Back in 2016, Avo had the idea to travel from New York to Los Angeles by train. Back then, he decided to share the experience in a series of twenty posts in this blog, a collection he called “The Trans-American Railroad.” The recent US elections brought that blog post series back to mind. Back then, Avo was fresh off writing his book and he followed a similar narrative approach in his travel posts: he talked to everyone he met on the train and then shared their stories in a “travel diary” format. The result is a vivid image of the gigantic scale of the US, with its bewildering diversity, the scourge of racism, and the scars of the country’s constant forward motion.
Avo’s cast of fellow travelers includes immigrants, Amish families, a Black retiree, and a former Alaska female miner. You can tell when he hasn’t met anyone to talk because his tone becomes gloomy. As he says, “a trip alone on a train is half a trip.” On the other hand, when he finds others to talk he expands the map with references to history, art, books, business, making the trip even bigger than it already is. Two favorites are his stories about the Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia, and about the Jumping Devils of Glorieta Pass.
On his first day in the new role, President Biden mentioned the “Transcontinental Railroad” as one example of what the US can achieve even when besieged by internal division. Avo’s journey follows a different path across the country than that older railroad built on President Lincoln’s orders. We hope it will still help you see the US in a new light. Here’s a full list of all blog posts in the series in chronological order.
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The Trans-American Railroad: New York to Los Angeles at the Speed of Iron
The Countdown: Two Days Prior to Departure NOTE: All persons in this chronicle are mentioned under pseudonyms, except public figures. Water washed away the blood in the little basin. “It’s not that bad for four years without seeing a dentist,” Dr. Ara said. As he spoke, my eyes were fixed on the brown bricks,… Read…
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The Trans-American Railroad (Part II)
The Countdown: One Day Prior to Departure The first time I saw Riga was three years ago at a Manhattan office, where I had a temporary job. That day she walked in soaked. Rain had washed away anything that could have stood in the way of her beauty, of which she had an abundance in body… Read…
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Penn Station: The Journey Begins
A cab driver in Muslim garb and skull cap came to pick me up from Harvard Club as I left for Penn Station at 5:30 AM. His accent and countenance pointed to a South Asian origin. “I thought you said you were going to JFK,” he said. Then I realized it was no chance that… Read…
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Suburbia and the Ruins Outside Philadelphia
Soon after emerging from its underground hideout at Penn Station, the train left behind Manhattan. The Empire State and one other building I could not identify (perhaps Liberty Tower) refused to disappear for much longer into the indistinct mass of blurring concrete. But I kept looking back until even the tallest of the tall were… Read…
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The Flies, the Blue Whale, and the Boatman on the Potomac
The train slowed down as we passed by the Sunoco Marcus Hook refinery in Pennsylvania. At snail pace, details that would have escaped me came into focus. A cloud of flies was hovering over the bloodied carcass of a small deer, perhaps a young female. Another congregation of flies was inspecting the dead animal’s eye.… Read…
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Descent into West Virginia
The South was only a moment away from Washington, a place that Kennedy said had the charm of a Northern town and the efficiency of a Southern one. We were soon cutting through Virginia across the Bible Belt into the Deep South. All those invisible lines only existed on atlases, history books and people’s mind.… Read…
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The Grain Express: How Tomorrow Moves
Diane was dozing, on and off, waking up at every lurch forward at a somewhat rough patch. Amtrak’s Cardinal train was penetrating further into the rugged terrain of West Virginia. A very long cargo convoy overtook us near Hinton, going in the opposite direction. It was a CSX line train. Some cars bore the motto… Read…
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The Amish Travelers of the Old Order
The train skirted the New River, then called at a small West Virginia town near Shady Spring. A group of Amish travelers came on board. There were at least three families. They stood out in their simple clothes, tidy and clean, but immaculately so, the caps of the women impossibly snow white. It was a… Read…
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The Color-Blind Passenger
The sun had set over gloomy West Virginia by the time I finished my conversation with the Amish travelers of the Old Order. Diane listened with unfeigned politeness. Yet my report back did not stir the curiosity of my seat companion. She lived in Philadelphia, and knew quite a bit about them. In the seconds… Read…
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To the Sides of the Railways
Railways were a major divide in the territory they cut through. From New York to Chicago, by way of the daylong loop through the Virginias, the differences between the right and the left side of the line can be striking, and stark. Sometimes, rails conformed to the topography. Perhaps they were laid on a dead… Read…
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Away from Cincinnati, and the Sun
“Where are we?” Diane was just coming back to her senses after a deep sleep, which she conjured with the poise of a sphynx. I looked it up on my smartphone’s map. A moving blue dot showed we were in Indiana, somewhere between Lafayette and Gary, rolling northward towards Chicago. Amtrak’s Cardinal train was about… Read…
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Chicago: Four Blocks Around Union Station
Travel friendships go the way of the wind, and so did with Diane. Still, she wrote my email address in the back of a novel she was reading. She wanted to read the book that I wrote on Turkey’s hidden Armenians. Notwithstanding my warnings that it had a narrow focus on a tiny group of… Read…
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The Southwest Chief
The Southwest Chief was a double-decker, with only a small cabin in the lower levels of the cars for short-distance travelers. If not my mood, my muscles were feeling it was the second day of my trip. And I had another two nights on the train before arrival in Los Angeles. Two massive engines would pull… Read…
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The Crossing of the Mississippi
On the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles nobody sat next me. When Diane left in Chicago, so did the stories. It is always a blessing to sit alone on a plane these days. Yet that logic does not apply to trains. They usually go longer distances, and a second voice plays the chorus for our… Read…
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“Next Official Smoke Break: The Paris of the Prairies”
Iowa was just a brief interlude between Illinois and Missouri, where we were now. As the train was arriving at La Plata, the conductor had a message for the smoke deprived: this would just be a short stop. “Next official smoke break is Kansas City, the Paris of the Prairies.” We would be arriving there… Read…
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“On the Road”
Third day on the Trans-American Railroad. I ran to the cafeteria in the lower deck of the observation car for a breakfast of straight black coffee and toasted bagel with cream cheese. “What are you reading, sir?” It was a soft voice, but there was something peremptory in the tone, like a cop’s trying to… Read…
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Where Trains and Cars Come To Die
At 7:39 AM on the third day of the trip, we called at Lamar, Colorado. The train clanged past a car wrecking yard. Among the old models I spotted a 1970s Impala. The piles of crashed and crushed cars reminded me of a cemetery of locomotives in the Gobi Desert on the Trans-Siberian railroad in… Read…
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The Jumping Devils of Glorieta Pass
Of the monotone speech of a U.S. National Park volunteer, in a green shirt that evoked boy scouts’, I only caught a few words. But he was probably in his seventies, and it was painful to see him struggling to prevail over the noise and the indifference of the passengers on the observation car. Yet… Read…
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Lunch with the Amish as we Cross New Mexico
Instead of the cafeteria, I signed up for lunch at the dining car on the third day. Chance had it that an Amish couple would share the table with me. We had just left Gallup behind, a name made famous by the poll company. It was hard to believe the global firm was associated with… Read…
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Los Angeles: The End of the Line
There is no Trans-American Railroad as such. It is a name I coined for the two-train network connecting the East coast with the West coast, America’s Atlantic seabed with the Pacific one. But to my knowledge, nobody uses the “Trans-American” name to describe it. For good reason, too. It is not one single line like,… Read…
