Free All Gone to Look for America by Peter Millar

machinery is some form of track-cleaning equipment – and they have left a substantial amount of their kiton the line in front of us. It would appear that, despite this being – in Amtrak terms – a relatively well-used route, they have somehow not been expecting us.
    Happily – whether or not it was down to the horn-blowing – disaster has been averted: we were only doing about 50 mph anyhow but it still would not have been nice. Now all we have to do is wait for the crew to move their kit off the line so we can continue. In the event it takes no more than some 15 minutes before we are ready to move off again. As we do several of the crew clamber on top of their big yellow rail-cleaning machine. One of them waves cheerily; another pulls out a digital camera and takes a picture of us. I am left wondering how often these railroad workers actually come across a moving train.
    On through Amsterdam – a small town famed only for being the home of the company that makes Cabbage Patch dolls – and we are rolling through some of the richest, greenest pasture land in America. This part of New York State is littered with dairy farms producing a disproportionate amount of the country’s milk and cheese. No wonder the Dutch felt so at home. Unfortunately for most of the twentieth century much of the cheese produced here was disconcertingly similar to the more bland products of the modern Dutch dairy industry: mild – and mildly rubbery – blubber of the Edam/Gouda variety. Only in recent years has there been a movement towards traditional, organic, artisan cheeses. The future is still in the balance.
    Gradually now, as we have parted company with the Adirondacks route that heads up into New England, the forest has thinned out. Quaint pastel-painted clapboard houses line the track on the west as we pull out of Utica. Utica used to have the more comprehensible – if more cumbersome – name of Old Fort Schluyer until it was renamed after somewhere in North Africa. Why Utica when it could have been Cairo or Alexandria is for the moment beyond me. Somebody later tells me it was pulled out of a hat. When you remember that there is a town in New Mexico which changed its name from Hot Springs to Truth or Consequences after a radio broadcaster promised to present the next episode of his show from any town that changed its name to that of the programme.
    Meanwhile, our next stop is, after all, Rome. A bulky bald conductor who has replaced the one with the Rip Van Winkle beard comes through and bellows it, like a latter-day praetorian looking for gladiators to enter the arena. The little old couple opposite are the only takers.
    Somewhere back along the tracks we have obviously passed an invisible marker beyond which the founding fathers in this relatively ancient part of inhabited North America had a classical education. After Rome comesSyracuse. A young mother with two small children who replaced the mobile phone-addicted hermaphrodite and has been struggling for the past several hours to both entertain them and keep as much as possible of their collection of teddy bears, colouring books, combs and flip-flops in more or less one part of the carriage, asks the praetorian if there is a ‘car’ to be had at Syracuse. Or if someone could phone ahead.
    This seems like a reasonable enough question. I have no idea how big a place Syracuse might be and whether or not they have a taxi rank or car hire office at the station. The praetorian, however, is shaking his head as if informing a pagan mob that there were no Christians and lions on the day’s agenda: ‘I’m awful sorry, ma’am, but there’s no baggage assistance at Syracuse.’
    At this point the penny drops and I realise that once again the supposedly common language is proving to be a treacherous friend. What she is really asking for is a ‘cart’, by which she means a trolley for her luggage.
    ‘I realise that,’ she is meanwhile telling the praetorian with remarkable