The slow track
Harry Mount crosses the mountainous waist of America hen a hobo dies after a lifetime riding the rail across America, his fellow hoboes say, 'He's gone west.' I could hardly have felt more alive as I went west from New York's Penn Station 2,500 miles across America, hunk of Emmenthal and 10 slices of Citterio prosciutto by my side, New York's two robustly conservative papers, the Sun and the Post, on my lap. Two dollars to the pound. Heaven was right on track.
First came the English Perpendicular and German Gothic spires looming over Philadelphia. Then the steps of the Greek revival Philadelphia Museum of Art, the ones that Sylvester r Stallone ran up and down in Rocky.
The farmland of Pennsylvania followed, the horizon broken only by grain elevators and church towers. At Lancaster — the capital of America for a day in September 1777 — an Amish couple and their five-year-old daughter got on. The Amish rules, the Ordnung, forbid moustaches with their military connotations; thus the man's chinstrap beard. The women are forbidden fripperies like buttons — the wife and daughter fastened their blue anklelength dresses and their white mob caps with safety pins. The man was perfectly happy to flick on the overhead light to read The Pennsylvanian, though.
Moving into the Appalachians, you see poor, white, rural America — those born literally on the wrong side of the tracks, their mud-streaked trailers squeezed between the railway line and the river. The further you go into rural America, the number of pick-ups picks up too — practically all of them Fords. Despite Ford's huge losses, it's the biggestselling marque in the country.
That night, I closed my curtains on the flaming steel furnace chimneys of Pittsburgh's dying rust belt. I had dined well and deeply during our four-hour stopover, at the opulent Victorian former train station, now a restaurant (Grand Concourse, 1 Station Square, Pittsburgh, tel: 412 261 1717).
I woke in Chicago. My breakfast view was splendid: America's tallest building, the Sears Tower, and the Florentine palazzi of the Midwest's mercantile kings The internal view of the train is not so good. Amtrak decor remains trapped in the 1970s, with the leather revolving seats in the glass-topped observation car upholstered in chocolate and cream. Like many of the passengers. Fat Americans are old hat. What's more striking is the complete confidence with which they carry their fatness. At Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a threetimes-lifesize Claire Rayner was handwinched into the train on a mechanical hoist. She didn't bat an eyelid. Nor did the small knot of passengers who'd got off for a smoke. No one got off for fresh air. We rolled on into what the conductor called `the breadbasket of America, the greatest country on earth': Iowa's fertile earth, the colour of burnt wood; Nebraska's glow-in-the-dark roads, crisscrossing the state, straight as an arrow, dividing the country into mammoth combinefriendly fields. And then on to the roof of America — the Rockies. Canyons dotted with pine trees, turning russet brown and yellow at the tip, look down on the ice-edged creek boiling in the valley below.
This is Western country. Doc Holliday, OK Corral gunfight veteran, is buried at one stop, Glenwood Springs. A few miles away at Telluride, Colorado, Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank in 1889. That day I went skiing at Breckenridge. I stayed at the Oxford Hotel, Denver (303 628 5400), a fine old Gold Rush Western saloon of a place.
Back on the train, we climbed up and up, tracking the Barbour-green Colorado river, until the purple-rinse and tan brush turned white with snow, when you hit Fraser river, the 'Icebox of America', with its winter temperatures of -50°F. After a day in the Rockies, you leave the elk, deer and bald eagles behind you by nightfall. When you wake up, you're in the deserts of Utah. Ciabatta-coloured sand sprinkled with flour-like snow gives way to brick-red terraces topped with teetering piles of boulders. The snow returns as you move through Nevada into California, and on to the final stop: Emeryville, a ten-minute cab ride from San Francisco. At times, it's been like Fawlty Towers on rails. The food is microwaved and designed to maintain the passengers' bodyweight; the menu's side order for the chicken sandwich was a plateful of crisps. It's expensive, too. My flight back to New York cost $159 and took six hours.
The train cost $1,900 and took 82 hours — still a reasonable price and a decent amount of time to see the mountainous waist of America.
For train information, contact www.amtrak.corn.
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