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By RALPH BERRIER JR.
Somebody should. It's a good ride. Late, usually, but a good ride through mountain passes so majestic and river towns so pretty God must've felt obliged to hide them in the hills like precious jewels in a pouch.
Waitin' on the Cardinal, down in Clifton Forge Ride it through the hills, rumble through the gorge Waitin' on the platform, lookin' down the line Schedule says 3:30, but she's half-an-hour behind. She may be late, but the Cardinal still runs through Clifton Forge twice a day, three times a week between Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It still cuts through the New River Gorge, blinks at the hollowed-out ghost towns and sweeps past Kanawha and Ohio valley power plants that burn West Virginia coal lugged in by the hoppers and gondolas that share these tracks.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001, and more people, fearful of flying, found themselves at train stations, trying to make heads or tails of train schedules and piece together safe routes from New York or Washington, D.C., to Chicago or Seattle or Los Angeles. Trains still carry people home, return them to family, ferry them to work. On the Cardinal, those passengers are as different as the changing landscape that rushes by the windows. As it hurtles and rocks along, the train becomes a community itself. Somebody ought to write a song about it.
I could've been there yesterday, but I'm too afraid to fly Some folks read, some folks drink, others are more than chatty Some folks sleep the whole dang way from the Forge to Cincinnati. ***
"Not really Christmas weather," cracks Ray, a vice president at Virginia Tech. The Smoots don't need to take the train to Charleston, they just like it. "Ray was hoping it would be cold and the whole gorge would be iced over," says Jean, referring to the area where the New River cuts a deep, mighty swath through West Virginia. With these temperatures, the Cardinal would have to be about a month late for anything to be iced over. Today, it's only its normal 30 minutes behind. At 4:08, two quick whistle blasts signal its arrival.
It's pretty dim on board already, and with the sun diving behind the looming mountains, it'll be a dark ride to Cincinnati. It's quiet on board. Many people are traveling alone and keeping to themselves - reading, listening to music through headphones, napping. During Thanksgiving, every car was packed with people heading home for the holidays, the attendants tell you. On this trip, barely 50 people are on a train that could carry nearly 300. Ten stops await before you get to Cincinnati. The Cardinal was supposed to have an observation car with tall windows for sightseeing ... but it's in the shop. Through a seat window, you get a look at the train station at White Sulphur Springs all decorated for the holidays, then darkness sets in. The Cardinal flies by dark little towns along the New River, which sparkles with the reflection of multicolored Christmas lights that trim houses wedged right against the tracks near Hinton. Tall, sprawling sycamores briefly illuminated by the train's lights flash by like frozen lightning bolts stuck in the riverbanks. The only other light is the moon. The invasive glare of shopping centers and car lots cannot penetrate these dark hollows. Red Kaminkow stands at the rear of the last car, a drink in his hand, gazing out at the unfurling track. Red's returning home to Chicago and his life as a train engineer. He watches eastbound CSX coal trains on adjacent tracks, pondering the power it takes to haul those cars up these rugged mountains. He is an unreconstructed train lover. "I don't believe in flying or interstate highways," he says, although he does admit to owning a pickup truck. "The government likes to say it doesn't believe in socialism. Then it subsidizes air traffic controllers and airports. The interstate highway system is the biggest public works project in history."
*** It's 8 1/2 hours from Clifton Forge to Cincinnati. You can get up and walk freely through most of the train, but it doesn't change the scenery. You can eat an expensive dinner in the dining car. You go to the snack car, where you'll be greeted by a taciturn man with a Bassett hound face who seems slightly put upon to sell you a soda. You can stay in your seat and get lost in a book or your own thoughts. Or, you can make new friends. After dinner, Red heads back to the rear car and finds Dave Blount, 48, a businessman from Wilmington, Del., who's as big a train buff as Red is. They commiserate about the sad state of the government-run rail.
She's on her way to Indianapolis to visit her boyfriend's family. It's a solid 24-hour ride from New York City and she's been on the train for about 17 straight hours so far. That's not so bad. She once took a 50-hour train ride from Boston to Texas. She rides the rails because she's afraid to fly. "I was afraid to fly for 13 years," she says. "Then I started again about a year ago. Now, this happens." Everyone knows that "this" is Sept. 11. The scene in the car is resembles an ill-lit, all-night diner. People huddle and chat in darkness pierced only by small lights above each seat. In the car ahead, the scene is rowdier. Angie Knost, her daughter Lindsey and niece Elizabeth Kimes are sprawled about with blankets, magazines and snacks like they're at a rolling slumber party. They're going from Charleston to Chicago for a wedding. Elizabeth flips through a teen heartthrob magazine. Angie is working on a crossword puzzle in a country music publication. She's stuck on a song title. They're all sleepy, but not sleeping. They break out the Fig Newtons and Combos.
The Cincinnati station is a spectacular piece of architecture. It's easy to picture boys leaving for or coming home from the war. The soaring, domelike ceiling is adorned with a mural. The station is almost completely empty, but a couple of attendants are on duty to call a cab to take you to your hotel. You disembark, and before you have a chance to say goodbye to your new friends, the train pulls away. *** The soonest you can catch the Cardinal back to Clifton Forge is a day and a half later. It's the same train - same crew, same conductors, still no observation car. The morning of Dec. 7, it was an hour late because freight trains have first dibs on the tracks during nighttime hours. It's still dark on the farthest frontier of the Eastern time zone when the Cardinal crawls through Covington, blowing its lonesome whistle at crossings. Passengers are splayed across the seats. If they got on board in Chicago, they've already been on the train for 11 hours. A voice over the loudspeaker announces that breakfast is being served by "our award-winning chef and our very competent staff." Among the staff are Reggie Evon and waitress Diane Bowie. Reggie is a smiling, friendly fellow training to be a dining car attendant after several years driving a truck. He started this job about the time the government panel voted to end Amtrak's service. He's more than a bit worried about his job. "I was in training school when I read that," he says. "I thought, 'What have I done?'" Diane is a sassy, 23-year Amtrak veteran from D.C. She's seen all kinds of characters on the train. "I done met everything God made and some he didn't," she says. "Every train's got one or two kooks on it." She frets little over the future of her job. "Ain't gonna stop the train," she says. "Amtrak ties the nation together. After you've been here a while, you see everything come around and back again." Fog rises from the Ohio River as the whistle wails. A red Ford pickup, wipers swishing, is stopped at a crossing, its driver's day slowed down a click. Gray light filters through the morning mist and rain and unveils the passing landscape. Trees zip by like the pages of a thriller. There's another power plant. A yellow school bus. A muddy field. A collapsed barn. A scrapyard. Little Kentucky towns come into focus. Maysville with its brick depot and old hotel. Ashland and its cliffs. The omnipresent, necessary, drab floodwalls shielding towns from the mighty Ohio's fickle fury. Across the river, Portsmouth, Ohio, looks like a prison, a town incarcerated by a high, impervious concrete wall. Passengers, like the scenery, are awakened by the light. Clinton and Jeanette Curfiss , 79 and 77, respectively, are taking their first train trip since Sept. 27, 1945. They know the date because Clinton got a three-day pass from the Army to take the B&O to Cincinnati to marry his bride and haul her back to Quantico. Abigail Walker and her 16-year-old daughter Kyrstie are headed for Virginia from Wisconsin. Kyrstie's read three books on board - "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "The Hobbit." Imogene Hicks of Hackensack, N.J., sews a patchwork quilt with a star pattern. She's returning by rail from a family trip to Indiana because, "I'm not ready to fly yet." Besides, any airport worth its wings wouldn't let her on board with sewing needles and scissors. Across the aisle, Michael Bellamy chows on fried steak and rice that he brought with him because, "I'm not gonna pay $10 for no sandwich." The Smoots get back on the train at Charleston with two bags of Christmas gifts from their shopping spree. The Smith family - Betty, Loren, daughters Jill and Julie - boards there, too, with friend Tammy Pearson. They're going to Charlottesville. Then they're turning around and coming back. They just want to ride through some of the spectacular sights in the mountains. This is Mary Draper Ingles country, the river route she walked from Kentucky to Virginia after escaping the Shawnee in the 1700s. "And she did it barefoot, too," says Betty Smith, who knows her history. The trip through the New River Gorge is so splendiferous, so extraordinary that Amtrak brings aboard a narrator to deliver play-by-play. Don Maxwell of the Collis P. Huntington Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society describes sites natural and manmade: the golden dome of Charleston's capitol building, a paddlewheel tugboat on the river, earthen scars left by strip-mining, dams and locks, huge boulders in a shallow, rocky section of the river called "the dries." The passengers shift to one side as the arching span of the 856-foot-high gorge bridge unfurls above them like a rainbow over the river. The Cardinal snakes through the gorge, not stopping at Thurmond, a once-thriving mountain town that resembles a movie-set facade. This is home of the Big Bend Tunnel, John Henry country, the land of Man vs. Machine where, if you believe the story, John faced down the steam drill and proclaimed in song he would "die with my hammer in my hand." John Henry was a little baby, sittin' on his momma's knee He said that Big Bend Tunnel on that C&O Road is gonna be the death of me, Lord, lord Gonna be the death of me. Down in the smoking car, a few young people are oblivious to the sights. They play cards, listen to hip-hop pound from a boom box and quaff miniature bottles of rum. One older fellow has clearly had too many and leaves the car to go upstairs and wander aimlessly up and down the aisles. He seems lost, and the passengers seem more amused than upset by his wobbly stroll. The train lopes into Clifton Forge beneath whistle wail. You thank the attendants and before you walk too far the Cardinal has flown off to Staunton, Charlottesville and Washington, D.C. It will be back. You remember Diane, the waitress. She said so. Somebody should write a song about her. Some people like the mountains, some people like the plains But the prettiest spot in the whole wide world is the window of a train Mountains may fall, rivers run dry, but some things'll never change So you better believe me when I say, 'Ain't gonna stop the train.' Lord, lord.
Ralph Berrier Jr. can be reached at 981-3338 or ralphb@roanoke.com.
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They said it was dead, train travel. But in an ironic twist of fate, the millions of miles of snarled asphalt ribbon that once signaled the demise of trains are aiding their comeback. The highways are congested and dangerous. Trains are relatively safe and worry-free.
The interstates are crowded, it ain't no fun to drive
Ray and Jean Smoot drove from Blacksburg to catch the Cardinal for a midweek trip to Charleston, W.Va., and a little Christmas shopping. The thermometer at the Clifton Forge train stop reads 80 degrees in the sun at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5.
The car attendants (they used to call them porters) take your ticket and point you toward your car. The westbound Cardinal - also called Train No. 51 - has three double-deck passenger cars plus a sleeper car for folks who pay extra to have a room to themselves. You can leave your luggage downstairs or tote it upstairs to your seat and stash it in an overhead compartment. The train's ready to roll by the time you take your seat.
He's ticked. A few weeks ago, a government panel overseeing Amtrak and its red ink-stained books decided that Amtrak had reached the end of the line. It voted that the railroad had 90 days to come up with a liquidation plan. Other politicians, though, aren't as ready to give up on Amtrak.
It's very warm in this particular car. Nearby, Michelle Damato, 35, who's hoarse from yelling while "teaching gymnastics to freaking 5-year-olds" in New York City, wonders why she always gets a car that's either too hot or too cold. Plus, there's no observation car.
The train zooms along the Ohio's south shore, past power plants and small Kentucky towns until it crosses at Covington, Ky., and trudges into Cincinnati at about 12:30 a.m.