I’m in church when the Amtrak train, the Ethan Allen Express, rumbles by on Sunday mornings. It used to be at 11:05, right near the end of the service during the last hymn or the closing words. The schedule has changed: now it goes by at 10:42, right in the middle of the sermon or reflection. Every Sunday.

It only takes about 20 seconds and most people don’t even notice it, but I do, every time. It’s not an epiphany or revelation, but I am in a reflective mood on Sunday mornings, and I am thrilled by it and never fail to take note.

It clips on by about 150 yards away. I can hear it coming. I can see it if I sit next to the large, west-facing, vertical windows, speeding over the trestle by the high school, silver engine and about eight slick silver cars. It does not disturb the service — it’s not that close, but it’s genuinely audible and visible, if you listen and look.

Every time I hear it, I have all I can do not to run to the window, like a kid, and point and tell the others. I have been unable to avoid revealing to some my excitement. Now there’s a small coterie of us who await it — and discreetly wink or nod to one another as it passes by.

I have lived long enough, and go back far enough, that I remember when passenger train travel was much more commonplace. Even cities of a modest size, like Lewiston, Maine, where I grew up, had a train station downtown, in Lewiston on Bates Street, just two blocks off Main.

The train station was a hub of activity in the center of town, with a spacious indoor area where you could buy a ticket from a person (a real person, not a kiosk) behind a window and find a seat on a bench in the waiting area or get a bite to eat from a restaurant or snack bar there till your train could be boarded. “All Aboard!”

I keenly remember as a boy lying in bed at night in the dark, hearing the train and its honk or whistle as it warned motorists at crossings. We lived in a house about two blocks from Bates College in one direction and about a quarter mile from the train tracks across Main Street down by the river, the Androscoggin, in the other direction.

On occasion­­­ — I don’t remember how many times, but more than once, my parents put my sister Martha (three years older) and me on the train by ourselves in Lewiston to go visit our beloved Aunt Connie in Boston. She would meet us as we got off the train at South Station.

The first time, I know I was scared. I was about eight probably, Martha 11. My mother attempted to reassure me by saying, “Don’t worry, Martha will show you the ropes,” whereupon I became terrified, hysterical: “The ropes, the ropes! Oh no, not the ‘ropes!’”

I had imagined actual ropes on the train that had to be negotiated, and I knew Martha would not show me what to do with the ropes because she didn’t like me (nor I her, not till she left for college). This became a family story, often retold when a new experience occasioned anxiety: “Don’t worry, I’ll show you the ropes.”

EVEN TODAY, DECADES after Karl Lindholm was introduced to the romance of train travel, who doesn’t have a favorite memory of riding the rails.
Independent photo/Steve James

Between my junior and senior years at Middlebury College, I spent my summer as a common laborer in a factory in a small town in Switzerland, Brugg. I had spent the previous eight summers, from age 13 to 21, working at the golf course at the nearby Poland Spring Hotel. I wanted a radically different summer experience, an adventure, one (my father insisted) I subsidize myself.

I couldn’t speak the language, Schweizer Deutsch — it didn’t matter anyway, the other factory workers were Italian. It was a solitary existence, lonely perhaps, but only for two months. At the end of my shift each day, I rode my bike the two miles from the GeogFischer Machinfabrik into town and went straight to the train station.

Once there, I bought the Paris Herald-Tribune, the newspaper for English speakers, and read it through sitting on a bench right where the trains came and went noisily on three separate tracks.

This is where I found comfort and peace, amid all the formidable train sounds, the hiss and screech of the brakes, the whistle blowing, the rumble of the engine, and the people sounds: “Alle Einstengen!”

Three years or so later in the spring of 1968, just out of Middlebury College, I traveled for four months in Europe and North Africa with my friend Jon. We hitchhiked in central Europe but mostly took the train in southern Europe (Italy, Spain) and Morocco, as it was cheap transportation if you went 3rd or 4th class.

We found Morocco wonderfully exotic, an Arab country where the people spoke French! Jon and I had both taken French classes at Middlebury (and performed miserably), so we were all set in Morocco: we knew the language! Bien sur.

We were in Morocco for a couple weeks, traveling by train from Tangier to Rabat to Casablanca to Marrakech. As my contemporaries certainly recall, the song “Marrakech Express” by folk-rock supergroup Crosby Stills & Nash, was something of an anthem of the footloose ‘60s.

Singer-songwriter Graham Nash had preceded us by two years. Traveling by train to Marrakech, he became bored riding in first class, so he ventured back to third class: “That was where it was all happening,” he wrote about the experience. “There were lots of people cooking strange little meals on small wooden stoves and the place was full of chickens, pigs and goats. It was fabulous; the whole thing was fascinating.”

Jon and I felt the same way. We were thrilled to be “riding on the Marrakech Express!”

I have taken now to asking friends for their favorite train memory, not just old folks like me, but also young people who have traveled to parts of the world where passenger train travel is vital. Seems like everyone has a good story.

What’s yours?

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Karl Lindholm can be contacted at [email protected].