Noteworthy Railyards of Minneapolis and Saint Paul Bike Tour, next Thursday

Railroad siding in Northeast Minneapolis.

Hey! It's been a while since the last bike tour, around about two years. (By funny coincidence, I now have a two-year-old.) AS you might imagine, this one has been cooking in my mind of ra while. We're going to bike around and look at some past and present rail yards, ,certainly a negative / blank space in many people's imaginations of the city. And yet rail yards are all around us, and there used to be twice as many, huge swathes of urban land given over to nothing but railroad tracks and 24/7 industrial activity. They're quite interesting and with the help of a local railroad expert, I'll do my best to explain what they are, how they work, and how they've defined the urban geography of Minneapolis and St. Paul. 

You'll learn fun things, such as the existence of "East Minneapolis" (a real thing) and what "humping" really is... I hope to see you there!

[Facebook invite here.]

Who: Anyone who wants to ride bikes and learn about history
What: 2+ hour, 15-mile relaxing bike ride around St. Paul and Minneapolis
When: Thursday, June 29th, leaving at 7pm
Where: We will meet at Insight Brewing and end at Bang Brewing (about a mile away)
Why: Because some of them are still there, and trains are cool

Railyard in Saint Paul.

Railyard artwork by Aydin Büyüktas.

Obscure Local History #7: Saint Paul Boasting the Finest Trains in the World, c. 1906

[St. Paul Union Depot c. 1910. It burned down soon afterward.]

Here's a quote from turn-of-the-century railroad industry booster magazine, Railroad Gazette, describing St. Paul's passenger rail service at the Union Depot in 1906, around the peak of its powers:

One of the most striking illustrations of the rapid development of the railroads of the Northwest is that to be seen any night by a visit to Union Depot, at St. Paul, Minn., where, standing side by side, may be found four of the finest trains in the world, each run by a separate railroad, each bound for the same destination and, all scheduled to be started at nearly the same time. At no other place in the U.S. (or the world) can such a sight be seen, and to the railroad man it is really inspiring. The cars of these trains are all of the latest design and embody all the best features; and they are hauled by the fastest and most powerful passenger locomotives. [...] The superiority of the western service is clearly apparent. 

[Railroad Gazette, 1906.]

Presumably the trains described are the Hiawatha, Zephyr, 400, and Great Western (?), all going to Chicago. This quote is from a Union Pacific historical preservation study.

Document Dump #2: Gentile Yarusso's 1964 Memoir of Swede Hollow and Payne Avenue

[Swede Hollow c. 1910.]

Here's one from my archive, that I first found in the Arlington Hills library. It's a short, compelling memoir of growing up in Swede Hollow by Gentile Yarusso, of Yarusso's Italian Restaurant of Statue of Liberty fame.

Here's my favorite part, about the old railroad line that went up through the Hollow and the experience of those loud trains rattling along next to the homes of Saint Pauls' most famous informal community:

The giant locomotives would come puffing put he track, their headlights glowing like the eyes of a serpent, winding around the curves of the Hollow. what noise, what thunder a the engines passed us! Cinders and sparks fell all around us, on our heads, on our shoulders. Windows in the homes would rattle. Mothers would call for their children. Some of the smaller kids would become rightened and start to cry. Fathers would bet cursing the whole spectacle in general. After the freight train was out of sight, we would slowly walk back home. Stillness would settle over the Hollow. Occasionally one might hear the barking of a dog.

Read the whole thing if you are interested in more memories of old Saint Paul.

Notes from the Empire Builder IV

[See also: Notes from the Empire Builder I, II, and III.]

Taking Amtrak is like a bad relationship. Imagine loving someone who ignores you, and yet you love them deeply. The sound of their voice or the way they laugh make you forget the time of day. You cannot stop thinking about them, doing things for them, going to their house if they need anything, cleaning up after them. You're whipped.

Each time you return, it's the same: they treat you like shit. Your lover barely acknowledges you, never shows up when they say they will, rarely fulfills a promise, keeps you waiting for hours without explanation, offers only rudimentary efforts to apologize or win back your good graces. Your lover mails it in, barely a kind word, no reciprocation.

"I was busy," they say, hardly making eye contact.

"I got stuck. I was held up."

They give you the look that says, "I'm having a bad day," only it's like this every day: the flat voice, hanging head. They know they'll do it again tomorrow, they'll commit the same slights, fail you again.

So it goes on for a long time. After each fresh disappointment, you vow never again to repeat the mistakes of the past.

"I'm over this," you say. "I am moving on, for my own good. I respect myself too much to put up with this shit any more."

You vow to yourself, "never again."

Your friends and your family support you. They've seen you two together, the look in your eyes after a long weekend. They've been astonished by the stories. No person in their right mind should suffer constant neglect and abandonment. And you listen to them, leave your love behind. It was a stage in your life, you say, not to regret, but to learn from. Surely, you're a better person now.

But you can't quit. Months pass, maybe years, but once in a while, and more so all the time, your thoughts return to your love. You overhear a conversation, someone mentions their name, and it shoots you into a week of fantasy and remembering. What are they doing now? Where are they? What do they look like? Do they still sound the same, move with the same distinct rhythm? Is the feeling of being together still there?

You search your mind for images, retelling stories from years ago. That one time when a song broke out, when you got drunk, or where you noticed something surprising. You find yourself mentioning your lover in random conversations, bicycling places where you met, telling stories about those days to friends. There's no stopping it. You draw closer, and soon you'll find yourself trying again, despite it all.

Everyone else knows it, too. Your friends see as clearly as a sunset the way your eyes change when you talk about them, the way you cannot help but repeat yourself, bringing up their name.

You book another ticket. This time it will be better.



And sure enough, like broken clockwork, they are late again. They leave you waiting for hours, hopeless, sad, resigned, and familiar. You stand passive, staring out the window because you know what to do.

They finally arrive, mumble something in your direction, look away when you approach. But you're together again, and for a while it feels good to speed through a tunnel of green trees, blur surrounding the train as the sunlight flickers through the overhead leaves. There's an occasional glimpse of the river over your shoulder. Three crows fend off a hawk in midair, while a refinery flares gas from a rusty tower.

I wonder what do the Amish do for health care?  Later I Google it, and of course the answer is complicated.

In the lounge car, a Spanish-speaking couple plays dominoes. The white tiles clack on the vinyl tables mixing with the conversation, the whirr of the fans blowing air from the ceiling, the low, driving beat of the wheels below. In the dark lower level, old pale people sit in a dim room, comfortable and unsmiling, awaiting fates.

When the train departs so late that you leave when you're supposed to arrive, does that mean you've traveled back in time, or what?

Somehow two boxes of checkers appear on the lounge car tables. These are surely the cheapest possible versions of the game, made from the thinnest cardboard and the flimsiest red and black plastic, checkers thin as thumbnails. Compared to the tactile dominoes, the checkers make me sad. A game is not just an abstract concept, but a physical thing. Its appeal is not simply in the rules of engagement, but found in the visceral feelings it creates, the sound the checker makes when it strikes a think board, the feel between your fingers. To play checkers on a piece of paper with tiddly-wink is not to play checkers at all, and nobody does.

During the trip down the river, seven eagles perch on trees, soaring along the bluff line. Three pelicans fly low along the river pools.

Mounted hilariously on the wall in the café: the menu of sandwiches, snacks, and beverages. It's a large menu, but well over half of the things on it are loosely crossed out with a Sharpie. On the train, you're lucky if you get a small doughy microwaved cheese pizza and a can of pop. I'm lucky to get a bottle of decent pale ale and white wine. On Amtrak, be thankful when you get anything at all.

A father in cargo shorts stares out the window for an hour, resting his against the grey plastic side of the train car while his kid learns to read out loud, working his way through his book. Every once in a while, dad corrects his spelling, and despite the unredeemable dysfunction, I am hopeful. Any science will tell you that air travel is a terrible practice, killing species and wiping out the world's poor, and that we need other ways to get around. Somehow this underfunded, impassive, arbitrary, intentionally broken train strikes me as a realistic vision for an American future. Here on the Empire Builder, people resign themselves to a collective struggle, a rudimentary forward movement. Here on the Empire Builder, everyone is equal in adversity, committed to making progress despite the absurd broken promises ringing in the air overhead.




The voice of a resigned conductor blares from the overhead speaker, offering advice to people connecting to trains in Chicago.  Such an announcement on a train that's  six hours late train is a farce.

"More than likely you'll probably miss your train. I will pass information on to you shortly."

People's eyes glaze. A woman begins to agitate.

"I have information from Chicago," he says, as if Chicago is where information is found.

I can't help but daydream of Empire Builder meant to work well. What if the contents of the recycle bins in far the ends of each car were actually recycled? What if people actually threw their cans and bottles in them? Imagine if the train ran on time, and people could simply show up and get on or off when they were supposed to. Imagine if the interior was clean, and the food was good.

My favorite part of the trip is the thirty-mile stretch of the Mississippi from Winona to La Crosse, where the river opens into a wide valley in the driftless. This is the part of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota that was not scraped flat by glaciers tens of thousands of years ago, where the hills still roll like ships in a storm. Here in the driftless valley, Mississippi islands rise into peaks like circus tents. Everything green or grey or blue, water and flying birds. Flocks. Clusters. Murders. Conclaves.

Confirmed: some Amish people do use Ziploc bags.

A 67-year-old lady starts telling a woman she just met, who is half her age and wearing a yellow scarf over her head, about something called "functional medicine". She's been watching an video seminar on her laptop for a few hours, and seems glad to share her new knowledge. Functional medicine is the belief that everything in the body is connected, but especially the gut. She begins describing "energy work" to the young woman with the scarf and the Harry Potter tattoo on the other. She herself is headed to a family reunion on an island off Massachusetts, and is worried for some reason about attending the marshmallow roasting event on the first night. They hit it off immediately and talk past La Crosse.

"Zinc can actually turn your hair back to a normal color," the older woman states.

"Oh, I've heard some great things about zinc over the past decade," the young woman replies.

I imagine the Amish could share some of these tips about medicine.

Another question. Which is more intelligible: the German-Dutch spoken by the Amish, or the ostensible English-language announcements that come out of the  Amtrak loudspeaker? The dialects have much in common.

The train is crowded, and the cafe car is full. One guy with a beer approaches  another guy with a beer.

"Is someone sitting here?" asks the guy with the IPA.

"Nope, it's all yours," replies the other with the Corona.

"Cheers," and they clink, and the next thing you know the guy from West Virginia who works for the Marine Corps is explaining the intricacies of facial recognition software algorithms to the other guy as Wisconsin suburbs speed past the window, as if he could understand them.

Cut to a discussion about the definition of collusion vs. the definition of conspiracy.

"I think Trump is just a fucking dumbass who took whatever information he could get," says the one guy, to the irritation of the other.

There are three kinds of Amtrak conductor announcements: the mumble, the exasperated shout, and the dramatic performance. The conductor today is a maestro of the latter. He turns the word "Columbus" into a five-syllabus song as complex as a bird call. He's a carnival barker for Wisconsin cities. He repeats it seven times during one announcement -- Coooollummmmbuuuusssss! -- making out with the intercom somewhere on the train. He's the kind of Amtrak conductor that loves wearing the special hat. I imagine how many more stops there are along the way, whether each announcement will reach the same highs and lows, whether he builds to a crescendo somewhere in Montana as the train scales the Rockies. A true believer, he has a ticket-punching-tool holster on his belt, embossed with his initials.
 

There might have been a Pokemon Go festival somewhere in Minneapolis, as there is a lot of discussion of Pokemon Go and the evolution of species.

When the train is full, as it is today, it contains an unstoppable energy. There's the constant shifting of voices, the back and forth movement of people up and down the aisles. They all do the "Amtrak shuffle", the reciprocal leaning and shifting required for two bodies to pass each other in the 2' wide walkway. This energy comes out of from the diverse mix, hundreds of strangers sharing a space for a time, the selfish seat hogs, the bedraggled parents, the old folks in stupors, the Mennonite families, the hipsters.

One of the biggest men I've ever seen barely fits on two adjacent seats in the lounge car. He has a black shirt, black shorts, black hair in a ponytail, and a backwards Pittsburgh Steelers hat. He too is into Pokemon go, and chats with the man next to him about video games all the way from Milwaukee to Tomah.

The porter working with the sleeper car passengers, an African-American man, seems the most determined of the Empire Builder's crew. He moves with more  purpose than the others, as he reminds a pair of travelers that if they need anything, they can press the call button. I wonder if he knows about the time-honored, epic history of black porters in America, how they used this demeaning, tiring job as a lever of influence all through the 20th century, how they used a variety of subtle means to achieve middle-class status, somehow, despite all odds, social barriers, and obstacles. I assume he knows all this. I assume he carries with him a sense of ownership over the profession, a history of how "red caps" changed the country using service as a tool for progress.

A guy is really desperate to smoke his blunt, and asks the conductor for the next stop where he can smoke. "

"Winona" replies the crewman.  "you're not the only one, I've got people chewing my butt on here," and they both laugh.

Just when you think you've seen every possible iteration of an American Flag garment, along comes a new one.

It's dark when the train rolls into Saint Paul. This time, it's only a half hour late. Hope springs eternal.

Another Dive Down as Kelly's Depot Bar Departs the Station

I have a little ode to Kelly's today at City Pages. RIP Kelly's. I will miss you and your coney dogs. Get there before the end of April and soak in the atmosphere one last time.

The other shoe finally dropped. The rumors came true. 

Anyway, downtown St. Paul doesn't have a lot of dive bar credibility in the the first place. Most of the old haunts and blue-collar joints have been skyscraper'd, paved, or gentrified, a trend that's been going on well over 70 years. (Of course, downtown Minneapolis is worse; Google "Gateway District" if you don't believe me.)

Check out the story here.

What I Gleaned From Two Hours Under Lexington Parkway by the Railroad Tracks

I was driving my partner’s car the other day, a twelve-year-old Audi station wagon, when the engine stopped running. I was halfway through the onramp that (illegally) connects 35E to Ayd Mill Road, Saint Paul’s very own death star trench, and as the engine stopped I quickly realized that the car’s inertia was all it had going for it. As soon as I could, I pulled over to the right, and the car stopped at the side of the curving onramp connecting Ayd Mill Road to Jefferson Avenue.

I turned the key, and the engine turned over but nothing happened.

It would not re-start. I was stuck in the Audi next to the metal guardrail at the edge of the city’s worst and most forlorn half-assed-freeway.

[The infamous AMR onramps.]

This wasn’t my first automotive rodeo, and I made the necessary phone calls, one to my partner (who owns the car), one to the person that I was supped to meet with over in Minneapolis, and one to the State Farm insurance hotline.

Twenty minutes later the insurance people called back having scheduled a tow truck.

“It’ll be 105 minutes,” said the woman Kathy, calling from somewhere in Tennessee.

“Okay,” I resigned.

And there I was, spending time by the onramp to my least favorite piece of city-owned infrastructure for two hours on a Friday. I did not have high hopes for the rest of my afternoon.

But eventually I resolved to make the best of it. The car was in a relatively safe place, compared to say the middle of a demolition derby or the right lane of Interstate 494.

After sitting for a minute or two in the hot sun listening the constant sound of cars speeding by the doorway, only 20’ to my left, each passing truck subtly shaking the car on its suspension, I decided to act.

I spotted a gap in the incoming car traffic, and hopped out of the door, over the guard rail, and ventured through the weeds over the side of Ayd Mill Road.

There was a a massive bridge above me, the abutments for the Lexington Parkway ridge that stretched high over the railroad tracks and the Ayd Mill trench. I climbed down the side and found a shady spot under the bridge.

It turned out I was not alone.

The first of my encounters that afternoon was a classic Midwestern scene. There was a dude down there with me under the bridge, a white kid with curly black hair in Chuck Taylors and a ratty brown teeshirt.

He looked about twenty, he seemed like a slacker of the skateboard slash stoner variety, and for the ten minutes we spent together under the Lexington Parkway bridge, he completely ignored me. There wasn't one glance in my direction, not a single hint of eye contact, and most definitely no utterance of acknowledgement that, oh hey, there’s another person ten feet away from you crouched under the same random railroad bridge in the middle of nowhere.

Instead, he was glued to his phone, having a low-slung conversation with someone about how shitty the world was.

“I gotta get the next ticket out of here,” I heard him say.

Eventually he wandered off, hopped over the train tracks and headed off into the ditch weeds.

Meanwhile, I sat on a lumpy rock in the shade, perched under shade the like a trout in August, willfully protected from the stream of speeding cars by the wall of 10-foot concrete.

More time passed, the sounds of the cars droned on behind me, and I began looking at the infrastructure more closely.

The bridge was huge, and dark steel beams stretched overhead. The walls loomed massively. The set of train tracks curved below through the trench, to the north alongside the divided four-lane Ayd Mill Road "highway" and to the south through a valley alongside a bare dirt road and footpath. The walls of the bridge were marked by some basic graffiti, nothing fancy or artistic.

Having two hours to kill, I wandered around. I hopped over the tracks and walked around the road alongside for a few minutes. Luckily I had my headphones and a fully charged phone, and started listening to my podcast on the history of Rome.

About halfway through the short reign of Valerian, I looked up just in time to see a ragged brown fox run by.

I couldn’t get a photo, he was too quick, trotting down the path, but his fur was as ratty as I’ve ever seen on anything other than a rat. Maybe it was molting season, or maybe the life of an Ayd Mill fox wasn’t that great to begin with. I imagined it eating Mac-Groveland mice or Grand Old Day trash, dodging Parkway cars, lingering by the alleyways between the forgotten carriage houses.

The ragged brown fox jumped over the lazy tracks and was gone before I could really appreciate it. I soon returned to my Ayd Mill doldrum.

For some reason the weeds or trees along the ravine called out to my purgatorial soul, and wandered farther down the path I found something.  Down the green path and ump the slope sat a solar powered utility box. It was marked with the logo of the Capital Region Watershed District, and I still wonder what it was doing in the glen.

Further along and running up the bluff, the foliage thickened and I could almost see the edges of people’s yards. Rows of homes push up against the Ayd Mill trench and I imagine the area is think with wild turkeys, deer, and other urban wildlife.

With its rivers, creek beds, bluffs, and ravines, Saint Paul has many of these rough fringes. These untamed contours give the city texture, while remaining at the very edges of our attention as we speed over or around them. How odd to spend hours in the midst of these largely forgotten woods in the cracks of the city.

Not wanting to be truly enveloped of to have my clothes covered in burrs, I turned back to the comforts of my lonely bridge.

I don’t know how many minutes had passed when I saw a truck approaching from the north, trundling slowly toward me along the dirt utility road next to the tracks.

“Oh shit,” I thought, “railroad workers,” and I tried my best to look not homeless.

As the truck got closer, I recognized the Saint Paul Public Works logo on its side and relaxed. As it came to the bridge, I waved half-heartedly, and one of the two guys inside returned a mild salute. Funnily, the truck kept moving, passing right by under the bridge before making a U-turn as the dirt road came to an end.

“What are they up to,” I wondered as the truck came to a stop at the far side of the bridge. But then the two men hopped out and grabbed plastic buckets, long poles, and went to work painting the side of the bridge.

They seemed fairly bored about it all, and I came up to them. “My car broke down,” I said.

“Oh yeah, I saw that,” said one guy as he rolled beige paint onto the side of the underpass.

Within a minute or two, the large black graffiti was covered.

“How often you come down here and paint this?” I asked him.

“Oh every couple of weeks we make a run down here,” he replied, “it doesn’t take too long.”

At that moment, a train appeared from the south, the headlight of a red Canada Pacific locomotive. And all of a sudden, the solitary bridge was full of activity, two men with paint rollers, an idling truck, a waving engineer atop a pair of massive diesel engines pulling a small row of train cars up the short line.

Within a minute though, after the truck and the train had left, it was quiet again.

A molting brown fox trotted in the abandoned valley over the lazy inattentive blogger.

Ten minutes after the painting crew departed, I called my railroad buddy. He's one of the guys I know that seem to know everything about railroads.

”Yeah, there are four trains a day there,” he told me. “Maybe not every day, but most days. CP uses the track to run from one yard to another, probably just empty cars they’re moving around. They don’t have to take that route, there are other options. Then there’s the Twin City and Western that runs down it too, they don’t have to take that route either.”

He had a lot more to say, too, about which yard went where, which customers might be served by it, and how the line might be useful in the future as offers the one of the most direct routes between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. I don’t remember all the details.

I wandered the other direction along the dirt road. My buddy had said it’s certainly owned by the railroad, but like most railroad property it had signs of other life. There was a path leading up the slope toward Lexington, a trace of dirt worn down up to the sidewalk. I clambered up it and found myself along the sidewalks in between the neighborhoods on either side of the bridge. A woman walked by on the far side of the road, impassive behind a pair of sunglasses, ignoring a guy who appeared weirdly from nowhere. How many folks wander down here, up and down from the neighborhoods into the old rail trench?

I quickly returned down into the uncivilized shade of bridge, and gazed at the old walls and the new walls. A tall steel lattice tower was perched on one side of the old stone buttress holding up some power lines. How many people rely on this tower, and how many people notice it?

Soon afterward, I spotted two people in the distance, coming along the trench to the south in the wooded area between the freeways. They were loosely dressed, wandering slowly alongside the rocks next to the curving railroad tracks. Every once in a while one would stop and bend over, seemingly trying to get a better look at the ground. I guessed they were looking for agates, but I never found out because they kept their distance and eventually disappeared back into the green. 

Forty-five minutes or so passed before a maroon TC&W locomotive came down the tracks going the other direction. It was a short train, maybe a dozen cars, and it quickly disappeared on its way toward the river.



A laggard raggy fox skipped down the dirt road by the tracks in the sunshine.

For another hour, the sun beat down on the old mill valley and the fresh green leaves of the cottonwoods. The creek had long been buried underground, and these days the railroad tracks were mostly empty. I stood in the shade by the crumbling road I hate the most as the dull roar of the cars droned, listening to the fall of Rome until the tow truck driver pulled up. He had a Russian or Ukranian accent, had driven all the way from Ham Lake, and was nothing if not efficient.

Later, it turned out the car was just out of gas. A string had somehow become wedged in the gas tank, messing with the fuel gauge. The total bill was $18.42, plus whatever two hours spent under the Lexington Parkway bridge is worth to you.

Notes from the Empire Builder III

[See also, Notes from the Empire Builder I and II.]

Once again I am riding the Empire Builder, but the most beautiful part of the trip, where the train skirts the wide Mississippi through Southeastern Minnesota, falls in October in the dark of night. From time to time, the wide dark river reflects a light or two, and a bridge or a dam will illuminate its width, and I wish I could see it. Is it worse to know it’s out there, to sense it lurking below the rails reflecting the  moon? I prefer Springtime sunsets, yet change is the nature of seasons.

I hadn’t taken the train in a few years, and walking to the bus stop early in the morning felt strange. The familiar land beneath my feet, the bluff overlooking downtown and the river, I know its history, can trace its paths and describe its detailed geology. But soon I would be far from these roots, pushing East into the unknown, vertiginous.

I had forgotten the way the train departs with nary a nudge, no announcement, just a silent imperceptible moment and, seconds later, realization. Its beginning, an asymptotic distinction impossible to notice like the line between two breaths. Instead the trip begins with the awareness that you are already moving. The shifting perspective of the station pillar. The gradual acceleration to an invisible vanishing point. The promise of horizons.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with my mother, and she asked, “Why do you take the train? Is it because of environmentalism? Or because you like it? Or because you have time or because it’s cheap?”

“Yes,” I said. It’s all true.

Really I just like it, but there’s that other stuff, too. An airplane is fast but psychologically oppressive, and it is no exaggeration to say that flight is irreconcilably destroying some of the planet’s diverse life. I try to avoid it, and luckily my work allows me this privilege.

But also I just like the train. It’s relaxing next to cars or airplanes in the way that “magic fingers” massage mattresses in cheap hotels are relaxing. You can stretch out and walk back and forth along a linear path approximately 12’ wide. What else besides a New Orleans shotgun house is this linear? And for a geographer, rail travel offers a special fascination. Rail lines are deeply linked to the historic growth of Industrial America. The first railroad reached Saint Paul sometime in the early 1860s, and for the next hundred years it was the primary way that people traveled to and from my home. Before that, the river; afterward, cars and planes.

[The Hiawatha lounge car in Minneapolis, 1948.]

A century of transportation dominance is nothing to sneeze at, and if you learn about railroads and the economic growth of the Midwest, the geography of the railroad makes complete sense. For a hundred years it would have been inconceivable to go to Boston without first going to Chicago, and indeed that’s exactly what I’m doing. Chicago is on the way, as is Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and a great many more in-between towns. All of them are all still American places where people live, even places like Gary, Indiana and Springfield, Massachusetts, places that you would never fly to. What a large complex country!

Unlike the Empire Builder, the train from Chicago to Boston has on-board wi-fi, a welcome improvement since my last trip. So I looked it up, and it turns out that, apart from a tiny section near Southside Chicago, the Amtrak follows exactly the route of the original “Lakeshore Limited”, a famous train that began running in the 19th century. I spend some time reading railroad history and daydreaming about what rail travel was like in the past.

The most famous American train, the “20th Century Limited”, also ran this route, making just a few stops along the way. (Not even Cleveland!) The train was designed and marketed for rich business travelers, and its luxuries were famous; it’s where the term “red carpet” comes from. It’s impossible not to imagine the luxury and sigh, the 13 sleeper cars, the elaborate meals, the country’s elite mingling and roaring like a bullet through the night. It was also faster, of course, making the trip in less than 17 hours (versus 20 or so today). But I looked it up, and in today’s dollars the $50 one-way rail ticket amounts to more than $700.

All of a sudden my $100 ticket and crappy microwave pizza doesn’t seem so bad. On today’s Lakeshore Limited there is no pretense of luxury, at least if you’re traveling coach. In fact, whatever the opposite of luxury is, that’s what Amtrak provides.

At some point I find myself drinking a $5 Budweiser, and I’m disappointed that, even on the train, a can of Belgian-owned Budweiser reads “America, land of the free." Later, departing the café car, the America can is in my hand as I look for the recycling bin, the café attendant says “the garbage is right over there.”

For a second I contemplated throwing the can in the regular trash. It’s something I haven’t done in years, and something that my father could never do, even if he tried. I imagine his hand would become physically incapable of obeying their commanding neurons, like the gloved hand of Doctor Strangelove but for recycling instead of nuclear war. Such is the visceral connection between recycling cans and our quasi-environmental psyche.

These little failures expose the vacuum of utopia. Think of the hundreds of hippies taking the train for extensively environmental reasons, and forced to throw aluminum in the trash, the ultimate torture. You’d think some part of Amtrak would be in sync with these translated ideals, but this would underestimate the totalistic extent of the right-wing hatred of rail. (Wisconsin is Scott Walker territory, after all, and I briefly imagine an alternate reality where he had embraced Obama’s railroad, and Wisconsin had set the national standard for modern high-speed railroad transportation.)

Thanks to the right, today’s Amtrak seems without a shred of marketing savvy. The difference between the US rail experience and that of European railroads, which (for all their flaws) seem to be a source of some national pride, is immense. I picture Amtrak as a sink of governmental self-loathing, the cesspool to which bathtub conservatives can point to make the case that government itself is the problem, that collective enterprise is doomed. This train is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I throw my empty America can in the regular trash bin.

[The Adjustable Clamp Company in Chicago's West Side.]

Late at night, an Amish man walks by. I can’t get over looking at Amish people — the hair, the clothing, the language, the gender and family relationships. Much like the Erie Canal or Dakota people or an old brick building in a Northern Indiana town, they persist in the complexity of the present day.

Listening to Coltrane on a train is an exhilarating experience and I cannot really describe the intersectional harmony. But really listening to anything on the train is worthwhile. Fats Domino, Chopin Nocturnes (at night, of course), Bon Iver, Miles Davis, Koerner, Ray and Glover, Hüsker Dü, and even Celtic music. It all works.

Do the Amish know about jazz?

Riding the train you find yourself rocking back and forth whether you want to or not, something about the way that twin rails sit atop wooden ties, the gravity of curving lines. Because of the rocking, there is a trance-like quality, rails rocking you back and forth, as if your body is dances on its own, mindless.

Noted: the thin steel beams they use to lock up the liquor cabinet each night at 11:30 on the Lakeshore Limited lounge car are significant pieces of metal. I’m sure this was a trial-and-error process.

And yet, returning to history, I am aware of how the railroad polluted the landscape one hundred and fifty years prior! The railroad on which I am traveling destroyed the sacred caves of the Dakota people, not two miles from where I live, dynamited for industrial expansion. This very act which I  now enjoy, and nay declare to be the vanguard of American sustainability, was, along with slavery, one of the cardinal sins of the continent. From these trains, whites with guns exterminated bison.

[Mount Greylock in Pittsfield, MA.]

It's a fact that the best time to travel through Northern Indiana is the absolute middle of the night. What could you possibly want to see?

Because it’s all but impossible to sleep on the coach seats if you share them with another, I stay awake as long as possible. By the time we reach Cleveland, I might be the only one awake apart from the conductors, mostly failing to look busy.

As expected, Amtrak wireless is whimsical, almost there for a hot second in the middle of the night. But, no. No. A teasing wisp, the most ephemeral thing I have encountered outside of Civil War ghosts.

The next day I find myself along the far Eastern shore of Lake Erie eavesdropping on a conversation between retired conservative Midwesterners. One, a beleaguered man who hasn’t been on a train since he was 5 years old, is quite disappointed. Talking with him are a couple with a lot of Amtrak experience, trying in vain to assuage his gripes.

“After 42 years, I decided to retire,” says the disgruntled man

“Well, I did 47 years myself,” replies the other, a round slightly more gruntled chap with glasses and a blue shirt buoyed by suspenders. His bottom barely fits in the booth.

“Wow, nobody does that anymore,” says the first. You can tell this is a favorite topic. “Kids today, 5 or 6 years and they’re off to the new thing.”

“So what did you do?" asks the round man.

So far the conversation is a typical rustbelt cliché, Trump coming up alongside head shaking about the state of the world. I prepare myself for some classic tirades about Obama or NAFTA or something.

But then the bombshell…

“I worked for a company that made assembly line robots,” said the cranky retiree.

“Oh really, my nephew does that too,” replied the round man.

The irony of it! The old timers muttering about the postlapsarian rustbelt, yet the classic manufacturing job in this conversation was, not an actual product, but the creation of assembly line robots. A career built on automation itself, robot manufacturing, the one job that puts factory workers out of work more than any other.

They two men agree on two facts: politics is messed up, and assembly line robots are a highly competitive growth industry.

Later the cranky one uses the term “Chinaman” without irony and, at some point, the conductor joins the conversation.

“Did your robots paint the whole cars?”

“Oh yeah. We had a whole division dedicated to GM,” he replies.

When Trump complains that manufacturing jobs are leaving the rustbelt, is he really talking about automation robot factories? I wonder, can they build robots that build robots? (Probably not.)

We pass through Erie, Pennsylvania and the downtown looks like the site of a zombie apocalypse, ramshackle Western Pennsylvania homes rolling by the window, Lake Erie in the background.

The timing for the Mississippi River didn’t work out, but later that evening, the sunset is timed perfectly to catch peak fall colors in the Western Massachusetts mountains. My cheek presses to the window as the train winds along the Mohawk River through the Berkshires.

I went to college near here, and I remember losing my mind that first October seeing the bright red maple leaves falling everywhere on the grass, the soft-focus mountains over saturated and impossibly beautiful. I would pick up the brightest and biggest maples and bring them back to my dorm, tying their stems with string and hanging them from windows. Twenty years later and these are the same leaves.

I should note that the occupational standards on the stretch of train from Boston to Albany are particularly lax, even for Amtrak employees. Hardly anyone leaves their seat, and the café attendant twiddles his thumbs most of the time, reading a copy of Ebony Magazine twice through. He and the equally bored conductors are conducting a hilarious trialogue right out of a Tarantino movie.

“No matter what I do I can’t gain weight. I’m going to put on six pounds. I’m going to do it,” says the short thin one.

“You need steroids,” replies the larger.

“No steroids.”

"You need steroids. You can’t do it, not with your metabolism. You need ‘em, or that powda. It puts the weight.”

“No steroids. I’m gonna work out. I’m gonna put on six pounds. I’m 178 and I’m gonna get to 184. When you see me you’ll say, there’s a guy who has some mass.”

“Hell you can have some of my weight,” chimes in the third guy with the magazine. “I’m trying to take off twenty.”

This goes on for a half-hour until someone somehow is vaguely summoned.

A radio squawks: NO DEFECTS NO DEFECTS AXLE ZERO CSX END OF TRANSMISSION

[A family having an Amtrak Picnic with champagne and tablecloth.]

Later that night, another Amtrak employee ruins my good mood. He had gotten on in Buffalo, and is wearing a bright red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. At first I am hoping that it’s meant ironically, as in “Make American Trains Great Again” or something.

But no. He’s sits down at a café table with a couple in the lounge car, a black man and a white woman, to talk Trump.

“I don’t wanna breathe bat shit and especially Mexican bat shit, because Mexicans they’re filthy people … Ha! I’m joking around, but still. I don’t trust those Canucks either!”

He goes on about politics today and how both parties are terrible, and how that makes Trump OK. Keep in mind, this is a guy wearing an Amtrak badge who works for Amtrak, so, irony aside, I guess he’s making a fair point.

At some point he takes a deep dive into US political history — “Well, Nixon took the high road” (!) — and the black man across the table from him remains nonplussed.

“It makes you wonder on some of this stuff,” he rambles. “It kinda goes to the politics you have now, because it’s just too bad. Things get better. The economy is going up. The dollar is strong, but they’re saying its inflated. So that’s where this place might be, like a house of cards. So they’re saying, I don’t want to be a conspiracy guy, but this is what’s really going on ….”

When I took this train a few years ago, one of the conductor was wearing an IWW hat, so I guess this makes up for it.


I killed my layover in a Panera Bread next to the Sears tower as wind ripped rain along its massive black facade. In downtown Chicago, they have redesigned the store so that you never have to encounter or speak with another person, and can order your soup and coffee using an iPad and round numbered discs with location sensors.

[The Palmer House Empire Room in Downtown Chicago.]

Returning to the Amtrak lounge, I tried to approach the gate.

“Are you military or a senior? This area is for military and seniors,” the woman proclaimed.

Like many Amtrak employees she was simultaneously officious and playful, and I imagined that repeating this phrase was a pleasure.

When my time came, I escaped the Trump screens of the TVs buckled to the waiting room ceiling and passed through the gate amid the flurry of conductors, porters, epauletted women, many of them people of color. In all its chaos, Amtrak offers a microcosm of America, a sound, flawed system straining for some kind of equity, rooted in an erased past, and stymied by the unabated demands of capital. This train will reach its destination, but not soon, and it’ll be full of character: amish families, a college student lost in a book, British tourists, a hunter, an Asian family, wide-eyed seniors driven in dingy carts complaining about plastic bunks folded against the wall. If you want a real sense of how we are doing as a people, as a government, as a public-private mess, pass by the shiny ad-saturated airport filled with disappointed futures. Instead come here and witness the fair-minded but misguided stuck in a structure they cannot control. This is America's cracked mirror.

Later in the lounge, one of the worst-looking men I have ever seen — crazy unkempt mullet, skin like junkyard upholstery, worn leather jacket, and white-and-black off-brand Zubaz pajama pants accentuated by a front-butt — strikes up a conversation with a pretty college girl in a La Crosse sweatshirt.

“My sister is the leader of Wisconsin,” he says. “She’s the #1 lawyer. She’s in charge of everything.”

“Well how come I’ve never heard of her? I’m from Wausau,” the Wisconsin girl replies, speaking for some reason in a loud almost clownish voice. I suspect she is somehow used to dealing with people that look like this.

“I ran for office twice in Minnesota," the man declares. "I’m getting a free SUV on Craigslist.”

“Craigslist? Isn’t that sketchy?” The girl almost shouts, exaggerating every word.

“I don’t care if it runs or not. I’ve got six Lincoln Navigators,” he says.

[Wisconsin Dells.]

On the Amtrak, absurdity doesn’t escalate linearly. It compounds and eats itself. In moments like this, late at night on the Empire Builder, it is as if a great social dam breaks, releasing the country's kaleidoscopic weirdness.  

Eventually he wanders back to his seat. The La Crosse girl later calls him “zebra pants” to her friends, and seems half-amused by the exchange, half-bitter about having to take part in it.

The absurdity has reached a fever pitch because the thin British guy is here too, a small college-aged man I’d seen waiting earlier in the lounge, alone with a backpack and a bow tie.

Earlier on the train ride I had overheard him with another young guy in a black cowboy hat drinking whiskey, who had asked him where he’s going.

“Oh North Dakota,” he says, British accent glowing.

“Why there?”

“Oh, to take a vacation break. I’m going to this place, Mee-no, or something.”

“Mee-no? You mean Minot? What’s in Minot?”

“Oh I don’t know, really. Just want to see it, I suppose. Have a little fun.”

“You’re nuts, man,” the young cowboy says. “Minot is boring! If you want to go somewhere, get of the train in Saint Paul. Saint Paul is far from Boring.”

[June's, a fire station from 1898, next to the Amtrak station in Rensselaer.]

That last point would please some of my friends, who have launched an ironic grass-roots campaign called Keep Saint Paul Boring complete with tee-shirts, in an effort to encourage more street life in the sleepy city. (On the other hand, the cowboy might have meant “far from Boring, Oregon” which would be accurate as that small town is 1,700 miles away.)

I listen while another young man joins in, getting drunk discussing the (pros and) cons of Minot.

And then this.

“I heard that if you go to small town America and have a British accent, it’s really easy to get laid,” the thin Brit declares. “Like, you get laid right away.”

At first, the thought of a young British man taking the train to Minot, North Dakota for sex tourism strikes me as hilarious, but then I remember that I read about this phenomenon somewhere online. It’s actually a thing. I can only think that it must be pretty boring in England.

“Yeah, you’re gonna get shagged,” one of the men replies in an Austin Powers voice. At some point this second guy decides he’s going to pretend he’s Irish, and adopts a barely-passable brogue.

I spend a bit of time imagining a thin British man wandering alone at midnight through downtown Minot in a bowtie like a Sam Beckett character. The only way the scenario could be improved is if it took place in January.

And that’s why it’s funny that later the two men, the Brit and his new fake-Irish friend, are sitting and playing a card game called “Bullshit” with the three college girls from Wisconsin. The game is perfect, because these two guys are so obviously full of shit themselves, but in the end it doesn’t matter. They flirt and everyone has a great time and the night is just beginning when the train comes to a halt just past the Hastings river bridge.

After a long wait, the conductor announces a tree has fallen onto the tracks, but not to worry because someone somewhere will go out there and clear it away. For the meantime, we are stuck next to the Mississsippi, a mere twenty miles from my house.

“We’re sending out a team of our best leprechauns,” the fake-Irish guy says, and everyone laughs.

“Don’t eat my noodles!” screams one of the women, going to get another drink.

“In rugby you’re not allowed to throw forwards. You throw it this way, backwards,” the fake Irish guy says.

“They don’t let you off the train, health and safety stuff. There might be a big hole or whatnot,” the Brit says.

“They’re out to look at the tree,” a girl named Angela says.

“The tree has committed a crime and we are investigating. I wonder if this is in my jurisdiction…” the Brit says. (I have to admit that even I love his accent.)

The banter grows louder as they start looking at cell phone pictures and discussing the “zebra pants” guy. As someone quotes Borat I decide to pull the plug and take off. Honestly, an exchange program that sends British chavs to rural North Dakota doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world, even if it stems from hormones.

As I leave, from the corner of my eye, I see one of the girls lean over the table and make out with the Brit.

“What the hell just happened here,” says one girl.

“I have desperately bad breath, because I ate all of those chips,” replies the other.

Eventually the leprechaun crew clears the tree, and the train rolls into Saint Paul an hour late. As I walk the marble floors of the magnificent empty station, my feet root again in firm ground.

[Somewhere in America.]

Union Depot, Public Space Petri Dish, Still Waiting on Actual Trains

[Obama speaking at the SPUD in 2014.]

At this very moment, Vice-President Joe Biden is in downtown Saint Paul to tout the long-term effects of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus and infrastructure spending.

Fittingly, he’s appearing at the Saint Paul Union Depot, the 1920s train station that was remodeled as part of the stimulus package, receiving over $200M of Federal money for a thorough and gorgeous remodeling. The Union Depot, or SPUD, has been the site of a bunch of similar political events, from Obama’s 2014 appearance to the Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation dinner that same year. Like a lot of downtown Saint Paul, it makes for a picturesque, if misleading, urban backdrop.

Because there’s only one problem: the Saint Paul Union Depot is a train station without any trains.

To this day there’s one train in each direction that actually stops at the depot, and there’s little hope of that changing any time soon. When Obama came into office, he introduced an ambitions plan for national network of “high-speed rail” that would, it was hoped, finally start bringing the US passenger rail network into the 19th century.

Because trains make such easy scapegoats, building inter-city rail is one of the most difficult of the political Herculean feats. The election of Scott Walker in neighboring Wisconsin almost single-handedly derailed plans to bring more trains to Saint Paul, and he's still thriving despite falling flat on his face in the presidential race.

Other transit or rail projects that might connect to the SPUD aren't faring much better. Not much is gonna be changing anytime soon.

So despite all appearances, the SPUD isn’t much of a train station. In fact, I'd make you a bet that one of the most frequently used transit vehicles there is the Mystic Lake Casino bus, which is free, by the way, though I am told that visiting casinos might impose hidden costs. (I am half-kidding; Jefferson Lines’ buses actually make good use of the station, though they are also not trains.)

So if the SPUD isn’t a train station, what is it?

Here are a few answers, and a few ideas.

[Most of the time the $250M SPUD is really, really empty.]

1. A Public Space / Refuge from the Cold

[One of the few places Downtown open at to the public at 5am.]

It turns out, that the massive polished marble spaces of the SPUD have become something of a public space experiment lab, filled with art, a variety of kiosks, and a whole bunch of moveable furniture that are constantly moving around the massive rooms like Tetris blocks, arranging and re-arranging themselves into constellations that open up and close down the surrounding spaces like blooming flowers.

Here’s an example. The other night, just this week, I stopped by SPUD to use the bathroom. For some reason, there was as new spatial arrangement. Half the waiting room furniture had been moved into the “hallway” area between the entry way and the main waiting room. And just about every bench was occupied.

Meanwhile, the rest of the movable furniture, instead of being clustered together (as per usual) had been separated almost equidistantly through the cavernous space. And just like the hallway benches, almost every seat in the room was occupied. And almost every occupant was a person of color.

Apart from the fact that it's literally someone's job to re-arrange the deckchairs in this massive room, it was interesting to see the relationship between space, furniture, and social relationships play out before you. It offered quite a change from the usual empty room.

(It’s also worth noting that SPUD is one of those places that the “mallwalkers” seem to like. During the workday you get all kinds of office types emerging from the skyways to do laps around the massive marble floors of the waiting room.)

[Hallway benches occupied on a February night.]

[Furniture spread to maximize distance.]

2. A Public Art Gallery

[A lot of lite brite.]

The SPUD is full of public art, including the largest lite-brite display in the world, a cool “radio” step kiosk in the far corner, some awesome ceiling installations, and a kiosk tribute to the Avidors (who live upstairs).

There’s also a healthy dose of place-making in the SPUD, including the ever-popular acoustic ping pong table.

I think there’s room for more, most especially in the still-vacant outdoor “driveway” space between the SPUD steps and the light rail station. It’s sort of fascinating to watch these pieces attract or be ignored by different audiences at different times. This is what public art is supposed to look like.

[Ray King's "twin waves" sculpture.]

[Daily tous les jours' AIR installation.]

3. An Event Space
 
Lots of events happen here, and for the most part it works out just fine, though when the once-a-day Amtrak train actually does arrive (often belatedly) it can be amusing to watch the actual (sleepy, smelly) train passengers bewilderingly interact with a wedding or corporate shindig or what-have-you.

But anyway, it's a nice place for a banquet or a massive all-night art festival.

[Set up for a banquet.]

[Northern Spark festival.]

So that's OK, but it still seems like you're not getting all your "bang for the buck" with a quarter-billion. So what else could it be?

1. A River Connection

For one thing, it could be a connection to the riverfront. The city has ambitious plans to build a “river balcony” that would connect Lowertown and downtown to the river along an elevated walkway path that would enter seamlessly into the depot. Saint Paul has huge problems connecting to the river, which offers so much potential, thanks mostly to the (largely unnecessary) half-assed freeway running alongside the waterfront.

The Depot is the only building that bridges the train tracks, and if done carefully, could connect downtown to the river and activate the SPUD space at the same time. Optimistically, this could happen quite soon, if some funding is put together.

[Plans have changed since this model was built; the balcony would likely enter the side of the SPUD.]

2. A bike shop

Well over five years after it was supposed to happen, this is actually happening. See the recent article in the PiPress:

The Lowertown Bike Shop has signed a 10-year lease for both the Depot’s large basement space, as well a retail space on the Depot’s main floor. The shop likely will open at the new location in late April.

The Depot’s space is three times larger than the bike shop’s current space in the Jax Building across the street at 253 Fourth Street East.

“Being part of a transportation hub allows people to find us a lot easier,” said Crystal Sursely, operations manager for the non-profit shop. “We are beyond capacity with storage. It will let us carry a lot more and branch out into apparel, which is big.”

[Bike mechanics forced to pretend they're excited.]

3. An Actual Train Station

Maybe someday if we get the second daily Amtrak train, Scott Walker retires, funding for commuter rail plans materialize, or some other act of political divine intervention, this will be a real train station with more than one train a day.

At any rate, VP Biden, himself a big fan of Amtrak, might be stretching the truth a bit today when he talks about the successful transformation of the depot into a train station. I’m sure there were better ways to spend $240M on Twin Cities' transportation than fixing up this building.

But an earmark is an earmark, and it’s an amazing building, a priceless legacy that will anchor Saint Paul’s "railroad future" (whatever that means) for generations. The hard work is still ahead of us, but fixing up and rehabbing the SPUD was never going to get any cheaper, and these days it’s interesting to watch it evolve into a vital downtown public space.

In the mean time, the juxtaposition of refuge for the city's poorest people, transit station, restaurant, exercise room for office workers, and stage for political events makes for some fascinating public space people watching.  Don't forget to try the ping pong.

[I don't follow instructions well.]

[Empty benches, polished floor.]

[Train station, shmainstation. This is a great ping-pong table.]