost $62 round-trip—no incentive there to leave the car at home, especially if there's more than two of you. And the longer trips are even less appealing—the Eagle from Fort Worth to Chicago, for instance, is also only once daily, takes 24 hours and a compartment will run you $413 per person. That's pretty much only attractive to those relatively few people for whom time and money are not a premium.

What would it take for the U.S. to have the great renaissance of train travel that Europe seems to now be enjoying? Well, taxes on gasoline would have to go much higher here than they currently are (which would put us in line with pretty much everyone else in the world... okay, maybe not in the OPECs). There would need to be an enormous investment in infrastructure—at the very least, upgrading or replacing tracks, signals and grade crossings in order to accommodate high-speed rail service. And I think the only way that investment could happen would be to privatize the industry again, since the first fruits of the project would benefit a relatively small percentage of the public—and what representative can ever hope to win re-election by voting huge amounts of money for projects in someone else's district? Perhaps, as gasoline becomes more expensive, some bright young entrepreneurs will come up with plans that will make money and revive this industry in the U.S. But, more likely, those bright young entrepreneurs are concerned more with how to save their automobiles (fuel cells, anyone?) from obsolescence... 

*If I could go wherever I want to without ever being in an airplane again, I'd be thrilled—I hate airports and flying, in general. But, alas, train service to Europe is unlikely to happen in my lifetime... and can you imagine how many different trains you'd have to take to get to South America from NYC? And, of course, the faster you get somewhere, the more time you have to spend in that place—which is why you're going there in the first place, I'd imagine.