Train Kept a-Rollin’ is one of my favorite Aerosmith songs (even though it’s not their song but an old blues song). Now the train is one of my favorite travel methods. I flew to Indianapolis for the HLAA National convention on June 10th. But the thought of flying to Philadelphia on June 26th for the ALA National convention was as enticing as going for a swim with my bionic ears in.
So I didn’t.
Sure taking the train turned an hour and half trip to an almost five hour trip but the duration differences are greatly exaggerated. An exaggeration I can sum up in one word: lines.
I left from Westwood, not Boston. While the drive on 95 to that station ended up taking as long as the drive on 93 to Boston, Westwood had the boon of cheap parking. Seven bucks a day. (Side note: you pay with PayByPhone and the station has a 5 night limit, with no extensions. I was in Philly for 6 nights. This caused me no shortage consternation. Fortunately, I don’t sleep well away from home. So at 2 am on my last day, I paid for that 6th night.) Paying to park was cheaper, by far, than taking a Lyft to either Westwood or Boston.
After I parked I went down into the station and to find my gate. It’s a small station and there was but one. As I sat down and looked around I felt like I was missing something. Surely it couldn’t be that easy. Could it? Where were the armed guards loitering around the line that I have to wait in before I can wait in another line at the metal detectors?
At the airport, that’s where.
Had this been the only difference between plane travel and train travel, that would have been enough for me. To say that I’m anxious while waiting in line to get my license scanned and then waiting in another line to go through the metal detectors is like saying the sun is hot. There are a myriad of opportunities for me to mishear on my way to the gate. There are a myriad of people to introvert through on the way to the gate. And damn near everyone is harried. I don’t know if they’re bored or surly, but the people manning the TSA lines never look at me; they’ve got a camera to match my face in front of them with my face on my license. They also never enunciate, as if speaking clearly causes them excruciating pain. I’ve heard a myriad of horror stories about run-ins with the TSA. Which makes me anxious that if I mishear something they say, or don’t hear something altogether, I’ll become another story
But I digress.
I like to focus on the positive. There’s enough negativity in the world. I’ll move on from the TSA and get back to my train talk. Just gimme a moment to slow my racing heart and dry my clammy palms that thinking about the TSA caused…
OK, I’m good.
As I was saying, I got to the gate with as much trouble as the Big Bad Wolf had with the straw house. When I went up to the service desk for luggage tags, I noticed they had a hearing loop at the desk. I didn’t end up using it because the interaction lasted two shakes of a lamb’s tail, but I wanted to report back that it’s a possibility. Some airports have loops in some places but with Auracast on the horizon, I don’t see a loop coming soon to an airport near you.
While the entire station wasn’t looped, there were visual cues a-plenty. There was the digital display with the incoming trains and which track they’d chugga-chugga-choo-choo their way to. That was akin to the departures display at airports but with a twist. It had a section for messages. At first I thought the announcers were following a script but then I realized I was wrong. They weren’t announcers. They were recorded messages. (I almost wrote pre-recorded but then realized, when the hell else are you going to record something? Afterwards?) Whenever there was a real-time announcement, the captions were on a coffee break.
When it came time to board I strained a mighty strain to catch my train number as it was announced. Luckily, I knew which number to strain for because it was both on my ticket and on the screen. Not just that but the screen changed the status of my train from “delayed” (fret not, dear reader, ’twas but 10 minutes not the 3 hours that my flight to Indy was. Hey look, another difference!) to “boarding”. So I was able to beat feet to the platform post-haste. Once there, I was greeted with a series of smaller digital signs that showed me which side of the platform I should be on. There were also physical signs on the platform itself, showing me where my car would stop.
As I stood on the platform, it was slapped by deja vu. Surely it couldn’t be that easy. Could it?
At an airport, the struggle to decide whether or not to self-disclose to the gate agent is real. And I’m not struggling alone. When I was flying to Indy for HLAA, a couple of HLAA members were at the gate with me. Not one of us self-identified. But here, I didn’t need to. I simply walked onto the platform when I saw that my train was boarding. There was no gate agent pulling not one but two lines out of her hat. On planes, you board in groups. Each group waits in line and the rest of us wait in a dotted line for our straight line to form. Whether I’m able to hear which group is boarding is always shrouded in mystery. And there’s not always a display showing what group is boarding. For me waiting in line is one of the hardest parts of my hearing loss.
But there I go talking about planes again. One more brief snide comment before leaving the plane talk.
If making my way through an airport and boarding a plane is a Broadway show, making my way through a train station and boarding a train is a kindergarten pageant. Even in a larger station like Philly’s William H. Gray III 30 Street Station the pageantry only rose to middle school play levels.
There were more gates and more signs. Those signs only had text for recorded messages yet again. But I’m forever grateful for that signs becauseI had me a bit of a scare in Philly.
After hitting the little librarian’s room, I came back to find my train boarding already. At Westwood we went down to the platform five minutes before departure time. In Philly, it was fifteen. I appreciated the extra time because the train is only in the station for two or three minutes. (Except when there was a crew change in NYC, we were there for about 10 minutes.)
Once inside the train, I was visited by another pleasant surprise. The leg room! The leg room! By Darth Vader’s Fisher Price chest plate, the legroom! Look at this, there’s no need for me to straddle the seat in front of me. My knees don’t even touch the seat in front of me!
I had a window seat and in yet another difference between plane and train, I didn’t mind. I can’t look out a plane window. A train window? No problem. Well, scratch that, there was a wee bit of a problem: the dilapidated buildings and tumbledown houses that dotted tracks were sad to see. It wasn’t all that that way, there were plenty of trees, rivers, and rejuvenated downtowns. In fact, somewhere near Stamford, Connecticut, I saw a store called “Milk & Cookies”. It sold “cereal-infused ice cream”. I don’t know what that is but I know I want some!
Getting back inside the train, the car was noisier than I expected. Some people gabbed away on their phones. Though I took the opportunity to use my phone to text with a few people, it was weird to be able to use electronic devices not in airplane mode whilst travelling. I even heard the tell-tale chime of a Microsoft Teams notification. It’s easier for me to hear, not just because we use it at the library but because it’s high-pitched. The other thing I heard was the conductor. There were a few different ones. Some I heard better than others, but none I heard completely. There was a goodly bit of context clue usage on the part of your intrepid narrator.
I’ll end the post with a word about the end of my journey.
When it was time to get off, the conductor would tell us what station we were going to pull into. And he asked that anyone getting off gather their things and make their way to the exit. Because I couldn’t make out everything he said and had no context to clue me in, It took me three or four rounds of this to get the full picture. It was yet another difference that I loved. We needn’t wait for the train to come to a full stop, we made our way to the exit before the train even reached the station. I appreciated this preparedness to no end. Transitions are tough for me. I never know what I need to hear. I am robbed of my context clues by not knowing what I don’t know. I found that train conductors have much better communication skills than pilots or flight attendants.
I much prefer my
Communication on rails.
Trains keep me grounded.
Leave a Reply