I’ve just finished reading (or probably re-reading, though it surely didn’t seem familiar) Dick Francis’s book The Edge.  Written in 1988, it dealt with the fictional “Great Transcontinental Mystery Race Train” and, though I’ve never traveled by train in Canada, — or anywhere else after 1964, for that matter — it all seemed wonderfully familiar.

I have made transcontinental trips in North America, however — three of them here in the United States, from Boston to Portland and back in the summers of 1938, 1939 and at Christmas in 1946, the same trip, though the other way ’round.  I have few memories of the first two journeys.  I was 2-1/2 and 3-1/2 and made the trips with my mother from Boston where we lived to Portland, Oregon and then, of course, on by car to Oysterville to visit my Granny and Papa.

My mother told me two things about those trips.  On each of them, all I was interested in doing was walking the length of the train and back, through the many cars and over the scary couplings between them. Over and over again!  She claimed that we walked the full 3,000-mile distance to Oysterville!  And, secondly, after my first terrifying trip to the bathroom where you could see the railroad tracks when you flushed, I simply refused to go.  Period.  I didn’t have any “accidents;”  I just shut down.

My mother was fit-to-be-tied and finally appealed to the conductor who found a little potty and then, apparently, the problem was solved.  I think it might have been that same conductor who took pity on her and offered to do the walking with me for some of the time.  (I always did like a man in uniform!)

During the war when we lived in Alameda California and  had no car, we travelled by Pullman train from Oakland to Portland and always had a sleeping berth which the porter made up while we were eating dinner in the dining car.  Once or twice we made the trip at Christmas and I remember that the train was jam-packed with servicemen going home on furlough for the holidays.

“The Shasta Daylight”

By the time I was a teenager, Southern Pacific’s Shasta Daylight was making the trip — which they advertised as “a fast 15-hour-30-minute schedule in either direction for the 713-mile  trip through some of the most beautiful mountain scenery of any train in North America.”  I travelled back and forth several times that way, once with my Aunt Mona, once with my mother, and once with my best friend Joanne Bruner.  (All I remember about that particular trip is that Joanne and I made ourselves sick on fig newtons.  I still can’t eat them.)

In the fifties and early sixties, I travelled a little by train in England and Europe but found that it was less expensive in the long run to buy a car and then bring it back to the U.S. at the end of the summer.  And, besides, we weren’t stuck on the main rail routes that way and could really get away from the beaten path.  We were living on Arthur Frommer’s recommended $5.00 a day and travel was far cheaper by car if you could manage the initial outlay.

I don’t really miss train travel. Even back then, I found it more “romantic” to talk about it or see in the movies than to actually experience it.  But I am sorry that most of our recent generations haven’t had the opportunity — just like I’m sorry I didn’t have my grandparents’ experiences with horses, carriages, and buggies.  Again, it probably sounds more appealing than it was.