Booked on the Morning Train: A Journey Through America.

by George F. Scheer III
Hardcover: Chapel Hill, Algonquin, 1991. ISBN 0-945575-40-8

This is the third of a series of three related reviews on Amtrak travelogue books. The first is on Zephyr and the second is on Making Tracks.

Here is another book which takes you around the country, but it is much more of a personal story than the two above. Scheer doesn't seem to be a railfan, and though there are occasional bits on engines or segments of railroad lines, it mostly comes from railfans that he meets or Amtrak personnel he chats with. After a brief history of Amtrak in the introduction, we launch right into the journey, perhaps duplicating the disorientation that he himself experienced from boarding a train in the middle of the night. The pattern of the book only becomes clear on p.66:

"I was out simply to see what travel by train was like in our time in this country, where trains have been, admittedly, so much debased recently and are so often vilified. (Paul Theroux has called Amtrak the world railroad in the world, and he should know.) My plan was to see just what sort of journey one could have by train these days, provided only that he could pay the fare, had a few dollars left over to arrange for shelter and food, and remained open to whatever fortune, good or bad, turned up. Friends at every stop are not part of the bargain ... and I made exceptions. I also counted it in their favor if they had a washing machine."

Of course, the usual reference to Paul Theroux. (cf my page on Paul Theroux books)

"A Brown University graduate and jazz radio host hitchhiking on a train around the country" could be one way of describing it. He does meet up with a few old friends dispersed around the country, but when he gets off he's usually alone and unfamiliar with the area. And he really takes hitchhiking to extremes, renting wrecks some days and arranging with a car dealership other days, driving around in Montana during snowstorms, parking overnight in freezing temperatures waiting for a train, finding himself in the wrong part of town sometimes, even dropping in on a woman whom he'd met on an earlier segment of his trip (certainly a favorable impression of Minnesota hospitality!). It's a more plebian mode of travel. One gets the impression from Kisor that he traveled in sleepers each time he made the trip for research, and Pindell sometimes spent the night in the now-defunct (unfortunate, since inexpensive) slumbercoaches found on Eastern routes. But Scheer makes it clear from the start that he wanted to sleep in coach sometimes, both to observe and to keep his pocketbook from losing even more weight. It's like college student travel, but Scheer did it in his thirties and with a well-established job to his credit.

If a peek into someone else's life for six weeks appeals to you, Scheer's book will fit the bill. The reader will experience his surprise at finding something unexpected, his plans for the day, his dreariness in Seattle during a typical block of overcast weather, interactions with friends old and new, and his weariness at approaching the end of his journey. In this way, it's less cohesive than the other books which have a stated goal of chronicling their travels. Actually, many of the quotations in the book seem slightly paraphrased after they left their speakers' mouths, without the journalistic exactitude of other books. There's also no index.

But all this makes for a more serendipitous reading. Yes, there's the Golden Spike and J. J. Hill, it's hard not to write about these events which put the finishing touches on the modern American rail network. But day-to-day travel and riding horses in Minnesota and keeping warm and alive by cycling the automobile engine on and off through a freezing night — that's part of the enjoyment to be gotten from this book. One may not want to do it oneself, but it's entertaining and instructive to read about them.

Scheer like others waxes prophetic in the postscript, and he talks to the same Amtrak publicist Clifford Black whom Pindell interviews at the epilogue of his book. The two men also both undertook train trips at, as Scheer writes, "a particularly sharp cusp in my own life." Scheer did it all in a continuous six-week block whereas Pindell did it in three seasonal stages, so understandably he doesn't manage to stay rosy and optimistic throughout (one really feels the slide in the sixth week). But it's a distinct view, and informative in different ways. What's it like to try the wandering lifestyle, going from place to place just for the experiences? Try it yourself, or read this book. But if your interests run more toward the train, try one of the other books in this review series.