So I’ve been talking for how many months about traveling across the States by train and how I love traveling by train and how train travel is the future and… and today is a 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.
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 (all black) are unerringly polite and sweet and chatty and smiley. The passengers (mostly all black) 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 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.
We’ve just crossed the Black Warrior River – who even knew. It’s huge. I mean vast. But look on the map and it looks like the River Lea.