Come on in and sit down. I wanna talk to you about trains for a minute. It’s fine, you’re not in trouble, I just — no, you know what, yes, you are in trouble, kind of.
Do you remember the first-ever Treehouse of Horror episode on The Simpsons back in Season Two? The one that spoofed the classic Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man,” where Kang and Kodos abduct the Simpsons and Lisa finds a cookbook called How To Cook Humans and is convinced the Rigellians are going to eat them and then Kang blows dust off the title and it reads How To Cook For Humans and then Lisa blows off more dust and it reads How To Cook Forty Humans and then Kang blows the last of the dust off and it finally reads How To Cook For Forty Humans?
And then Lisa says “Well, why were you trying to make us eat all the time?” and Kang says “Make you eat? We merely provided a sumptuous banquet and frankly you people made pigs out of yourselves” and then Serak the Preparer starts crying and then Kang says “Well, if you wanted to make Serak the Preparer cry, mission accomplished,” and they drop the Simpsons off back at home and tell them, “We offered you paradise. You would have experienced emotions a hundred times greater than what you call love. And a thousand times greater than what you call fun. You would have been treated like gods and lived forever in beauty. But, now, because of your distrustful nature, that can never be.”
Amtrak is Kang, Kodos, and Serak the Preparer all rolled into one, and we are Lisa Simpson. Read on, if you would examine your own soul:
After all the hype and excitement over it new residency program for writers, Amtrak officially announced guidelines for the new program…A closer examination of the program’s official terms has some writers tempering their interest. Specifically, they are balking at the fact that Amtrak wants rights to their submitted writing samples…
Included in the application for the residency program is a required writing sample (no more than 10 pages), to ensure that Amtrak is sending actual serious writers on a residency and not just someone looking for a free ride. After reading the quoted portion of Section 6 above, however, writers are questioning whether or not they cede rights to their submitted samples simply by applying. The fear is, essentially, that Amtrak can do whatever it wants with submitted work, even work that they have been planning to use elsewhere.
You have a garbage soul and you look for garbage; you smell for it, you seek it out, you keep your head low to the ground and when you have found garbage — as garbage-seekers invariably do — you congratulate yourself as if you have done something, as if you have accomplished something. It is a free, optional goddamn train ride for a couple of writers, who are a categorically useless type of person, and complaining about it is not allowed.
“Oh, but they’re asking for the rights to republish my work.” I’m sorry. Were you or were you not just afforded the opportunity to be one of a handful of people to BOARD A STEEL BEAST AND RIDE IT ACROSS THE IRON SPINE OF THE GREATEST GODDAMN COUNTRY IN GOD’S ENTIRE GODDAMN SUN-FILLED GREEN EARTH? Are you John Donne? Are you Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, beloved Nigerian author whose third novel has been called “brilliant” by The Guardian for “changing the way [readers] look at the world”? Is anyone publishing your work right now, you pathetic Midas-in-reverse, frantically looking for gold to transmute into something dull and base in a desperate attempt to keep attention away from the fact that you have accomplished nothing with your dead-eyed, miserable life despite the fact that you have more resources and opportunities than every single one of your ancestors could possibly have dreamed of? Were you planning on simultaneously submitting those gems to the New Yorker? No. No one is looking to publish your work or mine, do not blame trains for the fact that you can’t drum interest up in your work of disaffected suburban alienation or that essay about your friend whose dad died one time, you joyless hack.
You have no poetry in your soul and your blood is not the blood of a true American. If Walt Whitman were alive, and if he could see you now, he would vomit tears of betrayal and rage, you fundamentally unloveable clod of dirt. You want a free cross-country train ride and then a hearty handshake and best wishes from Amtrak at the end of it? Oh, they’d own my application materials, my precious application materials. It is a contest. It is an Amtrak promotion. Why on earth would they not want to reserve the right to use your willingly submitted work in their advertisements? Save it for your dream journal if it’s too precious to trade in for filthy lucre, friend.
Frankly, if every train in the country suddenly decided that it had the right to all of my work, both published and unpublished, I would thank them for building America and sign the reversion cheerfully. The blood of John Henry and the spirit of Paul Bunyan and my own personal honor would compel me.
I rode a train once; a sleeper up the California coast. We whistled to the towns as we passed by. I slept in a cubby-compartment and rocked back and forth in the belly of the train as we barreled silent and dark past the sea. In the morning I ate breakfast off of a table with a white tablecloth. An old man came into the dining car and saw me looking out the window. He was traveling with his wife, this old man, traveling with his wife around the country after a lifetime of hard work and making do.
“Do you know what you’re seeing right now?” he asked, inclining his grey head to the picture window. “That’s America’s backyard passing by.”
Sweet Christ in the nine heavens, a train is a place where a woman can rest easy of a morning and eat her breakfast off a white tablecloth while watching America’s backyard pass by. Why would you seek to diminish this? What possible satisfaction could you eke from smearing the good name of trains?
A train is a steel horse that breathes steam in order to carry gentlemen and gentleladies about the country swiftly and safely — it cannot fall out of the sky, it cannot sink into the sea — and someone wants to put you on one of them for free because you have a five-year-old laptop and one or two aging bylines (I see you; you wrote for VICE or The Atlantic once and then immediately added it to your Twitter bio and then never pitched them again because all you cared about was getting that word next to your name, not becoming a consistent and disciplined practitioner of your goddamn cunting craft).
America’s goddamn backyard, that’s where trains go. Ride on a goddamn choo-choo for goddamn free, that’s what you had the chance to do. And you people took a shit on it.
Don’t be Lisa Simpson. Don’t go looking for that cookbook. (Also, you shouldn’t be simultaneously submitting in the first place; it is not the 1960s. You are not mailing fat manuscripts out to various publishers 3000 miles away; you’re getting auto-rejections within 48 hours, you piece of seething, roiling, superheated trash). If you should get that golden ticket, board that train and don’t look back. I shouldn’t even have to explain that to you.
Tags: amtrak, complaining, garbage, i’m not yelling i’m raising my voice, this is my application for the amtrak writer’s residency, trains, writer’s residency
“your goddamn cunting craft”
That’s going on the Amtrak website.
That should go on the goddam cunting side of the train.
I had this narrated to me last night, and I literally lay on my back and closed my eyes and opened my hands and faced the palms to the ceiling so as to allow each word to enter into me with purity and clarity.
Can Mallory please call me and read it to me, too? My soul needs burnishing.
Can I sit beside you and share in the pleasure? Because goddam YES to all of it.
Reading your recap of that Treehouse of Horror story made me laugh out loud without even having to see it, and now I’m just sad about the current state of that once great show (which I realize is the worst thing someone could ever type).
Also— Trains are the shit, I always think someone has been murdered aboard and I feel like the fanciest lad whenever I get to ride one.
I love trains more than I hate French-Canadians, which is good, because all Canadian trains are staffed by French-Canadians.
TRAINS ARE THE BEST.
Mallory, you have to read Dick Francis’ “The Edge” which is about MURDER and the TRANS-CANADA RAILROAD, and also there are horses on the train, and everyone has such a good time that even the people who [redacted] are grateful for having taken the trip in the first place.
OKAY I WILL BECAUSE I LOVE TRAINS
http://the-toast.net/2013/08/19/texts-from-dagny-…
Trains trains trains, I do love ’em.
For years I have wanted to do a trans-Canadian rail journey on THE CANADIAN. But it is very expensive and I’m not sure it would live up to my imagination; also I am not entirely sure I want to be sealed in a metal tube with lots of elderly Canadians for 5 days.
It’s pretty nice! If you want to do it, sign up for a preference card and watch your email. The tickets go on 50% off sale frequently and they announce it through there. At least if you’re ok with doing it in coach (heh, who needs a shower? when I did it we washed our hair in Winnipeg and grinned the entire time!) it can be definitely way competitive with the plane. As long as you’ve got a couple weeks to do the whole trip – after 4 days between Toronto and Vancouver, you’re going to want to get out and stretch your legs. I’ve done the round trip Ontario – BC once, and one Ontario – BC – Nova Scotia – Ontario once. That trip was epic.
My parents did it sleeper class twice. One day I’ll do it sleeper class with a partner during the winter… One day.
Ask me about the time we did Ottawa – BC as a family of four _on the Greyhound!_ No overnight stops! The single advantage of the bus over coach-train is that they actually turn out the lights on the bus inside, so you can see the stars and the storm coming across the parries. Driving through the rockies after 2 straight days of sitting, insane sleep schedules, and being hopped up on gravol, was pretty amazing. The train is much nicer though! No midnight panics in Winnipeg wondering if you’re going to get to sit next to your Mom or some random stranger who’s drinking from a flask.
And my parents wonder why I moved to Germany as an adult. All this travelling! And they won’t even come visit me.
Are you me? The cross country train trip (in February, so tickets were cheap), the bus trips (Toronto-Vancouver and back, twice!) and the living in Germany. Where my family refuses to visit. WHAT.
Hahahahahaaa, awesome. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t the toast, you know? We definitely need to do a Berlin toast-up – preferably in May or on a weekend before then (I’m moving from west nowhere, and am in town doing the house hunt and hanging with my girl every weekend basically before then).
But also: I am jealous of the February train trip! did you get snowed in anywhere? And what is up with parents not visiting anyway. I offered to buy tickets. My mother has grudgingly said she’ll visit “once” but no timeline on when that might be…
You just need dry shampoo. Or corn starch. I will totally teach you how, I swear.
Do it! It’s awesome. And not to brag, but I got my ticket for 75% off after some hardcore stalking of the VIA Rail website, so check there frequently. I sort of ruined the trip by crying the entire time because I was sad to be leaving B.C. behind, but the MAJESTY OF CANADA is a great background for tears, so.
Listened to the audiobook whilst on a trans-canadian vacation with mom and dad. Learned wonderful made-up words like Revelstoke, Kamloops and Calgary.
Yo, I am reading this article while sitting in a nice, comfortable Amtrak seat with lots of legroom and free wifi and an easily accessible power socket. I am therefore in an excellent position to confirm that, verily, TRAINS ARE INDEED THE BEST.
Man that power outlet (and the leg room) is one of the things that makes me really love trains/
Speaking of Canadian trains, yesterday I had the privilege of reading the following explanation: “”car” being Canadian for passenger carriage or coach.” This comes from “fruit ranching classic” Fruit Ranching in British Columbia by JT Bealby. I have only read the first few pages of this book and I am already entranced.
(the phrase “fruit ranching classic” comes from a British Columbia local news site)
I’m from the Okanagan and I didn’t even realize one would call oneself a fruit rancher. It’s so wild west and I love it.
Although “The Fruit Ranch” sounds like a very specific kind of club. One I would be happy to visit!
I’m not sure that one would call oneself a fruit rancher, but Bealby has an… original way of putting things. Some examples (the last two of which are actually from a biographical essay he wrote about ETA Hoffmann):
“The seasons are uncertain. Almost every spring frosts do damage. There are many bird enemies.” -his reasons for not fruit ranching in England.
“A sitting sparrow he did at length contrive to hit, but a flying one, or a hare, or even a deer, he never could succeed in knocking over, that is to say the real animals.”
“[He]… looked with contempt (partly amused and partly bitter) upon the childish follies and fopperies, the trifling and dandling with serious feelings and affections, of the folks amongst whom he lived”
His choices are so weird and yet I can’t stop reading?
I have this weird image of all of those quotes being made by cats. Just re-read them all as a cat.
“There are many bird enemies.”
That is absolutely how a cat would talk, and the subjects they concern themselves with. War upon birds and contempt for all.
Holy shit, you are 100% right about French-Canadians on trains and I didn’t realize it until this EXACT MOMENT. Shit. No wonder they are so much nicer to me after checking my boarding pass (with my very French name, despite the fact that I am not French-Canadian or even a little bit close).
I like being ON trains but I have a very specific hatred for the Toronto-Montreal special that runs 3x a week (MWF) at the exact same time and delays my 16-minute commute because I am not patient enough to add one extra minute. /snowflake
Three of my favourite things in one book? Off to the public library, tally-ho! By the way, I love public libraries, too, and if the train with the horses and mystery corpse stop by one, my head could possibly explode from pleasure.
Okay, so The Canadian (the VIA train that runs from Toronto to Vancouver) has an on-board musician program which is like an artist residency (free amazing food and passage!) and is the best thing. (Also: Canada did it first HA) My accordion-playing friend and I went a couple years ago and I can verify that all the passengers and staff were lovely.
The thing about the French Canadian staff is that they are all transplants and have to live in one of the (usually Anglo) cities at the terminus of their rail-leg. I played “Un Canadien Errant” as part of a set one night and made an old Quebecois steward cry; I have had only love in my heart for all of them since.
Oh, I love “Un Canadien Errant.” Okay. Briefly softening on the Quebecois.
oh my god I JUST REMEMBERED I wrote a massive paper in high school about the Trans-Canada Railroad and how it kept America from stealing British Columbia (more or less)
I have a friend who’s currently squawking about this on Facebook and it’s taking all I can do to not post this on her wall. Oh no, Amtrak wants the rights to the sample you send them for your FREE TRAIN RIDE. Maybe it’ll end up in their magazine so they can share who they’ve given the residencies to. THEN YOU WOULD BE PUBLISHED.
POST IT POST IT POST IT
Concurring that trains are the best, and also that this is spectacular.
Thumbs up for that perfect and succinct reply.
YA BURNT
BOARD A STEEL BEAST AND RIDE IT ACROSS THE IRON SPINE OF THE GREATEST GODDAMN COUNTRY IN GOD’S ENTIRE GODDAMN SUN-FILLED GREEN EARTH?
This really needs to be Amtrak’s new motto. I think, even more than a writer-in-residency, it would make riding the rails America’s preferred form of transport again.
This reminds me how much I want to do the Empire Builder line from Chicago to Seattle (via the Great Plains, Glacier National Park, and the Rockies) someday.
I did it! If you don’t have to be in Seattle on time (read: just hang out in the middle of Montana for no fucking reason for 6+ hours) then it’s great!
Yeah, it’d be a leisurely trip. Hanging out in Montana for 6 hours sounds fine! Think how much writing I could get done!
I’d also want to spend a day or two wandering Glacier and a night or two lying wide awake in a tent imagining every sound is an enraged, bloodthirsty grizzly.
Yeah, sadly the Empire Builder just stops in Glacier for like 20 minutes and then whoosh. And the one I was on/time of year, we went through Glacier at DUSK so you couldn’t see much. But I seriously recommend the experience.
Even better, book a room at the Isaak Walton Inn, which is about an hour east of West Glacier, and the train will stop there to drop you off. It’s so worth it. Or if you go to Glacier, at least stop by the IW Inn for lunch or dinner to see the old Amtrak menus they’ve got on the walls.
http://www.izaakwaltoninn.com/
M
Do it! I live near Glacier Park, I can bring you snacks while you wait (the trains are never on time, but the views are wonderful!).
Thanks! It probably won’t be for a few years, but hopefully we can still work out a snack delivery system based on this exchange.
WIFE: What do you mean you didn’t pack any food?
OSUTEIN: I told you, hugpunch is bringing us snacks.
WIFE: What is a hugpunch?
OSUTEIN: They’re another commenter on The Toast.
WIFE: Wait, this is someone you met on the Internet? And why do you keep using the pronoun ‘they’?
OSUTEIN: Well, I don’t know hugpunch’s gender identity. Stop being such a gender binarist. God.
WIFE: You don’t know our sole food source’s real name or even their gender identity? Do you at least know what they look like?
OSUTEIN: Some kind of goat?
WIFE: [murders]
Ha, the goat photo is misleading. I’m actually an owl.
I just want to add that literally nothing in the terms of service (which, to emphasize, apply ONLY TO YOUR SUBMISSION MATERIALS, not to whatever work of majestic prose you’re actually going to churn out on the train) prevent you from ALSO submitting your 10-page sample to, like, the Paris Review or something. They’re just going to publish it in Arrive, their on-train equivalent to an in-flight magazine as well, maybe, and in fact they probably won’t. You could also just send them something that was already published in the Paris Review! Oh, wait, you’ve never had anything published in the Paris Review? Or in “Arrive,” for that matter? Hmm.
Right, exactly, that was the thing that got me about it too – I looked at the article and read the section in the application that everyone’s so mad about just to make sure I wasn’t missing some clause where they said that they were the ONLY ones who could publish the writing sample, and it wasn’t there. Literally the only thing Amtrak could do would be to publish your work themselves for promotional purposes. So it’s like, you’ll take a free train ride from them but you’re too good to have your name and work in their magazine? If you were being published in the Paris Review you wouldn’t be applying for this in the first place, you pretentious twit. Ugh.
I think they changed it because of the uproar- my understanding is that clause 6 used to include the phrase “universal world rights” and now it doesn’t.
Ok, that’s fair – but even so, that’s just 10 pages out of your entire body of work. Can you really not let Amtrak have a measly 10 pages? Especially when they’re not even claiming any rights to what you write while on the train? You’ve got the rest of your life (not to mention a cross-country train ride) to craft material that’s worthy of being published by a more illustrious entity. And again, if you think your writing’s too good for Arrive, why are you applying for this in the first place? Sorry to rant at you; I just find all of this brouhaha really irritating.
Even in the old version, there was nothing to prevent you from republishing it. That’s still a good deal.
Writer: “Dear NEW YORKER, please find my attached submission.”
New Yorker: “Dear Writer, thank you! We’d love to publish your piece and also provide you with a free vacation.”
Writer: “Dear New Yorker, Thank you! Just to let you know, I will also be publishing the piece in the LA Review of Books.”
New Yorker: “Dear Writer. Um, as is standard in this industry, we ask for exclusive publication rights to the story. Please don’t publish it elsewhere.”
Writer: “FASCIST!”
HELL YES
The person I saw complaining about it was arguing that SURE, they say NOW that they only get the rights to your sample rather than the work produced, but what’s to say they won’t make you sign over the rights to said majestic prose before letting you off the train, all sneaky-like? What if it’s in the fine print of the extensive contract you no doubt sign to claim your prize?
Let me emphasize that this person was serious.
I’m imagining a dastardly Snidely Whiplash-style train conductor holding you hostage while the train puffs and steams, and you desperately try to charge past to your luggage waiting on the platform, and he goes “No! NEVER! Not until you sign THIS!” and it’s a long piece of parchment that you must sign in blood and there’s five cutaways to your face, then Snidely, then the engineer preparing to put the throttle down, then your luggage all lonely on the platform, then your anguished face again. And then it turns out that your masterpiece is actually a five-paragraph discussion of rkfire’s I LOVE TRANES
“(Re)railing the [Dis]course: Subaltern Semiotics in rkfire’s I LOVE TRANES”
“you fundamentally unloveable clod of dirt”
Possibly the greatest thing I’ve read today! You have a new fan.
I was confused by how anyone could love an American train ride, but I think the key must be the sleeper car. I once was in coach for 18 hours on a train that was scheduled for 7. It’s different if you can lie down, I assume, and I do love trains in places where the passenger trains don’t have to pull over and automatically give all the freight lines right-of-way. As it is, riding Amtrak generally gets me really worked up into a frothy, incontinent fury about the history of monopolies and the legacies of the Gilded Age. GODDAMN YOU RAILWAY BARONS.
That said, your point absolutely stands about people being giant babies about this residency thing.
Feeling worried that my above sentiments may be mistaken for anti-train. I love trains! Model trains, freight trains, books about trains. All the trains.
Amtrak also causes frothy rage for me! I have ridden in Amtrak once, round trip. The train was three hours late both ways in the middle of the damn night in the middle of Minnesota winter.
I like the idea of trains far more than I actually enjoyed the experience.
Transportation trains in many other places are SO MUCH BETTER. That said, I think the US train system might be slightly more palatable if 1) you can shell out for the fancy sleeper 2) you don’t actually have to be anywhere on time 3) you are traveling from large urban area to other large urban area. The Portland-to-Seattle Cascade route is actually quite delightful, and usually on time! Traveling to/from any place outside of a city center? THE WOOOORST. The station in my hometown was a platform, and when the train was 3 hours late, I just sat on a curb in the dark from 3 am to 6 am. Not a bathroom or a vending machine in sight.
I love the cascade route with a fiery passion.
I took the Coast Starlight from Oakland to LA once. I’m sorry I wished to like it, but never again. Give me a horrible sky bus tube any day. We could have been home in 3 hours. 3 HOURS. I don’t care how much of america’s magnificent coastline I saw in the 12 hours of travel that we could have done in a 5 hour drive. And we only got to have one meal that cost something like $25 dollars each for some mediocre pasta, because the other times the restaurants were booked and so we had to eat from the snack corner which was literally a microwave, one sad canister of pringles and bruised apple. We hesitated too long and missed out on the bruised apple.
Trains may try asking me out again when the bullet trains are finished.
In the meantime, even given that my experience was that of eating old shoe leather, these people are still intolerable and precious about their work. Dorothy Sayers wrote ad copy. Wallace Stevens, insurance salesman. And I’m sure all these complainers ain’t them.
.
I have just purchased a USA Railpass, which is obviously awesome because USA is right in the fucking name. I don’t know where I’m going (that’s a lie, I always go to Minneapolis) but I know that it will be on a train.
I am crying at the beauty, and also from the painful laughs in my stomach region.
The joy I am feeling is a complex kind of joy. It’s joy and also bliss and also shame and also an almost jingoistic patriotism, which isn’t normally a thing for me, but there it is, like a country song on the 4th of July, but with more fireworks and really excellent pizza.
I love this rant almost as much as I love trains, and there is very little I love as much as trains.
I am a little glad that these people are finding reasons not to apply for this residency, because I don’t want garbage people sullying glorious trains.
I have never been so happy to read something that so completely speaks to my work life, my life-life, and life in general. I work with trains. I ride them for a living, making sure they are safe (yes, actually a real job). Such a testimonial to the glory and magnificence of trains, and the mewling, fetid, corroded soul of humanity, could not have been better conceived by Leland Stanford himself.
Mallory, this is a goddamn masterpiece
TELL ME EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR JOB
haha! Mallory, there is so much to tell. I work mostly with urban public transit, but a train is a train, no? and all trains rule.
the most fun/awesome parts are: a) getting to do “tunnel walks” where you check the track and structures and find hobo collections of mannequin torsos (not making that up), b) see the control centers with all the screens showing where all the trains are (nerd alert), and c) talking to the people who make transit systems run – the operators, the maintenance guys, everybody – because they are some real deal, salt-of-the-earth, American heroes who keep people moving. I sound like a commercial, and I am ok with that.
it is a great job to have.
Oh my god can you please pitch a piece about tunnel walks I would read the shit out of that
In fairness, if you were in a position to be able to collect mannequin torsos but to do comparatively little else, wouldn’t you?
Aw, I wouldn’t want to take the torsos away from the guy who hoarded them there. First, ’cause I’d feel bad, and second, I’m not sure someone who collects mannequin torsos and hoards them in a defunct rail tunnel is, er, someone to be trifled with.
Aaaand I’m an idiot. Thought you were talking about me, but you were talking about the hoboes. Sorry!
ARE YOU HIRING?
trains are miracles. i make the round trip (philly to new york) several times a year to see my family, and trains make traveling through the literal wasteland of newark feel like a journey into the soul.
I love that approach from Newark into Manhattan. It’s beautiful.
SUCH TRUTH. I often take the trip from Chicago to Niles, Michicago (near South Bend, IN, if that is more recognisable to people) and despite the fact that it is always late and always gets shunted off by BNSF, it’s so much more interesting than the freeway. It goes through some crazy ass post-apololyptic looking smoke stack villages (I don’t what they actually are – some kind of refinery of something, something withs smelting? I have no fucking clue) and along the most polluted bit of Lake Michigan and the backyards of the weird outer suburbs of Chicago. The train even makes the trip from Chicago to Milwaukee, which is pretty much flat nothingness, totally fascinating. Also, CHI -> MKE on the Hiawatha is the most consistently on-time route in the U.S! It’s never more than a few minutes late.
Oh for fuck’s sake, are people really complaining about this? Like, what, you thought Amtrak was going to read your precious writing sample and be blown away by your talent and give you this amazing gift just cause they thought you were awesome, without getting anything out of it themselves? “Oh no, Amtrak owns 10 pages of my novel about white person ennui in New York City, they might actually publish some of it and then I’d have free name recognition and publicity along with a free train ride! How terrible!” Your writing is good enough to get a free train ride (which is goddamn expensive for the rest of us lowly non-writer humans, in case you’d forgotten, exalted word-crafter) but too good to be on the Amtrak website or whatever? Are you actively trying NOT to make a living with this writing thing? Free. Train. Ride. Just stop right there and kiss the earth and praise the heavens for this opportunity. I mean, really.
On the flip side, I hope enough people are complaining about it so I can stroll in with a half-baked essay and get a free Amtrak trip.
“We are pleased to announce that our first Amtrak writer-in-residency spot will go to rkfire for their micro-essay ‘I LOVE TRANES.'”
“We particularly enjoyed her use of crayon and construction paper as a medium for writing.”
Indeed, that would be the silver lining in this maelstrom of whine. I’ve got a couple of short stories from high school English class I could dust off. The free train ride would be worth the embarrassment of having my teenage writing published.
Yes! I’m planning a cross-country trip by train for later this year. Southwest Chief from Chicago to LA, Coast Starlight from LA to San Fran, California Zephyr from San Fran to Chicago, for those interested. I wanted to go visit my brother in California, and I’ve never been west of Dallas before. I figured this would be a great way to see the country.
The best! I took that route from Chicago-San Fran and it was great. They time it so you sleep through Nebraska and have a full daylight view of the Rockies. I didn’t even get a sleeper car, but there aren’t that many people so you can spread out on the seats. And the people who are there are awesome. Some of them have clearly chosen this method of travel because trains, unlike plains, have smoke breaks.
They also let you bring on a huge amount of luggage for free and even more for cheap, so Amtrak is my plan for my next cross-country move.
That’s the prettiest part of the Coast Starlight route. Have fun!
Mallory, I strongly recommend visiting Japan (in the event you haven’t already), because there are trains crossing every inch of a gorgeous countryside that you can ride for a pittance, and there are trains of every conceivable shape and size, and some (okay, one) of the station masters is an actual housecat with a tiny station master uniform, and it strikes me as a destination for any train lover even if it isn’t the Greatest Country on Earth™.
Yes! Japan is a railway paradise. One car trains that putter through forests between little coastal villages. Local trains that skirt deep, cloud-filled mountain gorges. And JR East even has a goddam double-decker bullet train, like some kind of steel steed shot from God’s own ass into the hearts of men.
Cosign to all of this! And the views of the glistening sea from the Tokaido line can take your breath away.
and if you’re lucky wolverine will be fighting a ninja on top of one.
Also, you can get a ticket that entitles you to FREE TRAIN TRAVEL (on one network, because capitalism) for a period of time and then you can speed across miles and miles in practically no time at all and see so much you forget basically everything.
Also, also, there’s a steam train up in the north that only travels in the winter, that goes from one undistinguished northern town to another and then back again, and inside the carriage there is a little STOVE for you to bundle up next to, roasting dried squid and drinking nihonshu.
Sometimes when I am on an expensive,over-capacity Northeast Corridor Amtrak delayed on the tracks somewhere between New Haven and Mystic, CT, listening to some dude in a rumpled suit yell at his phone about being late for his Boston meeting, I feel less than enthused about the current state of train travel in the US. Then I flip through the Amtrak magazine in the seatback pocket and see all these cheaper, amazingly beautiful routes that run clear across the country and I realize I gotta GTFO outta New England.
but I agree, people are goddamn whiners and this post is gold.
I ride that line, I feel you. Ugh. Also for some reason between those cities the trains are often at least an hour late and insanely expensive.
Alas, I am a bit of a train-hater. Maybe the experience is different for people in different places?
I have only ever taken the ones that run across the country, because I don’t live in New England, and they’re always from like 3:10 am to 7:30 am two days later and dump you in a weird tiny town 30 miles from where you’re actually going. But man, the views!
Ride on a goddamn choo-choo for goddamn free
Please let Amtrak make this the official slogan for this program. Please.
Can it be set to the Amtrak “All Aboard” jingle? Because I love that song.
CHOO [FUCKING] CHOO, as my nephew would say. He fully grasps the majesty of trains. I’m taking him to a train museum in a couple of months and, based on how much he lost his shit over a little model train going in a small loop over and over at Christmas, he is really going to freak out. It will be great.
If he is into Thomas And Friends at all, I highly recommend Day Out With Thomas events. The Illinois Railway Museum puts on a great do, and I understand that other locations are similarly fantastic.
As a writer I almost want to sympathize but then I remember that I sold out so much harder than anything Amtrak is asking of these people. Health benefits, suckers!
Also, if twitter were your only guide, you would think that the most major exploited labor force in America is people with graduate degrees. Get on that train and ask your ticket-taker how he pays the bills.
Comments that appear in the moderation queue which speak disrespectfully of trains are likely to meet with Mallory’s spam button, and, in this matter, I shall not stand against her.
But what if they are speaking disrespectfully of FREIGHT trains? The kind that are like 5 kilometers long and go at a snail’s pace, the better for you to sit there and memorize the license plate of the car in front of you and speculate on how much they spent on their stick figure family (5 people and a cat and two dogs? Those things are not cheap!) and organize your purse?
It is an opportunity for you to cultivate patience and contemplate meaning in the face of mortality.
BORING
Plus freight trains are much more environmentally friendly than semi-trucks and cargo planes, and help cut down on the number of semi-trucks clogging our highways and overturning at opportune moments during chase scenes.
NPR underwriting announcements have taught me that freight trains can move a million tons of freight eighteen hundred miles on a single gallon of fuel, or something similarly mindboggling.
YESSS
Renounce your car-driving ways; abandon your shitty SUV or compact or whatever mid-commute and hop aboard the passing traincar to adventure. You are a hobo now, and the world is your kingdom.
You can romanticize trains as much as you want, but Amtrak is no longer the gritty, blue collar builder of America it might once have been. It is actually cheaper to fly than to take Amtrak for most journeys. As awful as Megabus is, that’s how the people I know actually travel, because it’s literally $150 less than the same trip would be on Amtrak.
THANK YOU I WILL ROMANTICIZE TRAINS AS MUCH AS I WANT AND I STOPPED READING YOUR COMMENT AFTER THAT SENTENCE SO I CAN ONLY ASSUME IT WAS FURTHER CONGRATULATIONS
Also, you have to be in a position to be able to take the extra time off. Spend more money to take like 5 times as much time to get where you’re going. Have you seen Ken Burns’ documentary about national parks? It’s really interesting b/c the interlocking train system/ park system really WERE for rich people of leisure: it was inaccessible to almost everyone else. GILDED AGE!
Mallory can we have an article about the future of high speed trains b/c that is what I want more than anything else in the world
Yeah, my family lives in Upstate NY (like real upstate, not Westchester) and I would LOVE to take the train to visit them, because it is so much nicer, but it isn’t any cheaper than flying to Syracuse, takes a whole day, and involves being in NY Penn for several hours in the dead of the night (and even if NYC never sleeps, I still don’t want to be alone in Penn Station with my luggage and nothing to do at 3:00 AM).
However, I took the train from DC to NYC this summer, and it was lovely.
I think your math is missing the terrible price in human dignity implicit in flying. Trained experts have derived the exact formula for removing all possibility of joy from human beings soaring through the air, and it is an exact replication of the intake procedures at Calvert county jail plus an airless screaming-infused space you must be sawn off at the shinbone to be fit into.
Buses are acceptable but you still can’t get up and walk over to the dining car on your eight-hour intercity ride.
Mallory (and the Toast) I choo choo choose you.
This is reminding me how much better trains are than all other modes of transportation. You have to do literally no work, you aren’t going to fall 35,000 feet from the sky, you can see the shit around you and make sense of it, and you can still fucking drink. What isn’t perfect about this?
You are probably not going to disappear from radar and fall into the sea/go a million miles off course/end up on a time-traveling doom island. TRAINS.
I have to fly abroad on Monday and this whole thing is making me nervous, why can’t I just take a train across the Atlantic already.
You can wander around at will! You can eat and drink and go use the bathroom, and sometimes buy more snacks from a serendipitous trolley! The announcers and guards are sometimes funny, and increasingly often there is wifi, which is still incredible witchcraft when on a moving vehicle! One train journey I take regularly stops by a field of alpacas, which is delightful.
I am super jealous of your alpacas. I used to take the train once a week/every other week to go visit my then-BF and I got to ride by the coast and one time I got to see the very best interaction of my life and it was all because we were on a train! (It’s a very long story, but it ends with the snotty woman at our table of 4 on a packed train sniffing, “I find drinking rather offensive,” at the two guys at our table – who were drinking quite calmly like normal people unlike some of the other people drinking in our carriage – and the guy replying, “I find you rather offensive,” and continuing to drink and it was possibly the best thing every to happen around me.)
Greyhound, of all things, has busses with wifi capability. I rode a nice, quiet, wifi-equipped bus with my husband, and we were happier than pigs in slop.
Of course, the return trip featured a hot, overcrowded bus with a broken toilet, but you can’t have everything.
I got into college based on an essay I wrote about how much I love trains.
SUBMIT THAT SHIT TO AMTRAK
Every time I travel by train, I am struck by the dignity and civility it allows passengers. You arrive in a conveniently located station, browse through shops, admire the gorgeous old-time architecture and art that lives in so many of the old stations. Then you step onto a spacious car, find a spare outlet if you’d like (it’s free!), and you sit and watch the hidden parts of America roll by. Compare this with the indignities of traveling by air, where you are stripped of all objects deemed unnecessary, made to wait in line after line, and finally packed together elbow-to-knee with hundreds of other people into a bland metal tube that smells like stale farts.
What I’m saying is that I want cheap high-speed rail criss-crossing the United States, and I want it NOW. Pull a fraction of a percent from the Pentagon’s budget and build us some Goddamned choo-choos.
I kind of wish my Canadian town of 10,000 people had an adorable station like that! (The actual station is a converted mobile home in the middle of woods. Oh how I wish I was joking and I could conveniently hop on and travel to the Nearby Large Cities!)
I LOVE TRAINS. I have had so many god-awful experiences on my Local Commuter Rail (sup lirr how u doin), and I still love trains.
My only Amtrak experiences have been in the northeast (NYC to Vermont and Montreal to NYC), but one day I’d really like to take a cross-country trip. Hmmm….
haaaaaaa, ha, ha. LIRR. Yeah. I’ve only used it for leisure/coming home to visit and never depended on it to get to work, but. I’ve heard lots and lots of things.
there are… so very. many. Things. (not least of which is the $325 I drop each month to pay for my monthly ticket, ughhh)
via this magnificent bastard here
darth is a treasure.
Please say that this, this right here, is what you submitted to Amway in application for the position. My respect for the company would rise to unforeseen heights, were it to publish anything of this sort at all.
Here’s the other thing about trains. Harry Potter, Hermione, and all the other wizards COULD fly on brooms from London to Hogwarts, or arrive *instantly* via portkey, flu powder, or apparating to Hogsmeade. Do they do that, though? No. THEY RIDE A GODDAMN TRAIN FROM ENGLAND TO SCOTLAND BECAUSE A SLOW-ASS STEAM TRAIN IS STILL MORE MAGICAL THAN TELEPORTATION OR FLYING.
Also, look at the nice last trip the Pevensie kids had together. You could end up in Narnia.
Perhaps it’s because I live in the UK, but I wouldn’t give, say, ‘First’ rights to my work. They’d probably cancel it because of leaves on the line, and then someone would tear it up with a knife and puke on it.
Mind you, if it was ‘East Coast’… they could have it.; Their first class is GREAT. Actually worth paying for first class!
First: The Worst.
They run the buses in my city.
Yeah.
It costs £2.50 to go three stops.
I go along the west coast for most of my train travel (screw you, Transpennine Express!) so I have never experienced the glory of an East Coast first class, though I have heard others speak of the ‘Free Wifi’ and ‘Complementary Sandwiches’ that legend tells are available there…
It’s not just compilmentary sandwiches.
If you’re on for long enough and at the right time, a person cooks you a little meal.
Free wifi. Big, comfy chairs. Quiet carriage. LEG ROOM.
SOMEDAY. That little meal will be mine.
British trains are absurdly priced, what is up with that? I have to go to Leeds this summer and I was looking at visiting my friend in London and the flight (return) from Amsterdam to Leeds is around the same price as going to Leeds to London on a train.
I dunno. All I know is that we’re going to cornwall next week and it costs us less in petrol to drive there than it does to catch the train, and with the car there is room in the boot for our stuff and a guarantee we won’t be stuck in a crowded carriage with a colicky baby.
I get to ride on trains at the end of April anyway, all around Austria and Slovenia, so I will be making the most of that time and writing thinly veiled fiction praising Eurail.
I remember riding Eurail when my mom and I went to Germany/Austria/Switzerland four years ago, and feeling like a dumb American because I couldn’t figure out which way the doors between the cars opened, but was then gratified because actual Austrian people also had trouble with them.
Once on a European train to Austria, I was sleeping in a (regular, non-sleeper – because I did not realize the difference) car with only a woman and her little toddler. In the middle of the night I woke up and there was a MAN rifling through her bags! I just stared at him with an angry and sleepy look and then he left. Creepy. As. Shit. Also, awesome. My other train experiences were good too. One involved an Italian woman saying she always had to be the mom as she demonstrated how to set up weird sleeper car (this was after I figured out the difference) bed linens. Another time, playing tic-tac-toe with a German kid who kept slipping between speaking Italian and Germany SEEMINGLY UNKNOWINGLY. Genius multi-lingual Swiss child.
(Eat ALL THE CAKE in Austria! When I was there I ate almost exclusively pastries/cakes and sausages. And I was a vegetarian. I regret nothing.)
I can’t decide whether it would be worth it to anger Mallory Ortberg. On the one hand, one of my favorite writers would be angry with me. But on the other hand, she might write a brutal takedown of everything I’ve done and said.
Do I get cool points because I took the Amtrak to commute to school every week? 130 miles of reading/sleeping, WITH AN OUTLET TO CHARGE MY PHONE/LAPTOP!!!
Trains are greaaaaaaat. I even say that after commuting on them for a year. The NS trains might not be as glamorous as some, but they take me to the city I work in and I can read (okay, play Marvel Puzzle Fighter) on them in a pretty comfortable chair and look at fields and more fields as I go through Holland.
I also like the trains that go to Germany and France. Basically, I will take a train if it’s an option anywhere even if it’s twice as long. Do you know you can basically just show up to trains around when they leave, unlike airplanes? Like I went to Paris from Rotterdam on the Thalys and I just showed up after work around 20 minutes before my train and got on it and then I was in Paris and not that god-awful Paris airport either. Magical.
Oh yes! Air travel is like the loading screen of life. Trains allow you to switch zones directly and look at all the edges.
Yes! I love that train, it is amazing. And no CDG or Orly to deal with, either, which make it that much better. Yes yes yes.
Suddenly 1000% more excited I get the honor of boarding a glorious steel tube in Seattle and riding down our west coast to the land of ports. This is a trip I will treasure and remember dearly.
It’s a fun train trip! I like it a lot better than flying that distance (and yes, more than taking the boltbus even if the boltbus is cheaper.)
Trains! Oh, magnificent trains. I can ride on you and read and not get sick (like in a car or bus) and not feel slightly ill the entire time (like in planes). I can look out the window and enjoy the scenery. I just wish you weren’t so stupidly expensive in the U.S.
…I would love to be published in Arrive Magazine. (Last year, my boyfriend and I took the Coast Starlight from LA to Seattle because it sounded so awesome, and it was. I love trains.)
oh my god. Is hiring Mallory to yell at me thing we can do? I think The Toast should add it to it’s consulting services.
I think my new life motto is “Don’t go looking for that cookbook.” Don’t expect the worst. Don’t be ungrateful. etc.
As a Brit I’ve never understood why Americans generally have so little respect for trains, given that (i) they are in many respects the source of your nation’s glory and (ii) taking a train across the US is basically a Greatest Hits of World Geography for all the senses.
My girlfriend and I took a long-distance Amtrak train a few years ago. The staff were on the whole fairly unsettling, we came reasonably close to dying in a derailment (the freight train in front of us flew off the tracks and, as the attendant for some reason thought it would be appropriate to say to us, “It’s a good thing we were delayed or that would have been us!”), we were becalmed in rural Montana for 24 hours while they cleared the tracks and so had to become Murder On The Orient Express-level acquainted with all the other passengers while pretending not to notice that the food was slowly running out – and it was still one of the best journeys of my life.
Because Americans like their freedom and their self-determination and thus also their cars.
Our trains and rail systems are also woefully underdeveloped/under-updated compared to other countries. Sadly.
Because uuuurgh convenience don’t you realize I could be at a strip mall in LA up to 25 minutes faster if I spent the entire trip hunched over a baroque torture machine looking at nothing, feeling nothing
My experience with trains (up and down the west coast several times, and once from LA to Chicago) is that the scenery is damned amazing, but that the train itself is usually very hot, very dirty, and filled with horrible children.
It is very possible that I have no soul.
All the talk about US trains reminds me of the time did the Starlight run from LA all the way up to Vancouver over Christmas. I’d been to Legoland with relatives, and I picked up a couple little lego sets which I assembled during the trip. As I was a 21 year old short haired woman of the butch persuasion playing with lego, I think quite a few of my fellow train patrons wondered what such a young boy was doing on a train all by himself.
Seeing the rockies change as I went further north was so neat. In LA I was swimming outside shortly before Christmas (what is this witchery?) and the mountains are sandy and covered with cactuses. The mountains became more rocky and treed as we went north, up through Oregon where we were delayed several hours by a snowstorm.
There may be plenty to complain about re: American trains vs. the rest of the world, but let me tell you, I took Amtrak from Portland to Seattle for AWP, and it was simply glorious. I left out of a gorgeous turn-of-the-20th-century train station, had leg room and pretty views the whole way, not to mention an outlet right there in my seat (and this was in plain old coach), and then arrived in another, even more gorgeous turn-of-the-20th-century train station. Felt very fancy. Could not be more pleased.
The Amtrak Cascades route between Portland and Seattle is high class as hell, and very reliable. Other parts of the Amtrak system, not so great.
Still, the problem is not that trains are not amazing, the problem is that occasionally trains are run badly or not given enough money to be amazing.
“Amtrak Cascades” is basically Cascadia Rail. Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia pay for it, Washington and Oregon have paid for the rail improvements that make it so reliable, and Washington Department of Transportation owns the cars. There’s more to do – particularly the trestle bridge crossing to New Westminster on the way to Vancouver, seriously, what is your deal with that British Columbia because it is terrible – but basically, everybody else needs to catch the fuck up. I am on that thing all the time, it is awesome. 😀
I read this in Sarah Vowell’s nasally voice, because she wrote Assassination Vacation and I love that book and I love her nasally voice. The America, man. it bleeds from these words. It pulls a tear birthed of pure patriotic amniotic fluid from my ex-pat, States hating soul.
I hope this is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. I’m not quite hip enough to know for sure, apparently.
Also, I have never seen that Simpsons episode or the Twilight Zone episode, but the Twilight Zone episode is based on a short story by Damon Knight which I have read, also called “To Serve Man,” and it’s great.
Yes to getting a sleeper; you will nestle in the aluminum embrace of your inexorable chariot and be offered wine tastings.
In Coach others more veteran are surrounded by fortresses of their own snacks and binkies, whether wanted at the moment or not, but; you can go sit in the Club Car with some alleged bread-and-cheese item, molten and smugly adhered to its own aluminum carriage, burning in your under-insulated hand, mocking your noble desire to “be green” and take less of the thin napkins. You will wish to tell others to bring a less-tall water bottle, so that it will fit under the shared water spigot that you and the other citizens of your mobile village queue and thrust at.
There is the creamy splendor of the white-tabletopped Dining, and there is the desperation of the whistle-stop leap to find something leafy and green at the station-adjacent dispensers. These are staffed with persons thin-lipped and amused by your futile pleas for a fresh-squeezed juice. There is only bread and cheese, forever.
As you fantasize at yourself, the subject of a Business-Week writeup at colonizing this nutrition-free frontier all the way to fame and riches, you scramble back onboard. The constipation seeks you.
The train winds southbound and lowers through tunnels and catlike arching turns. Doubled, you see your train’s own engines and think “That is mine.” And it is the train and therefore, perfect. (Coast Starlight, Seattle to Los Angeles.)
Must add: Day-tripping from Los Angeles to San Diego is divine as you don’t have to make the arid drive. Plus, start point Union Station, so beautiful. Whiz past cars stopped to let you through dingdingding flashing lights and you, doing a parade wave to the auto-bound plebes like the celebrity goddess you are. In San Diego, disembark languid and blinking right in the fun part of town. Take a ferry to the Hotel Del Coronado for lunch and strolling… Also, Amtrak has a AAA discount, or used to. OK one more-Metrolink currently has a special weekend-only Day Pass, go on any of their commuter trains as much as you can cram in for just 10 bucks for the whole day.
I’m going to North America for the FIRST TIME IN MY WHOLE LIFE later this year and I’m going to a wedding, and to NYC, and all sorts of exciting things, but MOST EXCITING OF ALL is when I catch a train from Toronto to NYC. I’m DYING OF EXCITEMENT.
TRAINS, MAN. SO GREAT. As an Australian, we sadly lack in the actual train department.
I feel like everyone who harped on about the conditions were just shitting on my parade. personally.
Do it! It's awesome. And not to brag, but I got my ticket for 75% off after some hardcore stalking of the VIA Rail website, so check there frequently. I sort of ruined the trip by crying the entire time because I was sad to be leaving B.C. behind, but the MAJESTY OF CANADA is a great background for tears, so.
I thought my own response to the goddamn-train-haters at http://teemorris.com/2014/03/14/amtrak-terms-of-s… was eloquent with just a pinch of snark…then I read this blogpost.
*slow golf clap*
Fucking. Gold. Prose.
Thank you for this gem. Thank you so very, very much.
I thought my own response to the goddamn-train-haters at http://teemorris.com/2014/03/14/amtrak-terms-of-s… was eloquent with just a pinch of snark…then I read this blogpost.
*slow golf clap*
Fucking. Gold. Prose.
Thank you for this gem. Thank you so very, very much.
I love trains, even though I can’t quite remember back to when my mother would take me on trains full of troops during WWII as she followed my father from post to post, six people sharing seats meant for four so that when it was my mother’s turn to stand in the aisle, someone sitting would hold me. And she’d share the graham cracker brought for me with all her seat mates. I wish I had the time and reason to go farther by train than my usual three-and-a-half hours to NYC. Regarding this topic, though, I think it should be pointed out that the objections are that Amtrak gets the rights to use (and also alter as they choose) ALL entries, not just the winners. Of course they should have rights to the winners. The wording may not have been well thought out, or intended to mean what it appears to mean, but there it is. I personally figure that it’s no worse than an entry fee for a contest, and I’d jump at it if my publishing history weren’t in a genre they’re not likely to want associated with them. Too bad, since I’ve written or edited some very hot scenes set in Amtrak trains.