All Aboard! Discover the Romance of Train Travel with a Journey on the Historic Atchison, Topeka, Santa Fe Railway
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I like trains. A certain romanticism surrounds them; sailing through life, watching the world change as you pass through. Trains take you to places unknown on tracks laid at the far side of most things familiar. You’ll see things through the window of a train you would never otherwise see, and there’s magic in the reflection, at the far side of most things familiar, staring back at you where you’ll see things in yourself you otherwise never would have seen.
I had the pleasure of working on an excursion train in New Mexico, a train, like most, depending on your perspective, where the destination was the journey. The trip started at the railyard in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and followed an otherwise abandoned line to Lamy, New Mexico. We served food and beverages, and in Lamy, our passengers could disembark, walk around, and explore the little town before embarking on the two-hour trip back to Santa Fe.
There were three daily trips: the first was in the late morning and we served brunch, the second was in the mid-afternoon and we served lunch, and the third was in the evening. On the evening trip and serving dinner, we stopped in the Galisteo Basin, home to the earliest New Mexican Pueblos, where our passengers could spend time on the flatcar under the stars. We wouldn’t go to Lamy in the evening because Lamy’s station doesn’t have lights, and the company wanted to avoid possible injury.
My job on the train was as host and tour guide, the talking points in quotes throughout this piece were a part of the script I wrote to engage our passengers, and I think my enthusiasm when sharing helped to express what might otherwise come across, to some perhaps, as mundane. At heart I’m still a nerdy little boy with a train set (I never actually had a train set), I’m also a sucker for mid, to late 19th-century (and early 20th-century) American styles in architecture, mechanics, and art. What a golden era, the 1870’s – 1930’s. The cars we used were built in or encouraged by the design of the time, they were old and fun. I would walk back and forth from one end of the train to the other, enjoying mostly the passenger cars and flatcars (with arm rails and built-in seating). I was also allowed to ‘play’ on the train when parked in the railyard.
I enjoyed this job on the train. The work involved little more than talking to people, specifically about this particular railroad, the history behind the railroad, and the history of the area, but also because I got to spend time living inside the romance history, art, imitation, and the trains. Life is far more romantic and chimerical than it is sometimes interpreted. Our lives are as much an aftereffect of our imagination as they are “pragmatic,” the unrecognized truth is that there is little difference between the mawkishness and the hard-boiled sense. I believe the further detached the two ideas get the further we are getting from the sensibility of living because the knotted truth of it is that the more practical, we live and think the more pointless our lives will seem.
Now more than ever, I feel like I’m being pulled in opposite directions trying to reaffirm the balance in my life existing between being practical and living inside the breathing opus. Sometimes we can feel our oeuvre surrounding us like when taking in the sunrise over the ocean or when exploring the countryside by train, when riding a train it somehow also feels as if I’m discovering a piece of myself that I hadn’t known since childhood, a piece of our childhoods that are suspicious of the illusion of maturing and earnestness. Despite X-Train, the company that sponsored this endeavor, being from Las Vegas, Nevada, the job was still one of my favorites. This excursion experience has since shut down and another has taken its place, Sky Railway. I would do it again, spend my days on a train. I’ve looked into the Writer’s Residency program with Amtrak but they haven’t yet figured the experience out.