Riding That Train

I grew up in Kingsbridge, a neighborhood in The Bronx, which is the only place in the world beside The Vatican preceded by the definite article when commonly referred to.  Not even Brooklyn can make a claim like that.

Anyway across the street from the old pre-war walk-up that was home for my first 23 years was a New York Central spur line going all the way up to someplace near Albany.  There was a small freight yard right about dead in front of my house, too.  A perfect place to play, and practice running away from cops.  I was a kid just at the end of the Age of Steam, and got pretty used to the deep huffing and clouds of steam and smoke punctuating the day as rich guys from way up near Albany came down to the City each day so Tom Wolfe could write "Bonfire of the Vanities" when I grew up.  I played in and around those big black bulls, scary and powerful and dreadfully attractive all at once, and remember dancing on the rails with my ragamuffin friends as they bore down on us just to provoke a few roars from the warning whistle. Toreadors before Iron Bulls.

I knew trolleys, too, and their clanging bells, and subways charging above the street near where I lived before plowing under Manhattan's hills a couple of miles south from the Harlem River where I learned to swim in open sewage, water that would make a kid from Calcutta wrinkle his nose in disgust.  I cannot count the number of times I hitched rides on the back of trolleys up to Van Cortlandt Park, a place much larger that Yosemite Park.  Me and Eddie Haviland would spend days hunting squirrels in the woods and snakes and salamanders in the little streams and swampy places and swimming in Charlie's Hole, a wide spot in Tibbets Brook, more mud than water.  I got to be a pretty good marksman with the stones from the railway ballast, and could hit a squirrel and bring it down from high up in almost any tree. 

I sneaked onto Subway platforms all over the city, too,  before they were patrolled by those spoil sport Transit Police and rode the trains to places like Elmhurst, which, with a name like that had no right to be in a city where there were neighborhoods called Hell's Kitchen.  Come to think of it, what was the Bronx doing with Kingsbridge and Riverdale? Well, we do have Rat Island.  Among my favorite destinations on the subway were the Museum of Natural History, Penn Station and Grand Central Station.  I could walk to the New York Public Library Central Branch from Grand Central, climb on the lions, sit in the main reading room, run up and down the stairs, and occasionally look through a book.

The trolleys were the first to go, replaced by buses, a much harder mode of transportation to sneak a ride on.  Steam trains gave way to diesel locomotives, ugly boxy black things that sat and growled, or stank along the tracks trailing oily smoke when they passed.  Commuter service stopped running up the Putnam Line sometime in the fifties after Gov. Dewey's New York Thruway ruined everything for me and my friends, and put a barrier between us and the freight yard about which I still dream, full as it was then with tanks and guns during the Korean War, fruit and produce for the city's kitchens  during the spring and summer, and always inviting whatever the time of year.  I still hate Dewey...and Rockefeller... for that crime against children, especially city rats like myself, in the name of progress.

All of these things ran through my mind this morning after reading two things.  The first was an e-mail from an old school mate, a fellow from Highbridge, another neighborhood in the Bronx.  He and his wife traveled to DC on Amtrak from his home in Connecticut last weekend and paid $258.00 for the privilege of several hours of discomfort, noise, lack of information and bad food in dirty dining cars.  It was an experience he says he will not repeat, though he may have to.  Driving down there, he has also learned, is a purgatory of crowded highways, confiscatory tolls and more bad food and dirty dining areas along the way.  It was a sad end to a long story, a romance, really.  I’d ridden back and forth between New York and DC on the Metroliner in the 80’s and thought it a wonderful way to travel; better than four hours in a car and much better than just the same amount of time at La Guardia and National Airport on either end of the Eastern Shuttle, even if the fare was only $20.00 one way.  It was till an airport, all glass and steel and no style, and still hours of slogging driving home or to your hotel.  The train dropped you near the subway and in an hour you were where you could get a beer and kick off your shoes.

The second is an article which appeared in Human Events Magazine, written by a fellow named Michael Barone who snarked about some multi-billion dollar plan to build high speed rail lines all over the place and put everyone to work.  The way he explained it, I had to agree with him.  The plan is just plain stupid.  I don’t believe trains ought to go as fast as planes darting from here to there like cobras.  Hell, they even look like snakes!  But, Baron argues against high speed trains because they just cost too much.  I’m not against dumping a losing proposition like that, and for that reason.  Up to there, I’m friends with Mr. Barone.  We part company towards the end. 

I think he’s really not interested in trains. Really, I think, not interested too much in public transportation at all.  He betrays himself in just a few words implying things would be much better all around when a guy has his car and isn’t forced to take a pre-planned route from A to B.  As if roads and streets and superhighways are like English (or poison) Ivy, randomly spreading out all over.  As if the 40,000 square miles of paved roads and streets and parking lots we have laid down since Henry invented the assembly line are an "unplanned cow-path-improvement on anything.  Forty K square miles.  That's roughly the size of Ohio; whiich wouldn't be a bad thing if the black top was actually all IN Ohio.

“Passenger rail is an old technology that is particularly attractive to planners, the folks who want to force us out of our cars and into subways that travel only on the routes they design. Let’s make everyone live the way people do in Manhattan!”

The rest of what he says, I buy.  I wonder, aside from the rents, what’s wrong with living the way folks do in Manhattan., where you can sing about riding in a hole in the ground.