Lessons From The City Of New Orleans

By Francine Russo

Trains are great for short-distance runs or for relaxed sightseeing on longer trips, but if you need to get far away fast, take a plane. So goes the common wisdom. But there are times when the train wins on both counts, as I discovered one recent Friday when my 16-year-old daughter Joanna and I were scheduled to fly from New York City to Chicago and, that night, board the legendary City of New Orleans. Our goal was to sample some of the best of the American train experience from the Windy City to the Mississippi Delta. But snow closed the airport. Postponing the Chicago-New Orleans run to Saturday night, we nabbed the last two seats on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited, leaving Penn Station at 4:30, while hundreds of snowbound air passengers were left milling around LaGuardia Airport. Lesson No. 1: Trains are reliable.

We slept through 14 snow-blanketed stops in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana before pulling into Union Station, Chicago, at about noon. We checked our bags and embarked on a whirlwind tour of the city, returning for the 8 p.m. departure on the City of New Orleans. The lounge and platforms hummed with Saturday-night festivity. Many folks, en route to New Orleans for vacation, had taken to the rails just for fun.

"Now, be careful," warned our redcap, Chester, as he carried our suitcases to our second-story sleeper on the silver superliner. "Your bathroom has two buttons--one to flush, one to turn on the shower." Sure enough, our deluxe bedroom had a private "bathroom" with a shower right over the toilet and a drain on the floor! Hmmm. Our compartment also included a long sofa-like seat (which converted to a double bed) with a view out the window and a chair across the way. There was also a berth near the ceiling, accessible by ladder, to be pulled down later. However eccentric its facilities, the "room" offered more space and privacy than the "standard" compartment--with its fold-down sink and unenclosed toilet--that we had shared on the train from New York. Lesson No. 2: Trains are not hotels.

"Welcome to the City of N'Awlins," drawled a voice over the intercom. The friendliness and folksiness of this welcome was echoed by the many staff members shepherding us, including "King George," our king-size personal attendant; Stephan, our waiter; and Frank Carswell, a service attendant, who was persuaded by co-workers to sing for us at dinner (this also served to promote his upcoming CD).

As trains do, the City of New Orleans slipped with cat-like stealth out of Union Station and glided past Chicago's night skyline. Barely under way, we were summoned to the dining car and ensconced in a cushy booth with white linen tablecloth and fresh flowers opposite Gloria and Gary Pothast, a couple from Duluth, Minn. Stephan, between bantering and chuckling, confided that his favorite on the menu was the blackened catfish (prepared fresh in the galley below, unlike the reheated frozen food we had eaten on the Lake Shore Limited). While not up to the best of New Orleans cuisine, it was real Cajun cooking. Lesson No. 3: Train food usually beats plane food.

Gloria, a court administrator, and Gary, a computer expert, are train aficionados. They had recently done a trip from Duluth (through Chicago) to Flagstaff, Ariz., and now they were on their way to Gulf Shores, Ala., by way of New Orleans. "You talk to such interesting people on the trains," Gloria observed. (That's Lesson No. 4, and it includes the crews, who leave their families and work together for so much time.)

After dinner, Joanna and I leaned back in spongy swivel chairs in the Skyview Lounge, watching the intermittently lighted expanses of Illinois flash by while other passengers took in the movie or hung out in the bar downstairs. When we returned to our sleeper, we found made beds beckoning.

I stretched out in the lower double, rocked luxuriously by the train's rhythm, starting awake briefly now and then to the thump of new passengers' gear being stowed and beds being made up. At dawn, after 10 stops, most of which we had slept through, we woke to peer down at the muddy train yard at Memphis, Tenn., where an engine problem kept us longer than scheduled. The lyrics of the Steve Goodman song ran through my head: "Changin' trains in Memphis, Tennessee, halfway home, we'll be there by morning, through the Mississippi darkness rollin' down to the sea."

We were on a faster schedule than the stop-and-go City of New Orleans Goodman described. (He wrote the song in 1970, just before Amtrak took over the line with plans to rename that route the Panama Limited after the old Pullman train. Goodman's popular lament for the train with the "disappearin'-railroad blues" persuaded Amtrak to rechristen it the City of New Orleans.) And our sleek new equipment was a far cry from the tattered luxury of its aging 1940s cars.

By the time we were served our scrambled eggs and fresh-baked biscuits and had read the headlines on the Memphis Commercial Appeal that had been slipped under our door, we were nearly into the station at Greenwood, Miss., where a few local passengers boarded. Our breakfast companions were Claudia Ogle and Alma Holloway, a retired secretary and a bank administrator from Toledo, Ohio. When I mentioned that I had showered in the toilet-shower combo, they looked as scandalized as if I had announced that I had sunbathed topless on the engine roof at full speed.

Between breakfast and lunch, the landscape turned swampy. I was fascinated by the strange rectangular pools bordered by skinny strips of land. They were catfish ponds. They soon gave way to fields of bright green grass alternating with patches of cotton stubble. Nearing Yazoo City, Miss.--our second stop after Memphis, with six more to go--we watched folks hanging out on their stoops, kids playing, pickup trucks winding along two-lane country roads. To this untutored Yankee, it was a first glimpse of what I had known only from fiction and song, from Flannery O'Connor to Hank Williams. And it did look different, from the dusty streets to the plain-lettered signs for BBQ and general stores.

And then came a sound track--history and nature observations by Emett and Barbara Burnett, Louisiana guides for Rails and Trails, a joint service of Amtrak and the National Parks Service. There was show-and-tell in the lounge car too, where Barbara invited us to examine native artifacts--a nutria skull and otter, coyote and beaver pelts.

By midafternoon, as we skirted the broad waters of Lake Pontchartrain, we saw Spanish moss everywhere, dangling from cypress branches like the long, pointed beards scholars wear in old Chinese paintings. Herons and egrets waded, and turtles sunbathed amid fan palmettos and water hyacinths that sprouted from the water. It was a breathtaking contrast to the icy shores of Lake Michigan we had left behind 20 hours and nearly 1,000 miles ago.

American trains, at least this one, lack the romance and luxury of Europe's fabled railroads or of our Pullmans of yore. The cars, comfortable and ingenious as they are, are too much plastic and Formica. But there is a sense of shared adventure among those onboard, a leisurely and good-natured spirit. Travelers rush to the windows together and marvel at sights like the 11 1/2-ft. pet alligator in the pool at Patchouli, Miss. Free from seat belts and sardine-can seating configurations, they roam the cars and trade stories. When there are discomforts or inconveniences, they share a laugh about them. Most of the time those packed-in planes really will get you there faster, but I can attest to this: you don't hear anyone out there talking about train rage.