Free All Gone to Look for America by Peter Millar Page B

deleting the image I have no idea, but I do know that over the past two to three hours, he has probably taken his own photograph more than 100 times. Whether he’s taking his own picture just for fun, to set as his background on his phone or – just conceivably – to send to a loved one, this is a guy clearly concerned about his image. Amused by his vanity, I’m sorely tempted to get a teeny touch of revenge by letting him see me chuckle next time he does it, but when instead he actually uses the phone to make a call, producing a ‘Hey, how ya’ doin’?’ in agruff New Jersey accent distinctly reminiscent of Tony Soprano, I think better of it and let the moment pass.
    In any case he, like almost everyone else on the train is getting off at Buffalo. That includes Casey Jones, rematerialised now in the line of passengers waiting to ‘detrain’ – this is another word from American locomotive language I have had to learn – with a row of pens, screwdrivers and torch in the front chest pocket of his striped dungarees. I can now see that these cover a grey T-shirt depicting a vintage steam engine that might or might not be the Cannonball Express.
    He’s also carrying a CSX tool bag identifying him as an employee of the freight lines: a man not necessarily impersonating a legend so much as living his dream; for some people ‘workin’ on the railroad’ is just a job, for others it’s a way of life. Back in England he’d be frustrated by dull diesels and short-haul routes and would spend his weekends with other enthusiasts tinkering with vintage steam trains at Didcot Railway Museum. Here the distances are vast and the boundaries between the romance and reality of rail just that little bit more blurred.
    Blurred, that is, unless you’re a middle-aged, well-to-do couple, originally from New York, trying the great American rail system for the first time on a trip from Baltimore to Toronto. Sandra and Ben, almost my only remaining fellow passengers for the last slow crawl of the journey along the shores of Lake Erie to Niagara Falls, are decidedly unimpressed.
    ‘We’ve been on these goddamn trains all day,’ he fumes in something extremely close to exasperation, barely concealing one of those ‘whose idea was this anyway’ hints of marital tension.
    I can sort of see his point. It’s 7:30 in the evening, dark outside, and we’ve little more than 30 miles or so to go, but according to the conductor it’s going to take at the very least another hour to get there. The problem is that there’s only one track up here near the frontier and the great long freight trains have priority over our by now very much reduced little four-coach passenger train with fewer than a dozen paying customers. Not normally the most placid of travellers – I can get annoyed with the best of them at unexplained endless delays at airports – I find myself showing a surprising element of British stoicism here: after all the timetable says we don’t get in until 8:50 p.m. and at present it looks like we’re going to be early.
    Ben, however, isn’t impressed by the inexorable logic of iron roads that don’t allow for overtaking, and his mood is not improved when, staring out into dark freight yards of heavy duty rolling stock, he gradually perceives thatwe’re going backwards. The concept of reversing into a siding to change locomotives is new to him. And not welcome.
    ‘Come on, honey,’ says Sandra gamely, smiling at me for encouragement. ‘You agreed to stop off and see Niagara Falls.’
    ‘I didn’t know what I was getting into,’ says Ben tetchily, obviously regretting it. ‘I’m a Noo Yoiker,’ he says, lapsing into the Big Apple’s unmistakable drawl: ‘I don’t do this stuff. It’s like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. It’s for people from other countries.’
    Meanwhile our little train is creaking and rattling its way towards what – it occurs to me Ben might possibly have forgotten –