Trekking on the tracks

There’s something magical about train rides, something that transports me back to the days of my childhood, when we used to take the San Francisco Zephyr from Omaha to California to visit my grandparents. The train station, a vast, cavernous structure, filled with echoes of the life surging inside. I don’t remember, but I imagine it was also beautiful in a way that so few buildings are these days, due to a lethal combination of cost, lack of care in building, and indifference to architectural beauty or, possibly, different ideas of what constitutes that beauty.

Today it often seems that train travel boils down to delays and taxpayer subsidies. Parking can be expensive and the freedom of the car attractive. However, when we stepped inside Philadelphia’s 30th street Amtrak station Saturday for an afternoon and evening in New York, the magic surged back. There was beauty in the building to offset the police and sniffer dogs that unfortunately are a fact of today’s life, there were conductors with mellifluous voices, a flower stall, coffee shop and more, adding to the European feel of the place. The trip was accomplished with a minimum of delay and we enjoyed a wonderful, sunny spring day in the Big Apple. Grab your ticket and come with me to the station and the start of a childhood dream.