The virtual world is pulling Americans apart. Could slow train travel be an antidote?

Social commentators tell us the nation is divided.

• Left and right do not speak to one another.

• Rich and poor do not encounter one another.

• Urban and rural look down on each other.

And the problem gets worse as we spend more and more time in online communities of like-minded people.

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, author Jenny Odell reminds us of how few common reference points we all have. There is a reason small talk revolves around the weather. What else do we all share in common?

“Just as attention may be the last resource we have to withhold, the physical world is our last common reference point. At least until everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses 24/7, you cannot opt out of awareness of physical reality.”

Riding a train may be one of the few instances where a group of strangers share one common reference point for a sustained period of time.

I cannot pretend that Amtrak can bring American society together. Especially considering only 12.1 million of the country’s 330 million inhabitants ride Amtrak every year — and many of those are on shorter trips.

But I can tell you that, at a time when too few Americans talk to each other, long-distance Amtrak trains foster conversations that would not otherwise be possible.

Consider a handful of my own interactions over the years:

• The first person I ever met on a long-distance train was a man who once served time in San Quentin State Prison in the Bay Area, but had lived much of his life in Oceanside, California, just a few miles from my home at the time. Leaving behind a drug addiction, he drove across the country and, when he ran out of gas and money in Oklahoma, he made that his home. He shared his story with me as we rode through Illinois and Iowa on the Southwest Chief in August 2000.

• I have watched the sun rise through an open train window with a civil servant from southern California along Idaho’s Pend Oreille River.

• I have played Cards Against Humanity with young people traveling to Chicago for a birthday weekend.

• Long before the advent of GPS, I hiked miles through Glacier National Park on no sleep with a library science student I had just met on the inbound train. After our hike, we bummed a ride back to our hostel from a stranger at a vistors’ center who never once spoke to us.

• Riding up the Eastern seaboard through dry counties on a Sunday, I broke bread with an Uzbeki-American truck driver, who shared with me an entire Halal meal he had packed for himself.

• Aboard the Southwest Chief in May 2022, I met an Italian couple who were touring the United States for a full month by rail. Later, when they were in New York City, I took them to their first baseball game, watching the Brooklyn Cyclones at Coney Island.

• On that same train, I chatted with Amish farmer who had a 130-acre farm near Utica, New York. His wife was fighting cancer and had been through five rounds of chemotherapy treatments. To supplement this care, they had just visited a homeopathic doctor, well-known in the Amish community, in Missouri. He told me about his dairy farm, the Amish language and the differences between Amish and Mennonite farms.

I cannot think of any other venue where I could have met a breadth of people like this.

And I am not alone. Countless authors I have read have said the same about train travel.

British author Jenny Diski set out on Amtrak with the goal of staring out the window, alone and lost in thought. In her 2002 book about the experience, Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions, she writes about having had conversation after conversation with people whose stories she found unexpectedly interesting.

“There was not the slightest possibility, I realised as I stubbed out my last cigarette of the evening on the platform of Chemult station, of coming across anyone who led the kind of uneventful and routine life that the vast majority of humanity were supposed to lead. Wherever these hoards of the normal were, they didn’t travel by train. Or not on my trains.”

Monisha Rajesh first traveled around India on 80 trains, and subsequently around the world in 80 trains. She has written books about both experiences, and in her second book, Around the World in 80 Trains: A 45,000-Mile Adventure, she wrote:

“Nowhere in the world could rival India’s railways, but I knew that every country’s network would possess a spirit of its own, it just needed a prod and a poke to unearth. Trains are rolling libraries of information, and all it takes is to reach out to passengers to bind together their tales.”

In the preface to Zephyr, Tracking a Dream Across America, longtime Chicago Sun-Times book editor Henry Kisor writes about his own challenges communicating with others as a deaf person whose impairment can sometimes bring on a crippling shyness:

“When both sides have all the time in the world to listen to each other, such a meeting can be a marvel instead of an embarrassment.”

He adds that the slowness of the train gives him time to get to know the stories of fellow travelers:

“At any time of the year one is unlikely to run into the wealthy and well-connected on a long-distance train, unless they’re afraid of flying. But the frequent rail traveler—especially one who rides in the off season—will meet professors and novelists as well as vacationing Europeans, South Americans and Australians, and, thanks to the luxury of time, come to know them.”

Similarly, James McCommons traveled nearly 100,000 miles by train reporting and promoting his 2009 book Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service. In a subsequent piece titled “What Riding Trains Taught Me About Americans,” McCommons described conversations with an Amish man with only one leg, a roughneck working at an oil field in North Dakota, a Texan who recently had a heart-lung transplant, and more. Like Diski, he marveled at how interesting these conversations were:

“Is anyone just a grunt, a cook, or a clerk anymore?

McCommons also explained how train travel has a unique way of facilitating these conversations:

“All mass transit brings Americans together, of course. When we travel, the self-segregation we otherwise practice — by race, income, education, politics, culture, religion, class, or political tribe — evaporates. But a train is special. Unlike a 20-minute commute on a city bus or subway, or an airline flight in the cramped seat of a fuselage, a train requires the commitment of time and space. Passengers ride together for hours, even days, and during the journey have the liberty to move about, eat and drink, and socialize.”

All of this has me wondering:

• Are the people on long-distance trains really more interesting?

• Or does everyone have an interesting story to tell, and train travel facilitates conversations that otherwise would not happen?

I posed this question to Thibault Constant, a native of France who has reviewed more than 250 trains around the world. He attributes the interesting stories to the layout and slowness of Amtrak trains:

“Everybody is interesting in his own way.

We all have stories, and the longest trains, where you spend a long time, makes it interesting because as I say, you have nothing else to do so why not talk about your life, your experiences?

Everybody has something to share, but on Amtrak, people who take the train are not different people, but they have a reason why they take the train. It’s that they don't want to fly, they like the landscape or they want to do a digital retreat or something — so everybody has an interesting story.

When you travel by plane everybody is flying to go from point A to point B as fast as possible. So you're looking at your phone, you're in your iPad and you just don't want to talk to people so — and I'm sure most of these people have interesting stories too.

So I don't think people are more interesting, but the train provokes that conversation.”

I posed the same question in an online Amtrak forum. Among the answers I received:

• Yes, trains do draw a more interesting subset of people. Especially as most "normal" people (outside the Northeast Corridor) probably don't normally consider trains to be even part of the range of options they would consider when travelling, Amtrak almost by definition draws people who "think outside the box". —cirdan

• I think there are people with interesting stories everywhere without regard to social, economic, cultural, age, etc. status. The train offers more opportunity to listen and share if one is so inclined. My favorite encounters occurred in the observation and dining cars. Not everyone wants to engage so I would gently put out invitations to talk and honor reticence. —susanlindsey

• I've met some real characters traveling on the train. Not saying negatively, just really weird in a fun way, or have fascinating tales to tell of themselves. On the long-distance trains there's more time and more opportunities, plus the lack of the expectation of getting somewhere in a hurry which, I think, de-stresses people. —alpha3

While opinions are varied here, one thing almost everyone agrees on is that Amtrak trains provide the time and space necessary for conversation. And much of that is due to one feature of Amtrak’s western trains.

Where it all happens: the sightseer lounge car

Many of these interactions would not have been possible without a feature unique to Amtrak’s Superliners: the sightseer lounge. With windows that wrap into the ceiling, a handful of booths, as well as seats that face the windows, it’s a great place to chat with fellow passengers while America rolls by.

While most Americans envy the speed and efficiency of European trains, Constant, the French Youtuber I quoted earlier, is a huge fan of Amtrak’s sightseer lounge car, saying there is nothing else like it in the world.

A self-described introvert, he says he can talk for hours with strangers on a long-distance Amtrak train:

“It's funny because it's only on Amtrak where I love to speak with people. It’s just that vibe where you're like, it's OK to speak with your neighbor and talk during two hours about life and stuff. It's one of the rare places.

Amtrak is so social. It's the most social train you can find, for real.

I've been to many countries and I don't think there’s any more social train.”

Does relative anonymity help lift inhibitions to conversation?

A 1954 paper on the psychology of travel suggests one additional explanation for why passengers exchange interesting stories with each other: anonymity.

Written around the time domestic train travel began its deep decline, Maurice Farber’s “Some Hypotheses on the Psychology of Travel” suggests that being “geographically and psychologically between two worlds” brings a lifting on inhibitions:

“One may note the curious phenomenon in a train of the passenger in the adjoining seat who in the course of a journey discloses to a total stranger many of his innermost secrets which he would not even hint at to life-long friends. Here, of course, it is exactly the anonymity of the stranger, the fact that after the trip he will never be seen again, which elicits the intimate material. One must keep up certain appearances within one’s peer group, and a pent-up hunger to communicate one’s real situation, with resultant loneliness, develops in our society.”

Building on this idea, Eric J. Leed suggests, in The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, that for some, passage to a new place can represent a sort of freedom. He cites the Englishman Alexander Kinglake, who in 1837 crossed the border between Christian Europe and Turkish Hungary:

“The liberation Kinglake celebrated at the boundaries of his world was from the watchful and judgmental eye that reinforces respectability, law, cleanliness, propriety. ‘Over there’ is that other world, the antithesis of the settled world, a land of lawlessness, mobility, wilderness, and liberty. Kinglake is one of those many Victorians who, a homosexual, suffered the tyranny of respectability by which the bourgeoisie affected its cultural dominance over the laboring classes in the aristocracy.”

While stepping onto a train is not as dramatic as crossing a cultural, political and religious 19th-century frontier, it could provide the space and anonymity, as Farber suggests, for a passenger to be more open or authentic with a stranger, someone not part of their current world and someone they will likely never see again.

Who rides Amtrak these days?

Given that Amtrak is usually not the most efficient way to get from Point A to Point B, who are these people who choose to sit for hours longer than they need to?

I have found that Amtrak travelers fall into roughly four categories:

• people who do not like to fly — including those afraid to fly, and people whose culture or religion prohibit flying, and those whose health makes flying difficult

• people who love train travel—you’ll see throughout this project the many reasons to do so—or people eager to experience it as a one-time vacation

• people with a lot of time to spare, especially retirees

• people traveling to or from a remote towns served by train but not by air

This is, of course, a simplification of what is really a more complex set of travelers. Some travelers fit multiple categories, while others fit none. I posed the question on the Amtraktrains online forum, and it generated a lively five-page discussion worth reading for anyone more interested in why people choose to travel by Amtrak.

Among the responses I received:

• I’m a high energy 24/7 person. Traveling by train is about the only way I can switch off and relax. —TheVig

• Another category may be the time and space for a social element while belonging to any of the above too. Most encounters with other slow train passengers are random. Having the place and time to develop a meeting with a stranger is often denied in many other situations we interact in, but is usually guaranteed on slow train travel. — V V

• Amtrak has a much more liberal baggage limit than airlines. Those ultra cheap air flights allow a purse or laptop and the clothes on your back. Any extra weight costs. Sometimes people need to carry more. — tgstubbs1

• The way the train motion feels! Nothing like it. Even the clickety-clack on a slow old route is great! The horn! Not for sleeping so much, but the rest of the time. Some of us _just_love_trains. — BalmyZephyr

• Did anyone bring up the importance of transition as a reason to go by train? When we fly we lose all prospective between the two locations. When we go by train we see the transition in land, flora, fauna, architecture, and people. To me the greatest thing about train travel is taking note of the transition. —Saddleshoes

Regardless of their motivation, most Amtrak passengers have an interesting story to tell — where they boarded and at what insane hour, why they chose the train, how the inevitable delay will affect their travel plans — and everyone seems interested to hear similar stories from their fellow passengers.

It is an immediate conversation starter.

And in my experience and the experiences of others, these conversations can go on for hours.

• • •

In his short essay, What Riding Trains Taught Me About America, journalist James McCommons sums up his encounters aboard Amtrak:

“Train travel induces a sort of reverie—a hypnotic feeling of being adrift on the geography of America. Passengers, many of whom are seeing the country for the first time, marvel at its beauty, diversity, and exoticness. And those feelings carry over to an inclination to engage one another and embrace the same diversity within the rolling coaches.

So while I still fly on airplanes, if I can work a long-distance train into my travels, I get aboard. When I want to feel and hear the zeitgeist of America, I get on a train.”

Long-distance trains provide the time and space to get to know people we would never otherwise meet.

• We are not going to hear those stories on a plane.

• We do not hear them on the subway commute.

• And we are certainly not going to find them in our Twitter or Instagram feeds.

But a slow train, meandering across the American landscape at an average speed of 45 miles per hour, fosters conversations and interactions that are otherwise lacking — and much needed — in our everyday lives.

⮕ Part of what fosters these conversations is that time slows down on a long-distance train. The next page of this project will explore time and state of mind on long-distance trains.

• • •

Bibliography

Diski, J. (2003). Stranger on a train: Daydreaming and smoking around America with interruptions (1st Picador pbk. ed). Picador : Distributed by Holtzbrinck Publishers.

Farber, M. L. (1954). Some hypotheses on the psychology of travel. Psychoanalytic Review, 41(3), 267–271.

Kisor, H. (2015). Zephyr: Tracking a dream across America. CreateSpace.

Leed, E. J. (1991). The mind of the traveler: From Gilgamesh to global tourism. Basic Books.

McCommons, J. (2009). Waiting on a train: The embattled future of passenger rail service. Chelsea Green Publishing Company.

McCommons, J. (2017, August 17). What riding trains taught me about Americans | Essay. Zócalo Public Square. https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2017/08/17/riding-trains-taught-americans/ideas/nexus/

Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.

Rajesh, M. (2019). Around the world in 80 trains: A 45,000-mile adventure. Bloomsbury.