So now President Trump wants to do away with that perennial whipping boy, Amtrak, and times being what they are, there is a good chance that this may finally happen. But it would be a crying shame for Memphis, for practical as well as sentimental reasons.
A one-way ticket to New Orleans costs $68, or $152 for a mini-sleeper “roomette” with seats that fold into a kinda comfy cot. The scheduled departure is 6:50 a.m. True, there is likely to be some adjustment there, but if you live in Downtown or Midtown you can wait it out in the comfort of your own place. And if fortune is with you, the train arrives in New Orleans in plenty of time for dinner.
There are no security checkpoints, no pat-downs, no take-off-your-shoes. You can bring booze and food on board plus all the baggage you want, hole up in your roomette, and get pleasantly buzzed. Granted, the trip to New Orleans takes nine to eleven hours, compared to seven hours driving on Interstate 55. But that’s not too bad compared to a flight that goes through Atlanta, requires you to be at the airport at dawn, endure the lines and indignities, and pay four times the price for a tiny seat.
On a recent trip to Hammond — the last stop before New Orleans, and closer to my destination on the Mississippi Coast — I boarded the train at 7:14 after two emails announcing slight schedule changes kept me on my toes. A friendly porter was waiting at Car 5900 and checked off my name. My room was clean and more spacious than a first-class airplane seat, with bottled water and fat pillows. The train lurched out of Memphis a few minutes later, horn blowing tolerably at every crossing.
I hustled to the dining car for breakfast of coffee, juice, hashbrowns, roll, a cheese omelet, and sausage. An attendant seated me at a table with three other passengers. I gripped my coffee cup and remarked that the train swayed considerably.
“Try sleeping,” my seatmate said, eyes rolling. He had boarded back in upstate Illinois.
But it was a sunny, beautiful morning, and soon we were gabbing away about emergency medicine (his specialty) and pestering people for interviews (mine). We bonded over shared tastes in travel, music of the Sixties, writer Richard Brautigan, and movies about Indiana (Hoosiers and Breaking Away). The other passengers excused themselves, and for nearly an hour we had the dining car pretty much to ourselves, coffee and more chow on demand, thank you. Try that on Delta.
The Amtrak marketing team does the best it can to highlight Southern specialties along the way, but truthfully there is not much to look at besides green trees, brown fields where cotton and soybeans will sprout, and muddy streams. In Greenwood a sign on one of the many battered abandoned buildings said “Don’t Bother.” Yazoo City and Flora were not much better.
Jackson was the halfway point to my Hammond destination, and things got a little confusing here. There was a stop of half an hour for no apparent reason. Depending on which schedule you consult and what day you consult it, the City of New Orleans stops in Jackson for two hours or two minutes. “Either way it leaves at 1:20,” the porter shrugged.
Such is train travel. Lunch was served at noon, with a choice of beef stew or fish included in my $142 fare. Next time I will brown-bag it. But once again the company was great. The doc and I were joined by a Tennessee woman, also a doctor as we would soon learn, wearing a green shirt emblazoned with an “H” for Hawaii, where she was headed. For the next hour we talked about the Kona Coast, ob-gyn practice in rural West Tennessee, the availability of abortions and opioids, railroad trivia (Fulton, Kentucky was once the junction for the banana trade for all of North America), and the merits of Jackson and New Orleans.
The porter leaned in to answer our questions about train speed (80 mph tops) and unexplained delays (freight trains rule). A couple from Wales came by and sang the praises of Memphis and Delta Blues. It was civilized, enlightening, and pleasant.
Not until 4 p.m. did the train finally roll into the lovely (really) Hammond train station. I could have made it three hours earlier in my car, but I would have missed something.
Something we will all probably miss, soon enough.
