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polycon express

South Station, Boston, Thursday afternoon, February 4, 1999. I've just boarded a train bound for Chicago! I've been way too busy lately; I really need to relax and I'm really looking forward to this trip. Visitors have been asked to leave the train; we should be starting shortly. I wonder if there are any other polycon attendees here. I notice a a nice looking woman on the commuter train two tracks away. I wish I could take more of these trips; right now I feel at home on the train as nowhere else. Here we go; the platform slides slowly by; we emerge into dim and hazy sunlight. I recall that it is supposed to rain tomorrow, and realize I will be hundreds of miles away by then. The interminable "big dig" project reveals itself in the form of workers and machines by the side of the tracks, and the conductor -- not some assistant or underling, but The Main Man -- arrives to collect my ticket. Now we glide slowly down along the Mass Pike into Back Bay Station. I see we are in a separate part of the station than that used by Corridor trains to New York and Washington; this part is only for the Framingham and Worcester commuter trains, one Amtrak Inland Route train, and this train, the Lake Shore Limited. The Viewliner sleeping car in which I ride is a marvel. It looks and smells brand new, although it's probably been in service a couple of years now. The last time I made this trip it was in an old 10-6 sleeper, ex-Union Pacific and perhaps forty years old. They are all gone now, replaced by these high-tech Viewliners with their much roomier compartments, in-room video screens, and upper bunk windows.

And now we're on the move again, passing into the darkness between Back Bay Station and the Turnpike corridor. When we emerge into the light, we roll alongside the Turnpike past Tower Records and the Citgo sign near Fenway Park. Compared with the traffic on the Pike we're moving very slowly, creeping past the Nickelodeon, the old WBUR tower, and the Boston University Photonics Center. After crossing under Commonwealth Avenue we start to pick up speed; we are under the Pike now, and I catch a brief glimpse of Harvard and the river we call the Mighty Chuck before we roll into Beacon Park Yard; it is intermodal city, with truck trailers, flatcars, and great mechanical monsters like Imperial Walkers by which the railroaders pick up whole trailers and set them down on the flatcars. This is how a lot of rail freight moves today. As we come out of the yard the Pike reappears to my right and I get a look at Arsenal Mall, the former World War II U.S. Army Arsenal, across the river in Watertown. We leave the city of Boston behind.

Newton Corner. We're moving along at quite a clip now, and I can feel the rhythms of the wheels slowly build. Washington Street is to my right; there's Clapper's of West Newton, and the former home of the long defunct Mayflower Furniture store whose sign used to proclaim loudly, "38 Years Without a Sale." Here's the stub of the West Newton toll booth which Bill Weld demolished a couple of years ago, and the warehouse with the WCRB sign where everyone used to think the station kept its studios. As we pass through Auburndale, I see the US Trust bank; then the track curves to the left and we go under the Pike once more, then across the river and Route 128. Here a vast tract of land to my right is occupied by access ramps among Routes 30 and 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike; it is one of the most stunningly extravagant wastes of land I've ever seen, land that would otherwise be worth a fortune to the greedy developers happily bulldozing the wooded hillsides of southern New Hampshire. Next we cross over the road from Newton Lower Falls to Weston, over by the golf course, and curve to the left across Intervale Road towards Wellesley Farms, where my grandfather and I used to wait thirty years ago to watch the New England States, the ancestor of this train, fly by as we now do. Familiar childhood memories rush by: White's pond, Cliff Road, and the bedrock of Wellesley Hills. The dead leaves of countless autumns lie beneath bare trees. Now we pass Captain Marden's, Wellesley Volkswagen, and my wife's old workplace -- what was the name of that company? -- at perhaps forty miles an hour. The friendly sights of my childhood give way abruptly to a sunless, snowless winter landscape: a road, an icebound lake; bare trees over leaf-clogged ground; New England granite.

As we cross Bacon Street, which is named for some of my maternal ancestors, we enter Natick, the town where they lived for 250 years as farmers. The Saxonville branch curves off to the right as we pass through the center of town; we are in a cut, so there is not much to see. Soon a great ice-clad reservoir looms on the right; we pass under Speen Street and past the National Guard compound. The developers have been hard at work here; this is West Natick, dominated by suburban backyards and high tension wires. We breeze by West Natick station, past an abandoned smokestack, and into Framingham, the largest Town in New England. As we pass the Avery Dennison plant we slow for the Framingham station; we stop there to take on more passengers, and I see some Conrail diesels idling in the old New Haven yard.

New England is lovely, even on a gloomy February day. The gentle swaying of the car is intoxicating. A hint of diesel oil wafts through the car in the wake of a passing train crewman; CSX auto racks on a nearby track rush by, harbingers of Conrail's impending demise. Images of a dark, desolate land greet my eyes: gray skies, brown land, white water. A grove of bare trees stands in a patch of ice. Here and there Christmas trees stand green against the brown earth. The train has taken me beyond the area I know well; we must be in Westborough or some such place. We're passing through a lot of swamps or marshes; deep in the woods some snow clings tenaciously in the darkening twilight. It's only 4:30 but it's already getting dark.

There are three cars in front of mine: two coaches and a lounge. Behind my car are six or seven baggage and express cars, all of which will be dropped in Springfield; I think they are empties destined for some Corridor train southbound from there. Now it has started raining; we are high over a lake whose icy waters surround several islands, all covered with trees. I reflect that there used to be several trains a day to Chicago on this route, but now there is only this one. Suddenly we come to an abrupt halt; I wonder for a moment what might be the cause, but it really does not matter. I am here to relax, and whatever happens I know the train will eventually get me where I want to go. But now the reason for our halt reveals itself: the eastbound Lake Shore flies by, announcing itself with a toot of its horn. It is on time, I see. We too are on time, and we glide into Worcester station, or rather the Worcester "Amshack", for Worcester's Union Station is still being restored after decades of neglect. Our stop is brief, and pulling out we pass Union Station and a string of run-down factories, sturdy stone and brick vestiges of the industrial powerhouse that was Massachusetts a hundred years and more ago. Soon the city fades into the darkness and there is only rocks and trees.

They wanted to replace this train with a bus, but John Kerry stopped them. Thank you, John Kerry; vote wisely and put a stop to this impeachment nonsense. I'm tired, and now there is only rain and dark sky and the silhouettes of trees rushing by. I crave sleep... but I wake after a while and my ears are popping; we must be high in the Berkshires. There's snow on the ground and it's pitch black outside. In my dream the couple in the next compartment were making love loudly; I could hear the woman's moans even over the noise of the wheels on the rails... but then I recall that there is no couple there, just a fiftyish man reading USA Today. Where did that dream come from?

We pass some spectacular ice-flows glowing blue-white against the dark rock face in the light of the train. The Conrail people have done a good job maintaining this line; the ride is very smooth. It must still be raining; there are puddles of water on the ground now and the snow is gone. We are slowing; this must be Pittsfield. I wonder if there's a station there yet; I had heard they were building a "multi-modal transportation center", but I don't see one. Soon we are out of Pittsfield and moving as though the devil himself were after us. This is wild country; there is nothing at all to see in the darkness but the occasional red flash of a highway crossing signal. There are several houses sporting Christmas lights; perhaps people out here use a different calendar than mine. I hope I'm not getting sick; that would suck. I'm trusting that they really will feed us after Albany; otherwise I'm going to be ravenous in the morning. I could have got something in the lounge, but the New York section of the train, which we join at Albany, carries a dining car and I want a real meal (which, in fact, I get, albeit not until 10:30; I guess the New York section was late, as we sat in Albany for something like two hours).

Friday morning. After a deep, restful night's sleep and a hearty breakfast I am awake, refreshed, and watching the flat, empty brown fields of northern Ohio roll by, punctuated by the occasional ice-brimmed lake or pond. In Cleveland, while eating breakfast, I saw that the the old stadium by the station, the "mistake by the lake", has been replaced by a brand new one that must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Now I'm back in my compartment, looking at what can only be the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant in the distance; a vast white cloud of vapor extends straight up from it, drifting slightly to the left at its apogee. The land here is absolutely flat, and yesterday's gray gloom has given way to sunshine and blue skies, except for the criss-crossing vapor trails of passing aircraft forming something like an asterisk in the sky. A branch line from the nuke plant joins our track from the right. This is farm country; "Myron Schiller" reads the name painted on a red barn. The fields are all empty, although some appear to have been plowed recently. The milepost says 271 miles to somewhere; I'm guessing Buffalo, which we passed in the night, now far behind us. Could all this flat land have once been ocean bottom? If glaciers scoured Lake Erie and its sisters, what became of the material the glaciers removed? Why are there no hills, I wonder, like the ones in upstate New York?

An air-raid siren stands on a pole, guarding against sneak attacks by some enemy now long vanquished. A jackass pokes its head out of a barn door; I see a Canadian National freight train stopped on a track that must cross ours; it is waiting for us to roll by. Here is what looks to be an oil refinery; white vapor plumes sprout from its numerous tanks and towers. This line is not nearly as smooth as the Boston - Albany line; we are rocking and rolling quite a bit. We slow as we approach what must be a town of some size. The train squeaks by some ancient rusty bridges, reminders of a time when railroads ruled and automobiles were quirky things that terrified horses and were forever breaking down. We cross a broad river; this is Toledo. "Great Lakes Terminal Warehouse" is painted on the side of a large building. We pull into the station, an old New York Central affair that has seen better days.

There are some wonderfully restored passenger cars on a track to my right: an open-platform observation car, the "Duchess Lynn", spotted in front of an Alco(?) diesel in Amtrak colors, but lettered "TDIX 106" and "ex-NYC 8283". There is a round-end car "Eaton" wearing what looks like Erie-Lackawanna brown and silver, and a blue car, another open-platform heavyweight. Another locomotive, a switcher, bears the designation "TDIX 1201". There are also perhaps two dozen Amtrak express boxcars, both of the old silver and new green variety, here at the station. As we pull out, we enter a Conrail intermodal yard, with lots of trailers, flatcars, and Imperial Walkers, and some blue Conrail locomotives, soon, I suspect, to be repainted black for Norfolk Southern, which I believe is to inherit this line. We slide by a junkyard, some cut-down trees, the Toledo Cut Stone Company, and Mister Frosty -- I'll bet he doesn't get much business this time of year!

Why are so many of these people into birds, I wonder as we cross into Indiana, seeing so many houses with stone geese on their front lawns. It occurs to me that the geese probably symbolize monogamy; one house has a pair, one of which is adorned with a blue ribbon to emphasize its gender. This is, after all, Dan Quayle country; heaven forbid anyone should mistake our geese for gay! Here is the Agape Assembly of God; I wonder for a moment whether, in a world where people have free wills, that which God is imagined to be is not at least as important as that which God actually is. Here's another air-raid siren; who on earth would want to bomb Kendalville, Indiana?

Kendalville is a town of suburban-style homes and some industry. There are puddles everywhere; my guess is this has been a wet, if not snowy, winter. Here I see more evidence of that damnable interstate highway system. A depressing thought runs through my mind, when I think of gasoline selling for less than a dollar a gallon back in Cleveland. Low gas prices are only going to encourage more waste and pollution; welcome to the new Carboniferous! Will unbridled capitalism make us at last a society of yeast greedily gobbling up all the sugar in the world, all the while slowly poisoning ourselves in our own waste? How will clean technologies like fuel cells and geothermal power plants ever be developed so long as oil is cheap? How will high standards of living be maintained in a world where cheap transportation means it will always be easier to import things from a place where labor is cheap instead of manufacturing them where they are needed? Re-reading these words, I realize I sound like a millennialist Chicken Little ranting about the end of the world and praying for a socialist Rapture; but then socialism misdirected can do as much evil as capitalism; one has only to look at some of the former Soviet Union's works to see that.

A sign out the window proclaims Millersburg; at first I thought it said Killersburg. A horse! A horse! I see two of them. Ask a horse to reorder the world and it will be all haystacks and lumps of sugar. What is this, a racetrack? Land o' Goshen! A horse is a horse, of course, of course... Midwest Pallet Recycling: this isn't farm country any more, but a proper city, to wit, Elkhart. We will be stopping shortly; there is a museum with a lot of old New York Central rolling stock across the tracks from the station. This train must be half a mile long; there are several express cars trailing the various New York and Boston passenger sections. Now getting on at Elkhart is a large party of what look like Amish; they are all dressed in black and all wearing curious hats. But the Amish, who shun modern conveniences, wouldn't use trains, would they? These must be Mennonites or Shakers or some such.

The Elkhart city logo is a stylized heart surrounding a capital E. Battje's Pontiac, proclaims a sign, and Pepsi Express. A Mexican restaurant called the Hacienda advertises "free love." Empty auto racks slide by on the right; another branch line, well-used by the look of its rails, joins from the north. The lounge car attendant announces he's closing the car, even though we must still be a hundred miles short of Chicago. Perhaps they've run out of food. Why do I have trouble imagining there are any right-wingers with happy home lives? How can a child possibly grow up happy in such an atmosphere? Mishawaka, a sign announces. This looks and feels like industrial heartland. The Grand Trunk Western joins us from the north.

We pass Stanley Coveleski Regional Stadium and the old South Bend station; we don't stop there, but at an Amshack a few miles farther down. Here's Bareman's Quality Dairy Products. As we leave South Bend the deteriorated and obviously disused track of the South Shore interurban appears on the right; I guess it doesn't run to South Bend any more. The real South Shore appears from the right a mile or so beyond the station; it's the Chicago, South Shore, and Somewhere in the Trees Short of South Bend. Suddenly we're back in farm country; the South Shore must be an interesting commute, what with all these cows hanging around. Here's Rolling Prairie: A Caring Community. A large hawk flaps vigorously over the mown fields of some farm. Now here's a field that's positively black, as though it's been burned. I think we're about an hour late; not too bad, really. McDonald's golden arches punctuate the wilderness, and suddenly we're back in a land of industry. Many are the tentacles of Conrail; another branch joins us from the north. This is Gary; industrial plants with names like National Steel and Prescott Metals dominate the scenery.

It's 488 miles back to Buffalo, according to a milepost. For a moment we're back in the wilderness; it's the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. But now gondolas filled with rolled steel appear on adjacent tracks, and the awesome USS Gary Works slides slowly by. Much of it appears deserted, but not all. The rail yards are endless; now the gondolas are filled with coal, and soon we pass an oil refinery. It looks like the slag heaps of Mordor. Showboat Casino -- say what? "America's steel team" is painted on the side of a switching engine. We cross some sort of canal; two orange locomotives marked "remote controlled" are parked nearby. Here is Lake Michigan, dull-green, stretching as far as the horizon. We slow for Hammond/Whiting station, the last stop before Chicago. It's 12:40; we should have been here at 11:46.

Chicago is sixteen miles away. I can see the Sears Tower in the distance; it is two blocks from Union Station, the end of my journey. We pass through what I think is Chicago's south side; I do not know this city. "Are you waiting for your kids to talk to you about pot?" asks a billboard. I can see the government's been busy wasting more of money on its stupid prohibitionist crusade. We creep slowly through a gigantic intermodal yard, far larger than the one in Boston. A bewildering array of images greets my eyes: traffic jams on the highways; CTA subway trains on elevated tracks; tire tracks in the mud next to the railroad where some stupid kids have done their mischief. Here are more slag heaps; "Isle Cosmic Funk CF", someone has scrawled on a bridge. I must stop writing now and pack away my belongings, for the train is about to pull into the station and I must prepare to walk several blocks to the subway, or El, I believe it is called. Polycon is at a Marriott out by O'Hare Airport, and I'm downtown, so I'll have a long ride on the C.T.A. before I get there. But I am relaxed, and rested, and only a little bit apprehensive as I get off the train and disappear into the labyrinth that is Chicago's Union Station.

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