Because Amish do not buy health insurance nor take Medicare or Social Security, he rode The Southwest Chief from Chicago to California and went to Mexico to see a doctor. He paid cash for the leg in Tijuana.

“A van picked us up at border and took us to a clinic,” he told me. “They have everything down there.”

Now he was eastbound, crossing the treeless high plains of eastern Colorado. Amos stared out at the sagebrush and sighed, “I just want to be back on the farm. I don’t suppose you know anything about feeder calves, do you?”

I knew enough to make conversation, and by the time dessert arrived, I had learned how to finish, or fatten, a calf with corn.

I’ve ridden Amtrak since college, and, in recent years, logged nearly 100,000 miles researching and promoting a book on rail policy. Dinner with Amos was one of my more remarkable encounters. But it wasn’t entirely unusual. During meals in the diner, where Amtrak practices community seating, Americans who might never otherwise encounter one another sit face to face at tables and break bread.

All mass transit brings Americans together, of course. When we travel, the self-segregation we otherwise practice—by race, income, education, politics, culture, religion, class, or political tribe—evaporates. But a train is special. Unlike a 20-minute commute on a city bus or subway, or an airline flight in the cramped seat of a fuselage, a train requires the commitment of time and space. Passengers ride together for hours, even days, and during the journey have the liberty to move about, eat and drink, and socialize.

Trains also have an intimacy with landscape. Incapable of negotiating steep topography, they follow valleys, hug rivers and oceanfronts, and strike out across plains and desert basins. Train travel induces a sort of reverie—a hypnotic feeling of being adrift on the geography of America. Passengers, many of whom are seeing the country for the first time, marvel at its beauty, diversity, and exoticness. And those feelings carry over to an inclination to engage one another and embrace the same diversity within the rolling coaches.

So while I still fly on airplanes, if I can work a long-distance train into my travels, I get aboard. When I want to feel and hear the zeitgeist of America, I get on a train.

Early in the Great Recession, on The Empire Builder—running from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest—I encountered jobless men converging on North Dakota with just a few dollars in their pockets and the hope of work. In Williston, men who had arrived months earlier in the oil patch boarded the train to go home for a few days and see family before heading back to sprawling “man camps” erected by Halliburton.

A roughneck having a beer in the observation car told me a woman was arrested for prostitution the day before at his man camp.

“The cops called it a crime. It was a public service. Those man camps are tense.”

Observing America through train windows. Photo courtesy of James McCommons.

The train rolled past campers with no running water parked out on the frozen prairie and rigs flaring off natural gas-like colossal candles. The snow and sky shone red and apocalyptic.

He had not been home for weeks.

“There’s no place out here for a family. And my wife, she’s sick. She got the cancer.”

On The Sunset Limited in New Mexico, I chatted with a Texan returning home from Los Angeles after being checked over at Kaiser Permanente. He tapped his chest.

“A weird virus took out my heart muscle. Two years ago, I had a heart-lung transplant.”

We watched pronghorn antelope sprint away from the train and mule deer standing in dry washes.

When he got up, he clapped me on the shoulder, “Every day is a good one … remember that.”

Over the years, I’ve dined with school teachers, a deputy sheriff, a distraught widower, an apprentice mortician, a veterinarian recruiting for slaughterhouses, a priest who discovered the call in Vietnam, an aging movie star, and a wheezy 98-year-old who was a door gunner on a Flying Fortress. A woman at our table whose own father had been a POW in Germany said, “Thank you for your service.”

He seemed bemused: “It wasn’t my idea. I got drafted.”

In Everett, Washington, my train picked up a cocky young man who told us he had piloted gunships in Iraq and was taking the train to Wenatchee for the funeral of a comrade who had committed suicide. Someone bought him a beer. Years later in Kansas, I ate a steak with a huge man in his late 30s, straw-colored hair flaring out beneath an oily baseball cap. He was like a sheep dog gone feral. He’d been in the “special forces.”

Inwardly, I groaned. Is anyone just a grunt, a cook, or a clerk anymore?

“I got fragged over in the sandbox and had to get out. I’m six foot five and used to be 215. I could run forever,” he said. “After my wife left me, I let myself go.”

He laid natural gas pipeline in Oklahoma, lived in motels, ate Chinese and take-out pizza each night, and guzzled gallons of beer. Flush with money, he apparently lived a lonely, haunted life.

Always, I take late meal reservations so if my companion(s) are compelling, we can linger over coffee or a glass of wine. The dining car stewards are in no hurry to bus the tables and throw us out.

Not all meals are a pleasure. Teenagers remove their retainers at the table, young lovers speak only to one another, people text on their Smartphones, passengers come to the diner still wiping sleep from their eyes, and others have no filter for what passes as dinner conversation.

Leaving St. Louis, I met two sisters heading west to visit a son. The mom said, “He’s such a good boy, called me every day when my husband passed.” The boy had testicular cancer when he was 16 but had still impregnated his wife on two occasions. Unfortunately, the poor dear miscarried both times.

She prattled on and on. As my father used to quip, some people never come up for air. I gobbled my food and fled the car.

On The Coast Starlight outside Salinas, the owner of a restaurant in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles told me she was worried. There were Muslims on the train. “Are they in Michigan, too?”

Yes, I say. Muslims are urban homesteading blighted neighborhoods in Detroit. “They’re making a go of it there.”

“Michigan wants Muslims?”

I listen, nod, and try not to be judgmental or revealing. If the conversation grows intense or tedious, there is always the window and a “Hey look at that” as a way to change the subject.

We could be looking at a hillside of wind turbines in Iowa, iceboats racing on the Hudson River, dapper worshipers exiting a corrugated tin church in Mississippi, delinquent kids in New Jersey heaving rocks at the train, kudzu vines strangling telephone poles in Georgia, or homeless men huddled in cardboard shacks beneath I-5 in Seattle.

A train trip unspools in an endless stream of images and words. And if you listen well, you hear America.

The post What Riding Trains Taught Me About Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When railroads emerged in the U.S. in the 1830s and 1840s, cargo-carrying trains were exceedingly short, handling only a few cars. By the 1850s, locomotives had become more powerful, track structures stronger, traffic increased, and individual railroads longer. Something more was needed to keep the trains on track. The engineer, fireman, and brakeman remained in the locomotive. But what about the conductor, “the captain,” who had legal authority over the train? And the one or two additional brakemen who helped to manage the primitive hand-braking system and throw switches as cars were picked up and set out? The caboose provided a shelter for the conductor and brakemen along with a heating/cooking stove, seats, and make-shift beds. It also included a desk and chair for the conductor. The caboose or caboose car was also a place to store shovels, brooms, wrenches, chains, couplers, lanterns, and other paraphernalia. It was basically a utilitarian add-on to a freight train.

A variety of cabooses appeared across the United States. Early on they were mostly modified boxcars and then custom four-wheel contraptions, many of which remained in service for decades. Later trunk carriers led the movement for eight-wheel or double-truck cabooses. A most distinctive change occurred in the 1860s, when the Chicago & North Western Railway introduced the cupola caboose, a feature that gave crew an excellent way to watch a moving train for any operational difficulties and gave it a most distinctive design. And in the early 1920s the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railroad became the first to adopt the bay window caboose. It easily cleared overpasses and tunnels while still providing good crew visibility of the train. The penultimate design came with the extended-vision caboose, where the cupola was pushed out on both sides. Over time, too, largely wooden construction gave way to all-metal fabrication; tens of thousands of cabooses of all styles were built.

It did not take long before the word “caboose” entered the popular American vocabulary. It’s a totally unique name. While its origins may be Dutch or French, its etymology is obscure. There is a consensus that the word dates from the 18th century and probably refers to the cookhouse on the deck of a ship. Yet not every domestic railroad called this employee carriage a caboose. The Pennsylvania Railroad used the term “cabin car,” and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad called it a “way car.” Railroaders, though, had a variety of distinctive nicknames for the caboose, including “buggy,” “chariot,” “crummy,” “shack,” and “shanty.”

While red became the common caboose color because of its widespread usage on rolling stock and station structures, a railroad might select brown, yellow, or something else. In the 20th century, it was not unheard of to see multi-colored cabooses in combinations including red and white or some other paint combination. Never the less, red stands out as the color most associated with the caboose, being long remembered even after this equipment faded away.

Since World War II, railroads have made monumental changes in their operations. The most obvious has been the diesel locomotive revolution. By the late 1950s, the iron horse had virtually disappeared. Companies also greatly increased the size of their freight equipment and added new types of rolling stock, such as the “Big John” hopper cars for grain haulage that appeared in the 1960s and specially designed flatcars for shipping containers first introduced in the 1980s. In the course of these transformations, state and federal regulatory changes and replacement technologies have spelled doom for the once ubiquitous caboose.

In the 1980s legal requirements for having a “full” freight crew of five to six employees changed rapidly. Railroads began to negotiate successfully with their operating brotherhoods for work rules that allowed them to dispatch three and then two crew members, all of whom could comfortably ride in the locomotive. Equipment, too, became more dependable and did not demand the watchful eyes of “hind-end” crew members.

A viable alternative to the caboose also appeared. This was the end-of-train device (EOT or EOTD). Placed on the rear coupler, it monitored air pressure in the brake system and reported any problems by radio signal to the locomotive cab. This portable electronic telemetry device also provided information about the slack between cars, and its blinking red light warned a following train that another one was is in front. Admittedly, this EOT’s light is somewhat less distinctive than the historic red and green caboose marker lights that evolved from kerosene to electric.

The last cabooses would be built in the 1980s; the premier manufacturer, International Car Company, ended its production in 1981. Soon railroads began to scrap, sell to rail enthusiasts, or donate to museums and communities these mostly obsolete pieces of equipment. Some carriers, however, continued to use cabooses, assigning them usually to switching or work-train chores.

The demise of the caboose no longer allows train watchers the opportunity to anticipate the last car of a passing freight train. Children (and adults, too) once took joy in waving to crew members, and these usually friendly trainmen returned the gesture. There might be a trackside shout or two of “hello” or “goodbye.” Still, cabooses can be seen in both public and private places and ridden on at some operating railroad museums.

In the 1930s, an Iowa farm wife may have explained why the now-retired cars aren’t completely obsolete:

“Whenever I see the caboose at the end of a freight train, I think what a cozy nook it is for railroaders. When I see smoke coming out of the little stove stack in cold weather, I like to imagine what it’s like inside for these men who are traveling down the track. I always wish I could be with them.”

And the caboose’s iconic status endures in popular culture. Certainly “The Little Red Caboose Behind the Train” is still sung and enjoyed by present-day school children. Yet the reference to the caboose probably needs to be clarified by the teacher just as the one-room school must be explained.

The post Whatever Happened to the Little Red Caboose? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.