All Aboard, Amtrak

I'm a train fan, but that's train fan with a small t and a small f.

Mostly, when I'm on a train it's the commuter train to see my sister in Salem or my cousin outside Worcester. When I travel to NYC, which I don't do near as often as I used to, I like to take the Amtrak Acela. Sometimes, anyway.

My longest train journey was from Orlando to Boston, when a colleague and I managed to hop on Amtrak after we were stranded at a business conference on 9/11 in 2001. That was a pretty scary trip. There wasn't a lot of information to be had, and we weren't sure when we left Orlando whether we were going to get home - the promise was that we'd get as far as Richmond, Virginia - and whether the US was somehow at war (which it was and wasn't). That was one long trip.

I've taken trains on occasion in Europe, most recently to get from one side of Ireland to the other. 

As a kid, my family sometimes took the train from Worcester - the Lake Shore Limited - when we visited my mother's family in Chicago. 

And I always liked my train trips in a way that I never actually liked an airplane flight. 

I loved looking out the windows, watching the country roll by, wondering who lived in those towns, on those farms. Who was driving on those roads that were running parallel to the tracks, and where were they going in such an all-fired hurry?

I sometimes fantasize about taking the train cross country, or at least as far as Chicago. Or the train that runs through the Canadian Rockies. (Which better have that glass-topped observation car if I ever do get on it.)

I don't really have a bucket list, but, if I had one, some train travel would be on it.

Nat Read is 84 years old, and he's a Train Fan with a capital T and a capital F. His bucket list - or maybe it was his life's quest - was traveling Amtrak in the entirety of its route. All glorious (and not so glorious) 21,400 miles of it.

In July, he came to Boston to board the Downeaster to

Brunswick, Maine, so he could finish (in his own words) "the last thread of passenger rail on Amtrak's spiderweb map."

“I feel fulfilled, this has been over 80 years it’s taken me, and to be in Brunswick after all of this, it’s an elated feeling,” Read said from Maine on Friday. “It was a day I will remember forever.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Amtrak hasn't been around for 80 years - it was founded in 1971 - but 80 years back, when Nat Read was just a little guy,h he took his first train ride. On a steam engine. This was during World War II, when he traveled with his mother and brother from Kentucky to visit his father, a serviceman who was stationed in Texas. 

A few years later, he traveled to a Boy Scout Jamboree via railroad. 

By then, he was solidly in love with rail travel.

“I have a fascination with watching America go by,” he said in an interview earlier in the week. “Sitting up high in a rail car and looking at the deserts of the West, the farmlands of the Midwest, the small communities of the Northeast, and being on a magic carpet to watch America unfold. I’ve never grown tired of that.”

Those trips in the 40's and 50's were, of course, made in the heyday of rail travel - before plane travel became affordable to the masses, before the interstate highway system was built. Train travel was actually pretty glamorous. (So was airplane travel before they made it affordable enough so us great unwashed could fly.) But through the thick and thin of rail travel, it's been part of who Nat Read is. 

Read’s love of railroads and thirst for adventure permeated into every aspect of his life. In addition to being a lifelong train rider, he served as vice president of public relations for the US High Speed Rail Corporation. He was part of an effort to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Diego in 1983 — an “exciting idea” that, he said, failed to get the population’s consensus and ultimately failed.

Being into train travel may seem a bit old school, fuddy-duddy. But Nat Read has had adventures that go way beyond riding the rails. He's been to 100 countries, and all seven continents. He's "stood on both the North and South poles." He made it to the South Pole while in the Navy, and made it to the North Pole on a nuclear icebreaker. A Russian nuclear icebreaker.

Read has had a lot of jobs in his life. In addition to his years in the service and with the High Speed Rail Corporation, he's been a writer and a cop. He's also done stand-up comedy.

A few years back, when looking over the Amtrak route map, he realized he didn't have all that many legs to ride complete the entire shebang. So he decided to check them all off of his list. He was interrupted by covid, but hopped back on as soon as he could. 

Which brought him to the end of the line: the Amtrak Downeaster to Brunswick, Maine. 

“I’ve set different goals and satisfied them one at a time. I’m 84 years old now and kind of coming to the end of the list,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

I'm quite sure that Nat Read will find something to occupy his time before he waves to the little red caboose. 

Anyway, my hat's off to him for finishing his incredible journey. Make that a conductor's hat. Or an engineer's cap.

All aboard, Amtrak!