I Love the Sound of Amtrak in the Morning

I.
Half a mile from my house is a railroad crossing. In the summer, with trees, shrubs and and vines as buffers, the train whistle is a mild, cinematic replica of what a train whistle should sound like, like a foley artist created it. In the winter, with no baffles, it is a jarring alarming jolt to the central nervous system, a flashing red light of a sound.

This morning at 6:54 a.m., about 12 minutes after leaving Cary, NC, “The Piedmont” rolled right through that same crossing, and two worlds intersected. It’s a bit mind-altering when you’re sitting on a train that comes through your neighborhood. It’s like when you are thinking about yourself thinking. You’ll never hear that train whistle the same again.

II.
I had a client meeting in Charlotte, so I decided to forgo 360 miles of interstate on a Friday, and let Amtrak do the driving. The Charlotte Amtrak station is not located anywhere Uptown Charlotte or a LYNX light rail station, but the Uber fare to my client meeting was only $6 and my driver was a recent college graduate who had just relocated to Charlotte from Jacksonville, FL.

The Cary to Charlotte trip takes exactly 3 hours, and there is none of the traffic hassle of the Concord-Kannapolis stretch of I-85 that is stressful at most any hour of the day. I worked on my client’s proposal, read a book, napped and had a complimentary coffee in the canteen car. There is no dining car or cafe on The Piedmont; only vending machines.

The scenery was pleasant, especially in rural Orange County between Durham and Burlington. The train shows you a different view of small towns that you do not see from the sanitized Interstate highway lanes. Rolling through Mebane, Burlington, Thomasville and Lexington, and even Greensboro, what you notice are a lot of giant brick buildings, most of them vacant, with maybe one loading dock in use.

It’s a testament to (or indictment) of the rural, right-to-work South, where these mammoth buildings once housed textile and manufacturing powerhouses, and those jobs are moved to more pristine “business parks” and most likely offshore. I only saw one parking lot packed to the fringes, and that was at LabCorp outside Burlington.

III.
I was equally entertained along the way by my fellow passengers. Most seemed to be college students in transit (my trip was in late August). A group of three silver-haired women intrigued me. They belonged to the same church, were on a shopping excursion and this was an annual event for them.

Did you know that there are Amtrak hosts, the rolling rail equivalent of WalMart greeters? The gentleman on my train was nattily attired in khakis and a wool vest and a necktie. He rode The Piedmont on its journey from Raleigh to Charlotte and return, and would probably be back home before dinner. He stopped and socialized for 15 minutes with the trio of ladies, but he did not say a word to me.

The highlight was the guy sitting directly ahead of me, who I took to be about my age, late 50's/early 60's. He got on the train in Burlington, took a cell phone call straight away in Elon College, and talked to the same party all the way to Salisbury an hour later. I can only go by what I overheard, but he had just that morning been released from prison, or as he put it “Alamance County Detention” and was heading to Charlotte for some reason never divulged.

The person he was talking to was in Lafayette, Louisiana, and the first half of the call was a catch-up of family and friends, specifically who was staying with whom, and where, and who had moved on. There were mentions of Baton Rogue and Shreveport, but the main area of his interest and inquiry was “La-Fayette.”

The second half of the call involved the particulars of this gentleman’s incarceration, which I determined to be a duration of two weeks. Evidently, he had outstanding warrants and had been scooped up in some kind of local dragnet. He might have been loitering, or drunk and disorderly.

I do not think he was a felon. This guy was strictly single A baseball. There was talk of restitution for some offense, but no mention of future court dates or legal representation.

IV.
So, this is America on a cross-Carolina Amtrak, one fine sunny day in late August, 2018, the humidity low and the sky the color of French blue dress shirt.