Great Escapes 2008: The Empire Builder

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.