Macau Matters | The joys of train travel

Richard Whitfield

I like trains and recommend them as a great way to travel!
I recently took a train from Seattle to Chicago, travelling over the Rocky Mountains and across the rest of Washington State, then Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and finishing in Illinois, a total of 44 hours on the train. I was told that these are some of the “flyover states”, so-called by Americans that live on the East and West coasts but I found them interesting. I had a good time, and the trip was well worth it. Seattle and Chicago are also both well worth a visit.
The sleeper cabin ticket initially seemed quite expensive, but became good value when you factored in that two days of (surprisingly good) meals and a reasonable place to sleep for two nights were included. The scenery through the Rockies was amazing and across the plains was also quite interesting. The train staff were also very friendly and attentive. At meals and other times I had several very interesting conversations with other passengers (mostly older Americans, but a few younger people from other places), and they had volunteers from the US “Trains & Trails” organization to explain the history and other aspects of the countryside we were passing through. I also had plenty of time to relax, read and stare out the window – which I very happily did for several hours.
Being Australian, I was very surprised by the amount of water and large navigable rivers with tugs and barges. We passed through many towns that mostly looked very manicured and prosperous and through a lot of countryside that was also clearly very productive. I should have expected it from my experiences with Europe, but I was surprised to see many very large modern factories in relatively small towns. Also, interestingly, I only saw a few large wind electricity generators, and very, very few photovoltaic panels. All in all, it was an excellent way to spend a relaxing few days and get a good feel for the American “heartland”, although maybe not a trip to take young children on.
Previously I have taken much shorter high speed train trips in Japan (Tokyo-Hiroshima), Italy (Florence-Venice), France (Nantes-Paris) and the UK (Paris-London) and I think that they are the best way to travel for trips up to 1,000km. For this length of trip, cars are too slow. Planes are also no faster, once you factor in the time taken to get to and from airports and the need for a long check-in time before flights. Trains are city-center to city-center and in my experience you only need to check-in 10+ minutes before departure.
I very much like these high speed trains for their comfort and convenience and because you can get real work done while travelling – the seats are big and you have tables to sit a laptop computer on and there is wifi and electricity to keep devices charged.
They have been talking about building a high speed train line between Melbourne and Sydney in Australia for 50+ years but it still has not happened! They say it is too expensive, but I say that this is rubbish once you factor in the development in towns at intermediate stations and productivity improvements that the train would enable.
In 1993 I also spent 12 very unpleasant hours in a slow, dilapidated train travelling from Ho Chi Min City to Na Trang in Vietnam. It is not an experience I would recommend, but at the time travellers were actively discouraged from taking internal plane flights in Vietnam because the airplanes were very old and very poorly maintained. Also, the train trip was actually much better than the subsequent 20 hour bus trip back to Ho Chi Min City.