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Life along the Railroad Tracks

One doesn’t need a television, book, or laptop when your odyssey takes you on the lines of Amtrack. Amtrack affords you not the traumatizing experience of a greyhound bus or the 24 hour day-long military-like operation of airline flying. It is more low-key and has better views that you can actually enjoy.

Railroads cut through some interesting places, unlike the terrifying view of clouds above a very-far-away earth, or the monotony of a never-ending concrete highway with spotted lines (that will hypnotize you if you stare at them too long). On the train, you cut through some pretty amazing places of nature, cross over rivers, fields… and see the scars of human habitation and time.

Lest you leave with a romanticized view of the railroad, it is when your eyes are above the railroad horizon that all seems serene. Lower your eyes to what lives right beside the railroad track and you begin to wonder when the great comet of the apocalypse will come raining down on us as punishment for being born human.

Life along the railroad tracks is pretty grim. It is as if humans can’t resist throwing all their waste down any type of slope or cliff. Though I am willing to consider that floods of water may also be the culprit, the evidence is pretty convincing; the household garbage that splays out from the houses along the railroad all seem to carry the fingerprint of the litterer. You can see it in how the shreds of plastic, tattered clothes, fast food containers all hang from the sides like someone’s squeezed out shit.

There are so many houses abandoned by the railroads.

There are so many graffiti murals on the railroad track walls that block the garbage from the tracks- it is like a 3 hour journey through an art museum. It reminds me of when we had those mini-murals in the tunnels of the D train. Are they still there?

How many factories do you see? Dated machinery from an industrial age that is leaving behind now only skeletons?

Looking out the window of an Amtrack train is like reading a book, or writing one in your mind.

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