Terry Pindell

A recent gift-purchase for my eldest son who is planning a cross-USA trip from DC through Montana to the West on his return from an overseas-posting prompted another reread of this book. I see from the penciled notes on the flyleaf that this is the third time I have enjoyed this book.

Having used the old Sheppey Light Railway as a boy and the British Intercity expresses as a matter of course for decades, I then had the privilege in my international career of riding some of the great trains in the world – the Blue Train from Pretoria to Cape Town, the Edinburgh Overnight Express from London, another Cape train to and from Durban and several of the SNCF European expresses. With these trips remembered, my wife and I took an overnight sleeper up the East Coast on Amtrak as soon as I retired. It proved to be a bit different to all those other services.

However, when asked, I enthusiastically try to sell the idea of taking a train trip to my fellow Americans as so few believe it to be a viable – let alone enjoyable – mode of transport. And that is a sad comment to make in this country whose past wealth, expansion, literature and history were so embedded in the great American railroads.

Terry Pindell comes from a ‘railroad family’ and as such needed little persuasion, when a sudden sabbatical from teaching presented him with most of 1988 as the time he needed to undertake his enormous journey of discovery of what is left of that great railway network. Boarding a train years before, with his family, the Station Master had looked at the tickets and mumbled, “Montrealer to New York and Silver Star to Florida. Boy you are gonna ride the worst and the best.” In his year-long, 30,000 mile trip, inspired in part by Dayton Duncan and Least Heat-Moon, Pindell certainly does just that. (Although after a dozen trips on both the Star and Silver Meteor on the East Coast I am wondering if perhaps it was the Montrealer that was supposed to be the best!)

This journey is, of course, partly conducted in history as well as geography and the author describes some of the meals served on the now long-gone American Great Trains and in the famous Harvey railroad houses of the late 1880s, menus to weep for when confronted by the dire and withered - and obligatory - Amtrak salad of today's dinners.

It is, of course, the people that Pindell discovers that are the real highlights of his trips, his fellow travellers and the train crews, some from families like his with a railroading heritage. But it is author's writing that grabs our interest, with very readable prose that describes his discoveries in terms that illuminate his points, and create a wanderlust in the reader as hard to resist as that you get on hearing that mournful, compelling whistle of the Great American Trains.… (mere)