Her use of the word “home” caught my attention. Yes, home. That is what an Amtrak seat is while you are riding on the train. It is home. And children must “run along home” when it's bed time.
And the Aisle is Main Street.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Amtrak's Main Street
I took my first cross-country trip on Amtrak in 1989. Living on a train for a few days is similar to living in a neighborhood. Your seat is your home. The people around you are your neighbors. The aisle is like Main Street. This became obvious to me the first evening. The woman sitting next to me was en route to Oregon to attend a wedding. She had two children with her. As children do, they had met a couple of other children riding on the train, and they all became friends, playing games, talking, whispering secrets and giggling as children will. Every now and again they would scamper down the aisle to the other children's seat, but they would come back with their new-found friends—just like neighborhood kids do. About 9:30 p.m. the mother turned to her children and said, “Tell your friends to run along home now. It's time to go to bed.”
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There are a number of excellent old movies that focus on train rides and I will try to compile a list of my favorites. Trains have been a staple of movies since the first films were made actually and even now some of them are still used in movies. The old train stations now long gone can be seen there and the people who worked and traveled on trains can also be seen,and long vanished stations like PENNSYLVANIA STATION(destroyed by the modern barbarians who erected the present monstrosity in its place). As one example, look at the old Thin Man Movies with William Powell & Myrna Loy.
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