On the rail

I love doing time on the road. I discovered the other day, however, that I might have a new love: Doing time on the rail.

For the first time I took a trip by rail.

Understand, I am not a child of train travel.

I am a child of President Dwight Eisenhower's interstate highway system that started in the 1950s when I was born.

I am a child of the Age of the Automobile who grew up on those interstate highways, traveling them many times with my family as we made our annual summer pilgrimage to the ocean in New England from the high plains and foothills of Colorado.

Eventually, I graduated to airplane travel as the most efficient means to get from distant Point A to distant Point B.

It was family business related to getting a car from my daughter in Connecticut that put me on a train from Boston to New Haven.

I was struck by a pace of travel that is determined, yet unhurried, very much unlike traveling by air.

It is a means of travel that I found fits my personality, especially a personality that is being retooled by retirement. I don't need the frantic scheduling of airlines. I can get where I need to go with the deliberate but unhurried pace of the railroads.

Because of my own need for promptness, I appreciated the precision almost to the minute of the travel to the schedule:
Arrive Providence 10:16, just as it says on the schedule;
Arrive Westerly 10:37;
Arrive Mystic 10:51;
And so on until our arrival in New Haven at 12:08.

And it was a different view of travel altogether.

On the highway as a driver, the view is stitching of the white line lane divider and a landscape you might glimpse when you look away from the road.

On a plane as a passenger, the view is a patchwork of roads and farm fields and a landscape pretty much flattened from being eight miles high.

On a train at about 60 miles the ground level view lingers longer. You can stare at the view and focus. And can stare and daydream. Or you can ignore it altogether. I sat on the car's east side as it traveled south, giving me wonderful water views as we hugged the Rhode Island and Connecticut coast (see image above).

The truest sign that this captured my interest?

I took the in-seat magazine called "Arrive." I never take the in-flight magazine. But I took this one as the surest sign I want to learn more because I want to do rail more.