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What Trains Know That Airports Forgot
From Penn Station to the High Line to the green hills of Vermont, traveling without jets turns out to be less about distance and more about immersion.
New York City, September 27, 2021
The Pennsylvanian slid into New York the civilized way: underground, directly into the city’s beating heart.
No taxi from LaGuardia. No shuttle bus. No conveyor belts. No TSA agent silently judging the contents of my pockets. No ritual unbuckling of the pants before being poured into a pressurized aluminum tube (aka commercial jet) with two hundred other people pretending this was normal. We simply stepped off the train at Penn Station, gathered our vagabond bags, and walked a block to the hotel.
This is one of the great virtues of train travel. It does not deliver you to the outskirts of a place. It delivers you into the middle of things. And in New York, the middle of things is never only geography. It is history, appetite, architecture, ambition, ruin, resurrection, and the occasional pigeon behaving as if it owns Park Avenue.
Ah, New York.
It was big and muscular, even in its semi-post-COVID state. You could still feel the old voltage humming…
