(Louisiana, Texas, Houston, San Antonio, The ALAMO, Beaumont, Amtrak: “Sunset Limited”, New Orleans).
27 December: On board the “Sunset Limited” train across the South to Los Angeles:
As we roll across the flat and rainy Louisiana bayou towards Texas: the crew on the “Sunset Limited” are chirpily introduced by an ebullient “Heather-in- the-Diner” by name, over an uncertain PA system, from conductors to sous chef. For the first time on this extended journey, an Amtrak dining car is decked out in Christmas decorations and twinkling lights. Heather-in-the-Diner seems relentlessly perky and in her late 60’s: “I do it because I think my passengers travelling at this time want to enjoy the season. It also makes me feel better as well. I’ve been doing this job for 17 years and just LOVE it!”
The service is charming: the food is the exact same menu as on the “Empire Builder” at the other end of the nation. I’m travelling coach now, so balk at the $39 “special” which some of us might know better as “surf and turf” (thawed and grilled). The salad option and “signature steak” for a bit over half that cost will do nicely at dinner!
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As she walked through the lounge car distributing diner bookings, Heather-in-the-Diner paused before the old solitaire-playing guy in the corner seat, wearing his “Vietnam Veteran” ball cap. She blew him a kiss, shook his hand; publicly thanked him for his service. “Why thank you, Ma’am!” He beamed and bowed his head.
Around the Sightseer Lounge: several conversations between families about this being their: “fi-irst evah te-rain ri-ide”, especially “as an experience for the ki-ids”... and how much better it is than paying the same ticket price on the “bu-us”... back to “Mississippi-i”.
Do I enjoy sitting in the lounge and diner and listening to the breadth of accents? (I rather think I do.)
Crawling through Beaumont, Texas (“Delayed by freight traffic in front of us”... once more...): through a huge petrochemical complex with mile-long trains of shiny black PROCOR tank wagons. Steam is billowing out of the silver clusters of pipes; slow white smoke drifts into grey clouds from the industry in the distance. They’re “adding more, building more” according to the woman behind me as “they’re having trouble storing it all”.
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Miguel is Mexican and “without papers”, from New Orleans, travelling through to Los Angeles where he will have a reunion his mother and sister flying in from Mexico. He’s not seen them for 28 years while he has worked in the building industry in Louisiana. After ordering a half bottle of merlot (“to help with the sleep”) he starts telling his dinner companions of life without papers.
Mexico is “so corrupt, from the President to the local cops” but his cousins say the building industry is good in their home town, so he’ll be going back “soon”. In the meantime, he’s travelling America as much as he can “because once I leave, I can’t come back”. He’s quickly worked out he’s at a “table of liberals” so, several wines on, is comfortable to talk. He questions why Moslems and “outsiders” are always “terrorists” in the US, while Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma bomber) and more recent “mass shooters” are “just mental health cases”. When he started pitching the need for nations to be like Venezuela under Chavez and to “take your nation back from the multinationals”, he left the American liberals in his conversational wake, somewhat...
The other table company was a retired “elementary school English teacher of special needs kids” and 70+ year-old passenger-train-obsessed “foamer” (North America only: circa 1910 - 1980: if you want to know about a named train, schedule or locomotive number, this was your dream dinner companion) who was utterly lost for any other conversation topic so tried to ingratiate himself with Heather-in-the-Diner. The rest of us politely colluded and avoided “going there” to foamer territory in conversation for the rest of the meal. We were joined by an auto-engineer from Alabama who recently “met a few of your Aussie design guys brought over here by GM since they shut you down”. He’s working on bringing back auto work from Mexico to the South of the US (“it’s not so unionised there as in the North...”) to reflect new “political imperatives”.
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Houston: for an extended time the train ambles through vast freight yards and heavy industries servicing “big oil”, and other dependent industries feeding into them. The stark black skyscrapers of a distant downtown appear south of the tracks and freeway overpasses as we crawl into the single remaining covered platform of a once vast station. This is serviced by a small boxy and temporary looking 70’s station house crammed with queueing passengers for the three-days-per-week service.
Car attendants assist passengers stepping onto the ground level “platform” and wait politely amongst the fast-puffing smokers for new passengers to wander up to find seats.
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We dawdle into San Antonio an hour early.
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28 December, 9am: San Antonio, Texas:
At breakfast in the pub, I’m the only non-Spanish speaker.
There’s a massive College Football match here tonight (Very Big Deal) so the town is heaving with purple-clad or red-clad supporters. Queues for coffee and at the Alamo are massive but good-natured.
Inside the museum we are crammed in a shoulder-to-shoulder shuffle past the convoluted history of Texan independence from Spanish and authoritarian Mexican dominance to becoming a Confederate state. Most of the visitors are Spanish speakers, with a smattering of college football supporters and a few out-of-state families earnestly explaining all of this to their kids (“ You HAVE learned this in school, haven’t you?”). Maps and captions are only in English, as are the “Remember the Alamo!” And “Don’t Mess With Texas!” souvenirs.
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Don Watson quoting Reuben Solis:
“Mexico wins its independence from Spain in 1821, but 15 years later this part of it is seized by Sam Houston and his gang. Here in San Antonio, at the Alamo, the Mexicans have their victory over the Americans: but soon after the Americans drive them back over the Rio Grande and seize what will become Texas. And they turn the Alamo into a triumph of AMERICAN courage and sacrifice. They make martyrs of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and Bill Travis. They deny the Mexicans their one victory. Ten years later the Mexican war makes the conquest permanent...”
“...As the ultimate victors, Sam Houston’s heirs and successors got Texas and all its wealth; as the vanquished of the Alamo they also seized the franchise on sanctimony.”
- Don Watson: “American Journeys
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Outside the Alamo exit I am approached by a young and sincere face:
“Sir, may I offer you a free Bible with some water?”
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The remains of Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett and the other Alamo defenders (despite the Mexican President’s best efforts to destroy all traces) are respectfully interred several blocks away from the heaving crowds and souvenir shop stampede, mounted in a small wall-tomb of the subdued entrance portal to Fernando Cathedral. Behind the cathedral is the whitewashed adobe Spanish governor’s mansion and tranquil garden courtyards .
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Random San Antonio “cultural” notes:
Welcome to the local bus. The stop signs warn: “No Smoking or Vaping, No Alcohol, No Weapons”(!)
Vacant downtown lots (and there are many of them where freeway construction decimated the old strip shopping centres and communities, replaced by scrappy grassy vacant lots or car parking) are plastered with local election posters (which seem “foreign” to those of us from more British political backgrounds) for County/District Clerk, District Attorney; Judge, Precinct Commissioner...
There is a security check to go into the US Post office (under the watchful, beatific, photographic gaze of Vice President Pence):
“Are you carrying guns or knives? Please place them in this tray...”
Behind City Hall is a war memorial erected by the Mexican Committee for Civic and Cultural Action:
“DEDICATED TO
THE MEMORY OF
FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT
THE GOOD NEIGHBOUR
AND
IN HONOR OF THOSE WHO,
LIKE HIM, DIED FOR
FREEDOM”
Lunch options at the (very Mexican) Market Square: (please imagine loud mariachi bands as you read these): Tacos! Enchiladas! Grilled corn cups! Funnel Cakes! Deep Fried Oreos! Corn Dogs! Deep fried Snickers!
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To bring pedestrian life (and a sense of human-scale safety/security and fun) back to the downtown decimated by freeways and the flight to the suburbs of the 1960s, the city has been transformed by Riverwalk. Take a narrow stream, not much better than a drain flowing through downtown, then reimagine it with 14 miles of twisting, landscaped and restaurant/bar fringed walkways, frolicking ducks amongst sightseeing barges, ornate pedestrian bridges, fountains and waterfalls so you reshape city interactions under mature tall trees with glittering seasonal decorations and gas-flame heaters. It’s brought the tourist crowds, gentrification and late night drinkers/diners, and richer street life to a city core that had been in serious decline.
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29th December, 5.40am, San Antonio station - westbound:
You have to check baggage in 45 minutes before departure time, so here I am: semi-awake, perched on a plastic chair clearing emails, looking forward to 15 hours on the “Sunset Limited” returning to New Orleans.
29th December, 6.40am, San Antonio:
We are boarding, waking prone, sleeping seat occupiers (from Los Angeles) to clear adjacent seats. Power is off and we are shunting up and down the station yard: a general fug of somnolence.
29th December, 7.40am, San Antonio:
This is not such a happy train. “We have no eggs” for breakfast, so it’s pancakes or “the continental”. Assistant Conductor is tetchy, sleepless and letting it show with sarcastically oily announcements and face pulling behind the backs of more “interesting” passengers.
A sleeping car passenger opposite me at the eggless breakfast complains of “a ruckus in the middle of the night. It went on and on...”. Another had no sleep as it was so hot in the cabin. The conductor announces that our train is “doing a few more movements up and down to check brakes before we depart”. Dining car crew are largely seated, reluctantly rising to greet new customers or to arrange a check. Not happy.
Downstairs, the 30+ years of this train in service is showing: not just the wear and tear, but the ill-fitting and swinging restroom doors with unaligned locks and beaten up interiors. There are overflowing trash containers with 15 more hours of use ahead of them. Air conditioning seems fitful at best (with chorus of coach-class-coughing that wouldn’t be out of place at a winter SSO concert). Not a happy train...
29th December, 8.40am, San Antonio:
My “partner” in coach has spread his girth well over my seat and is snoring deep, sonorous, sinus-blocked snorts. I retreat to the lounge car. The view is (still) San Antonio station and the hotel I left three hours ago to catch this train. I could have been there right now, well slept, eating a substantial and eggy breakfast. Our train cars are still shunting back and forth. Fellow passengers are sharing Amtrak horror stories of electrical breakdowns, level crossing accidents and 12 hours’ late arrivals. Not a happy train...
29th December, 8.55am, San Antonio:
We have made it over the level crossing. We are on our way! (Crawling through freight yards; two and a half hours late, then another extended pause to refuel). No-one seems at all phased by these extended delays: “It’s just Amtrak...” At 9.35, we appear (I am optimistic...) to be on our way.
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Houston: Texas - 1.40pm and 90 minutes late:
“We have a little boy named Eric on the platform who is travelling on this train. If you know of or are family of young Eric who is travelling on this train, you might detrain momentarily as we cannot leave for New Orleans until he is claimed.”
There’s not another train for 3 days, so the search for Eric’s owners is intense. At an adjoining table, Houston university students are discussing their “favourite brand of water”.
We then do another one of those strange American backing-up-for-several-miles shunts through residential back yards and over monster freeways “in order to find our right track” then to pick our way through a huge tangle of freight yards to exit the city.
4.55pm: stuck for nearly an hour outside of Beaumont Texas and running very late:
Passenger: Will we be able to make up any time?
Conductor: No
Car attendant: We’re only 10 minutes from Beaumont, but who knows when we’ll make it in there. There’s a freight ahead of us and it doooooon’t move!
Mother to her three young children in the lounge car: Our hour and a half journey just became three hours. Hour or two is ok. Three hours is not the plan. And they’re running out of beer...
Child: How will they know when we arrive?
Mother: They are tracking us on line. This is not what I signed up for!
The snack bar guy tries to lighten the mood by telling jokes over the sound system: What happened to the butcher who backed into a meat grinder? He found he’s behind in his work.
Mood not lightened. Not a happy train.
La Fayetteville, Louisiana, 8.15pm - 3 hours late:
A social worker from “SanTone” asks me if I also watch “Dr Blake Mysteries”...
After crawling through more freight yards and easing over the massive Huey Long bridge across the Mississippi then crawling through even more freight yards, we rumble through (what’s left of) depressed areas of New Orleans affected by the Katrina flooding. The patched asphalted blocks remain, reflecting the scattered streetlights. Many of the flat housing lots are vacant or contain the shells of former dwellings at crazy angles. About one in five of the houses seems repaired with lights on.
Passing the elevated hoardings warning of opioid addiction, we slowly edge around the floodlit Superdome - that place of shameful, squalid official survivor abandonment for many days after Hurricane Katrina when the Federal government couldn’t get its act together to rescue the stranded (largely black) evacuees. The thousands trapped within the Superdome experienced the breakdown of services, hygiene and public order while Bush congratulated his emergency teams for their “fine work”.
29 December, 11.55pm. New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA):
Final garbled announcement from the exasperated train attendant: WeapologiseforourdelaystodayandthankyouforchoosingAmtrak!
Three hours late.
A long delay (being barked at by Amtrak staff about where to stand, walk; hand in your tag for checked baggage, collect checked luggage….).
Not a happy train...
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