Romance With the Rails Takes On a Star-Crossed Look

Over the course of this evening, a dozen trains will be pulling out of Union Station.

So it says on the “Departures” board, posted at the head of the deep catacomb of concourses. But let’s not mince words: Of those dozen, 10 are merely train wannabes, the Metrolink commuter lines whose short-haul passengers bear briefcases and laptop computers, and the weary, workaday faces that go with them.

Only two are what I would call real trains, what Agatha Christie or Norman Rockwell would call real trains: steel-on-steel streaks across the landscape, bearing names redolent as the names of the great ocean liners--the California Zephyr, the Coast Starlight, the Desert Wind, the Southwest Chief.

The real trains’ passengers, too, are different from the Metrolink riders--older, most of them, cheerfully expectant, and why not? The great American journey, the romance of the rails, awaits them down those concourses, steaming and pawing the ground to be gone.

You cannot claim to know this country if you have not, at least once, set foot in a train station like this one, walked its glossy tile floors, and heard the sound of your own footfalls carom off the echoing arches, nesting up there among six decades of footsteps before them.

This vast and gorgeous station opened on so promising a spring day in 1939 that neither its builders nor the half-million people who showed up for the party could have imagined that this would be the last of America’s temples to the mighty age of rail. First the car, and then the jet plane, would be the undoing of the train.

Stanley Bell first walked these concourses in 1944, home after 33 months on the blood-and-mud tour of the Pacific. Marilee Bell made the acquaintance of this place two years later, on her way to her mother’s funeral. He remembers everyone being in uniform; she remembers a huge, thronged dining room.

They live in Modesto, retired from the dairy business to take up the almond business, and now that winter has freed them from the tyranny of the crop, they’re off to Branson, Missouri, for some fun.

The Bells are the sort of people my colleague Kurt Streeter writes about in today’s paper, travelers who love trains and who are in no special hurry to get where they’re going, which is certainly good because for someone in a hurry, Amtrak is almost never the way to go.

For three decades, Amtrak has been sucking down red ink like free beer at a frat party, and now, as Streeter writes, Congress is contemplating reworking it, even ending it.

Reports of Amtrak’s death have been frequent, and obviously exaggerated. It has had more near-death moments than a Hitchcock heroine. But if Amtrak is pronounced dead, its end will be a question for the sleuths of film and fiction: Was it murder, or suicide?

After September 11, everything old was new again. Patriotism was in flower. Cops were heroes once more. And train travel suddenly looked pretty good.

Trains just feel American, so muscular and relentless. They’re Frank Capra and summer-camp send-offs and the coveted properties on the Monopoly board (as they were for the robber barons who got criminally rich on real railroads). (And as a practical consideration, you can’t crash a train into much of anything except another train.)

Then September 11 became October 11 and November 11, and people gave up on the trains again and went back to their cars and to the airports. Someone choosing to ride the rails found a Frankenstein-monster patchwork assemblage of public and private parts, bus lines and rail, passenger and freight tracks, full speed and full stop.

That left Amtrak’s loyal riders at its extremes: the commuters, like those on the short Eastern Seaboard and San Diego-L.A. lines, and travelers like the Bells. And even the Bells have their quibbles; Amtrak should hire them as a focus group. They’ve been held up for hours waiting for freight cars to pass, and then continued their journey on jarring freight tracks. Cotton and steel pipes really don’t mind rough rails, but it shakes the Bells down to their shoelaces.

California puts money into trains, and the Bells say you can tell the minute you leave California because the rails get rough. Five years ago, the Bells called their congressman, Gary Condit, to say they hoped the federal government would do something about the mess of it all.

Americans still love trains, at least the idea of trains. Congress loves trains too--it fended off President Reagan each of the eight times he tried to kill Amtrak--but by year’s end, Congress may decide it must kill the thing it loves.

High-speed rail could be the saving of train travel--competitive in speed and price--but even at warp speed, that prospect is 20 years off, and Amtrak, gobbling money as locomotives once gobbled coal, may not live long enough to be rescued in the last reel.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com