Great Escapes 2008: The Empire Builder

Admittedly, the train ride from St. Paul to Milwaukee and Chicago is not the Orient Express. It has no mystique, no alluring aura of romance or intrigue. To my knowledge, no one has ever been murdered along this route (though I once saw a man have a heart attack), and the name of the train, the Empire Builder, hints at a grandiosity of experience that the trip doesn’t deliver.

And yet, perhaps because I’ve traveled it so much, this unassuming stretch of rail has become my favorite escape route from the Twin Cities, especially for three-day weekends to Milwaukee or Chicago. My in-laws live in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, you see, so once or twice a year for the past fifteen years our visit-the-rels routine has been for my wife and son to drive down a few days early, leaving me behind to “write” (i.e., grapple with some heinous home-improvement project to avoid writing), after which I take the train down to meet them.

It’s a beautiful arrangement, one that has allowed me to ride the train from St. Paul to Chicago in all types of weather, in every season of the year. I’ve traveled this route so many times I’ve developed an almost Proustian relationship with it—the experiences and memories of each trip layered in my consciousness like so many rings in an aging tree. While every trip has a similar rhythm, each trip is different and memorable in a way that travel by plane or car usually isn’t. Such distinctions are difficult to parse, but on my latest excursion south, in early March, I agreed to take some notes and try to explain what it is about the Empire Builder that I like so much.

Twin Cities to Milwaukee: $50-$110; Twin Cities to Chicago: $54-$119

For starters, the trip is the perfect length. The train departs Midway Station in St. Paul at 7:50 a.m. and deposits you in Milwaukee at 2:07 p.m, or Chicago at 3:55 p.m., in plenty of time for an evening out in either city. True, it occasionally runs late, especially eastbound from Seattle, but it’s the span of time—six to eight hours—that matters, not the precise arrival and departure. If your goal is to “get away,” six to eight hours is just enough time to feel as if you’ve “gotten” somewhere.

Of course, Twin Citians can get to Europe during that same time span, but travel by train is more about psychological distance than physical distance. When you watch 400 miles of countryside roll by, mile after mile, the brain registers it in a different way than it does in a plane going 500 miles an hour at 40,000 feet. It registers those 400 miles as actual distance traveled. The miles mean something; they’re tangible. You can feel them.

Psychologically, train travel is also infinitely more relaxing than travel by plane or car. Air travel is one little panic attack after another, from the moment you check your bags (will they make it?) to the security ordeal (will they stop me?, can they really stop a terrorist?) to the preflight disaster routine (why does my seat cushion need to float?) to the little voice in the back of your head that’s always wondering if this is going to be the flight that ends up on the evening news.

Driving feels safer, but isn’t, and highway travel requires that you stay alert to the possibility of death at any instant, especially if you close your eyes. By contrast, when you step on a train, your vacation begins as soon as you locate your seat. Your luggage is accessible, the driving is taken care of, the seats are as roomy as first-class seats on an airplane and are spaced far enough apart that a guy my height (six-foot-two) can stretch out, and you are free to close your eyes whenever you want—which, for me, is a very important part of the experience. Unlimited napping—priceless.

Indeed, one of the things I like best about train travel is that it disrupts the hurry-scurry rhythm of my ordinary life, forcing me to slow down and relax. On the Empire Builder to Chicago, there is enough time to eat a couple of leisurely meals in the dining car, read a few chapters of a book, get bored, take a nap or two, gaze out the window, watch the scenery roll by, and not feel guilty about any of it. In fact, one of the best things about train travel is that there is nothing else to do. Eat. Nap. Read. Talk. Play cards. Listen to music. That’s about it, unless you’re foolish enough to bring a laptop—in which case you can watch a movie or, though I strongly advise against it, work.

Let’s assume for the moment that you’re not foolish enough to bring the office with you. The first order of business on any trip east on Amtrak is breakfast. I heartily recommend taking advantage of every dining opportunity (that’s breakfast and lunch on the way to Chicago, dinner on the way back) because eating in the dining car is one of the things that makes train travel a more civilized, and civilizing, experience. The only way to get better food in a more socially inviting environment is to book an ocean cruise.

Cuisine is secondary to the overall experience, but on the Empire Builder the food happens to be surprisingly good—and reasonably priced. The most expensive thing on the breakfast menu is a three-egg omelet with potatoes or grits and a biscuit or croissant ($9). At lunch, a flame-broiled Angus-beef hamburger will set you back a mere $7.25, and they ratchet up the food quality at dinner, which features an aged flat-iron steak ($21), grilled salmon ($16.50), roast game hen ($13), wine for $5 a glass, and a dessert tray that any decent restaurant would be proud to offer. All the food is prepared onboard by trained chefs, and the wait staff treats diners as if it’s a special occasion, not just another meal on the train. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that finances should not be a deterrent.

Unfortunately, the dining protocol on Amtrak makes some people uncomfortable. Seating in the dining car is in the traditional railroad style, which dates back more than a century. Since seating is limited, every effort is made to fill each seat, which means that unless you are traveling in a party of four, you will be eating with someone you do not know.

The prospect of dining with a stranger terrifies some, I know, but it can also be the most interesting part of the trip. I once met a Neil Diamond impersonator who was studying to be a Buddhist priest. On another trip, I met a large woman, decked out in red, white, and blue, who was running for president because she was “feddup” with our “gummint,” and she was “gon’ do sumpin ’bout it.” She was crazy, but also sort of inspiring. On my last trip, I met a lady on her way to her fiftieth high school reunion, where, I was led to believe, she was going to continue an illicit affair she had been having with her high school sweetheart for half a century.

Dining with such folks and collecting their stories is part of the fun of train travel.

On my most recent trip, I met a doctor who let me know that there is a thriving jazz scene in Fargo, a health-services worker from Duluth who had forgotten why he ever moved there, and a retired schoolteacher from LaCrosse who told me more than I’ll ever want to know about the Order of the Eastern Star, an offshoot of the Freemasons, that, according to her, is the largest fraternal organization in the world that both men and women can join (a fact Googling seems to confirm)—though I’d never heard of it before. Exactly with whom one ends up dining is entirely the luck of the draw, of course, and I have run into a few social misfits over the years—but I’ve had enough unexpectedly interesting conversations in the Amtrak dining car to recommend taking the plunge to anyone.

After breakfast, I like to get a large cup of coffee and head to the lounge car, which has floor-to-ceiling windows and a glass roof so observers can take in the vast panoramas that are such an elemental part of train travel. I deliberately don’t bring anything else with me, because the scenery from Red Wing to Winona to LaCrosse, a two-hour portion of the trip, is the most spectacular part of the journey—and that’s enough.

Winter isn’t usually the best time of year to sightsee in southern Minnesota, but plenty of snow fell this year, and in early March there was still a foot on the ground, blanketing the landscape all the way to the horizon. In the fields, row after row of corn-stalk stumps poked through the snow in orderly ribbons and the bare trees etched their bleak beauty into the sky behind them. Lake Pepin was frozen solid, a vast slab of white with silver contrails of windswept ice shining in the sun. And everywhere I looked, it seemed, bald eagles were carving lazy circles in the sky. I saw four eagles flying over the Mississippi River near the train station in Red Wing, three more outside of Winona, and a few more here and there along the way, for a total of twelve bald eagle sightings in less than two hours. From my perch in the Amtrak lounge car, I also saw several wild turkeys, a number of deer, and a four-legged creature ambling across a frozen pond that looked an awful lot like a wolf—but, I’ll admit, was probably a dog.

Such sightings are an everyday occurrence for the Empire Builder staff, but are nonetheless exciting to those of us who spend our days in an office cube. While I’m looking out the window, I also like to entertain myself by listening in on the conversations of people around me. The writer in me says I’m doing it for “research,” but it’s really just old-fashioned eavesdropping. Still, one hears some amazing things. I jotted down these quotes from my latest trip:

“I don’t know where they found the body, but the head was gone. They had to identify it with, like, fingerprints.”

“Justin is a turd—a big, fat, ugly turd.”

“He keeps his coke stashed in an aquarium with a snapping turtle. He slides a board in when he wants to get it.”

“Zombie attacks always happen in little towns like these, then they move on to the city.”

“I’m an actor. That’s all I can do. It’s the only thing I can imagine doing with my life.”

“I’m the same way about music.”

“Righteous.”

“Yeah. And girls.”

People-watching is, of course, the other great sport for train enthusiasts. Trains seem to attract people who are slightly odd, or in some cases extremely odd—and from where I sit, the odder the better. In St. Paul, before even setting foot on the train, I had seen a woman with a lime green feather boa around her neck, a kid with skeleton-hand gloves, a guy dressed in full hunting camouflage, an old lady with an eye patch, and a family of five who were all wearing Brett Favre jerseys.

When the train arrived in St. Paul, the first passenger to disembark was a short guy with long gray hair and a red bandanna around his head who was shouting, “Ladies and gentlemen, direct from Los Angeles, put your hands together for Angelo Rossi and Jimi Hendrix!” When I got home, I Googled “Angelo Rossi” and discovered that someone by that name had actually opened for Jimi Hendrix in 1969, as part of an outfit called the Lucky Mud Traveling Medicine Show. I have no idea if that man in the station was Rossi himself, but having spent some time in San Francisco with people who never made it past 1969 in their minds, I can easily imagine that he might have been—and part of me wants to believe it was.

The Empire Builder makes seven stops between St. Paul and Milwaukee, but does not linger long at any of them. Lots of people board at La Crosse, it seems, and more often than not a Mennonite family or two is among them (they’re the ones, with the weird-bearded men, that everyone thinks are Amish). In March, a Mennonite family spanning four generations came aboard, including three small children dressed in black capes with hoods, as if they had just stepped out of a storybook. Boarding right behind them was a kid with dreadlocks wearing headphones the size of baseballs and torn jeans around his ankles. I could practically feel the Mennonites’ faith grow stronger. Heck, my faith in them did an arm-curl or two.

After a brief stop at Wisconsin Dells, the vistas open up and, candidly, there isn’t much to see outside except for vast tracts of farmland that can quite literally be dull as dirt or, when the corn and soybeans are up, reassuringly beautiful in their agricultural symmetry. It is during this portion of the trip that I usually opt for a snooze.

In Milwaukee, the train stops long enough for smokers to sneak a butt or two, and regular travelers along this route will be pleased to know that the new Amtrak station in Milwaukee is now officially open. Like seemingly every new building in Milwaukee these days, it is Calatrava white and gleams with a sanitary sheen the old 1960s depot couldn’t have achieved if you dipped it in bleach and plated it with chrome. The new station is a definite improvement, but the nostalgia is gone; it might as well be an airport lobby.

At the great Greek temple that is Chicago Union Station, the Empire Builder turns around and heads back from whence it came, continuing past the Twin Cities to Seattle and Portland, following nearly the same route of the Great Northern Railroad’s legendary Empire Builder, the moniker coined in 1929 to honor St. Paul’s own railroad magnate, James J. Hill, whose holdings controlled two of the three great railroads that ran between the Twin Cities and the Pacific Northwest.

The return trip departs from Chicago at 2:15 p.m. every day and deposits you back in the Twin Cities at 10:31 p.m., more or less, just in time for bed. I rarely take the train back from Chicago, but in March I did, and I saw a curious sight. Just outside of St. Paul, we stopped to let a freight train pass. This is common and isn’t usually worth noticing, but this time everyone in our car began gravitating to the windows on the right side of the train. Loaded on flatbeds and passing ever so slowly in the shadows outside were various military vehicles—jeeps and trucks mostly—along with a few tanks and various parts of weapons designed to shoot large, deadly objects a long way, including several anti-aircraft turrets and the disembodied barrels of a few guns big enough to shoot missiles the size of a beagle.

For all I know, such shipments occur all the time. But to all of us on the train that night, it was a reminder that we do not live in a world where everyone is free to travel and nap and make small talk for want of anything more urgent to do. Even the most innocuous of trips on the Empire Builder is a privilege—one that Twin Citians should never take for granted. Take it for a weekend instead.