Trains on the Brain Savour the journey & travel by train

One of my favourite books about train travel is Jenny Diski’s Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America.

This book charts her journey around most of America’s coast, the many interesting encounters she has with ordinary people and the personal memories some of these trigger in the author. As with much of her travel literature, it’s more about an inner journey and a retraction from the world than a straight travelogue. I’ll be posting more about her in my forthcoming round up great rail reads.

Image: Ashley Rose

Anyway, most of her encounters take place in the smoking car, bar or lounge, where strangers often open up to her with surprising candour. The book was published in 2002 and since then smoking has been banned on board all Amtrak services with the exception of the Auto Train which ferries drivers and their vehicles from outside Washington to near Orlando. (I’ve no idea why this train gets special treatment – anyone across the pond care to enlighten me?)

Coast to Coast with Amtrak

California Zephyr, courtesy of Denise Cross

A grand Amtrak tour is high on my list of trips to take, particularly the coast-to-coast route from New York to San Fransisco, which is actually two journeys with a stop in Chicago, but being a confirmed smoker the pit stop waiting time involved does trouble me. I guess most routes have a number of stops along the way, some leaving enough time to dash off and ‘take some air’ while stocks are replenished or staff swap shifts but the imminent danger of ‘being duffiled’, in the words of another great writer of rail literature Paul Theroux, might deter me a little.

Courtesy of Drew Dierschke

Smoking bans

Even though smoking bans are a relatively recent thing in Britain (only since 2007 has it been outlawed in all open spaces, including train platforms, it came in a year or two earlier in Scotland) the thought that you could smoke on buses and tube trains (the Kings Cross station disaster of 1987 put an end to all that) during my lifetime just seems bizarre and perverse now. All this got me wondering if there are any resources dedicated to detailing which major routes do and don’t allow smoking on board. Much of Eastern Europe may remain unaffected where routes avoid western countries, and I’ve read that a Norwegian line serving the Arctic north has its own smoking carriage. Presumably most of the year it’s just too Baltic to alight on the platform!

If you’ve heard of anyone desperate enough to compile such a resource let me know, or if you have a funny ‘smoking on board’ story, please share it below.

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