It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and in the story of modern life it exemplified the dichotomy between time saved and time wasted, and a conclusion surprising only on the surface.
This is a tale of two seatings, one on a somewhat old-fashioned train, one on a very modern airliner, both in coach, and of the relative values of experience and expediency.
There are plenty of good reasons to avoid air travel on environmental and economic grounds. Airports, air traffic control, and many other essential features of commercial air travel are highly subsidized (as is a portion of Amtrak's operation, but to a far lesser degree); airplanes emit double the pollution and greenhouse gases per passenger-mile as do US trains; and airports are a voracious land hogs.
As an example of the latter: Los Angeles International Airport presently covers 3500 acres and serves around 155,000 passengers per day; it is served by wide, congested streets and freeways that have made a desolation of its surrounding areas. Meanwhile, the Shinjuku train and subway hub in Tokyo covers a couple of square blocks of downtown and serves 3.6 million passengers per day, with no traffic congestion, while daily life goes on routinely around it in the heart of a great capital city.
Indeed, the airplane's only virtue is hurry--yet poets, philosophers, and doctors all agree that hurry is bad for you--will bring about your premature demise, in fact. So why encourage it?
But with the plan in mind of making a somewhat fair comparison of the experiences, I booked Amtrak's Coast Starlight to San Francisco to meet my wife at the tail end of her business trip, and reluctantly took a Virgin America airline ticket for the return leg.
This is how it went....
Since I used rail transit to reach both Union Station in Los Angeles and the international airport outside of San Francisco, we'll start from the terminals. I'll let the photos speak for the difference of experience between a rail station and an airport, both considered to be among the best of their kind. (It would have been truly unfair to use the dismal LAX for the airport half of the comparison.)
The first pair in images depicts the concourses--rectangular tubes in both cases, but with better decoration at Union Station--though I came in through the far less grand back entrance there:
Next were the waiting areas--Union Station's serving several trains at once, each of them carrying a bigger passenger load than an airplane; SFO's serving two mid-size airliners. Quite a difference in both physical comfort and visual aesthetic--the rail station's armchairs give you a little space between yourself and your fellows, so you don't feel crowded while you wait to board. The airline's waiting room is apparently patterned after a commercial stockyard:
This matter of the seats is repeated on board the respective vehicles. I've often wondered why airliners, which are a form of privatized mass transit, after all, aren't considered "convivial" travel modes, and on this trip, I realized why: besides that you are physically uncomfortable in an airliner seat, you are simply too close to your neighbor! Everyone is far too close to everyone else, with personal territories overlapping severely, so that any further contact, even casual conversation, seems far too intimate to be comfortable.
My two seatmates, both men, retreated into, at various times in the one-hour flight, books, sleep, laptop movies, or the insipid little screen of advertisements built into the seatback in front of them. Any necessary conversation was uttered in hushed voices and kept as brief and impersonal as possible.
My seatmate on the train was a young blonde girl from a small town in Michigan, the sort of person who should have been most shy about talking to a strange and somewhat rough-looking fellow on a ten-hour rail trip. Yet, because we each had our own large and comfortable territory, we felt free and at ease, and talked for hours about the scenery, our families, our towns, the fellow passengers, and whatever.
We could also get up and move to the observation car and get away from each other for a while, meet again there or not, as we chose, or go back to the seats, the dining car, or just another part of the train.
I also had a long conversation with a journalist I met in the observation car, and with an older woman I met at the San Luis Obispo rest stop, when we were both looking for coffee. My seatmate and I also enjoyed overhearing the troupe of Australian tourists in the several rows behind us, who were having a jolly old time, and one of whom was an accomplished humorist indeed.
The train, by not forcing us together, allowed us to come together in various pleasant sociable ways, and made the trip a joy.
As did the spectacular California scenery passing by the windows: large and small towns, the beaches, the mountains, hidden valleys, ranches, farm fields, factories, deer grazing on rolling hills, the oak grasslands of primordial coastal slopes--all pleasure to the eyes, and grist for conversation.
I left the train relaxed and happy; I left the plane both cramped and testy. In the latter, there was no view, there was no comfort, there was no company. (My wife and I ended up in separate rows, and of course you are not allowed to change--but that made my comparison more accurate, as I was seated with strangers on both legs of the journey.)
In short, I don't think that air travel saved me any time on this trip. In fact, it cost me time, though the total trip length was six times as long on the train. Why?
Because the miserable time on the airliner was subtracted from my life and thrown away, while the invigorating time on the Coast Starlight was added to my life, and enriched it greatly.
There's no comparison. Air travel is a penitence, not an experience. Rail travel lets you become a partner with the landscapes and cities you see, and with the fellow passengers who see them with you. Air travel wrenches you from your life and your culture; rail travel brings you into harmony with both.
Ten hours well-spent are worth much more than two hours wasted.
Text and photos by Richard Risemberg
