So this is it. I’ve been talking for how many months about travelling across the States by train and how I love travelling by train and how train travel is the future and… and today is Train Day. The first train day, going from Atlanta to New Orleans. On the train at 8.38am, off the train at 7.35pm. A long day on the train. (Rather reassuringly, and maybe just because they’d heard that there was someone from Brighton on board the train was delayed and didn’t leave till 8.50)
It feels a bit odd. It feels a bit of pressure, the same pressure I felt before I started this trip. Would it be interesting? Would it fulfil whatever ideas I had about it? Or would it just be long and a bit boring?
Well, it’s now 1.12pm and I’m guessing the answer is, unsurprisingly, “all of the above”. The train people are unerringly polite and sweet and chatty and smiley, but the big ideas about hanging out and meeting people…. The passengers are mostly asleep or plugged into screens with headphones. I guess that’s the big difference compared to when I. last did a big train travel (the Trans-Siberian Express in 1990). Then there were no phones, no laptops, no screens. There were Walkmen and there were books, but neither of those lock you in to your own world like screens and headphones do.
I’ve got headphones and I’m living by this conscious decision I’ve made not to use them. It seems a bit dumb because I’m sitting here locked into my screen, but I’ve got to keep some senses open.
We’ve been traveling since 8.38am and we’ve crossed a chunk of Georgia, all of Alabama and now we’re deep into Mississippi. By the time we get to New Orleans we’ll have crossed into Louisiana. It’s a curious thing. On the train, you don’t see much. OK, you see a lot but you don’t get near it. Again, I had this idea of “seeing the country”, but mostly what you see is trees. Mile after mile of trees. The railway – should I start calling it a railroad? – obviously doesn’t go through the centre of town so you don’t see places, you just see the track and where the track goes. And out here that goes through places where there are trees.
You do though get an idea of scale. Sometime earlier today we passed a huge river. Turns out it was the rather wonderfully named Black Warrior River – who even knew? It’s huge. I mean vast. But look on the map and it looks like the River Lea.
The houses are all single storey and detached – well, space isn’t an issue out here – and the cars are, for the most part, pick-ups. The other thing that’s noticeable is that the further deep you get, the wetter it is. Look out the window as you’re going through Mississippi and there’s water, the bayou as they call it out here. There’s trees of course, but lots of water.
We just passed through Hattiesburg – no, me neither – and it looked reasonably big and there was clearly life there. There was a big “Ranch Pizza” and you can’t say fairer than that, but then you’re gone. There’s no stopping, no getting out. I could have got off at Hattiesburg but then I’m staying the night and who knows when the next train is. Probably tomorrow, but… how many different toppings do you think there are at “Ranch Pizza”?
It’s now about 7pm and we’re about 40 minutes away from New Orleans. I’ve got my headphones on now because, well, I can. My friend in San Francisco (we’ve not met yet, but that’s a detail) had put me together with a friend of his in New Orleans but that’s fallen apart because he’s got teeth grief. A shame – we’d have had so much in common. Still, I’m sure there are some jazz clubs just waiting to be found.
Just pulled into Slidell, LA – which means we’ve passed through Mississippi and into Louisiana. Not far now.
Now this is fairy extraordinary. We’re going over a train bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, this huge expanse of water just by New Orleans. Look at the map, you can really see how it’s so vulnerable to climactic nuance. So Lake Pontchartrain, which was named after Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain in 1699. That’s also what happens on long train journeys. You start looking up stuff.
The rail bridge is 5.8 miles (9.3 km) long, it is the longest railroad bridge in the United States and the longest rail bridge over water in the world. And that takes a shortcut over the lake. There’s also the road bridge – called the Causeway which is 23.83 miles long. That’s a bridge. One of the websites says “This is not for the feint of heart. This bridge is long and can be both boring and dangerous. In the morning, there is often a thick fog that necessitates the bridge to be reduced to one lane each way with a pace car to regulate the speed of travel to 30 mph. That means it will take over one hour to cross. If you travel in the morning, always give yourself 75 minutes to cross unless it is very clear out. From the midpoint you cannot see the shore”.
Not sure what’s going to happen next. I was thinking of getting the train to Austin because on the map it looks like going from Brighton to Hastings, but there are two issues here. First, it would be like going from Brighton to Hastings if Hastings was 50,000 miles from Brighton and second, the line was – how shall we say? – disturbed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and has never really recovered. So now there’s the Louisiana equivalent of a bus replacement service from Three Bridges. And there are some things that are simply too scary for even the bravest of travellers.
