The train is great, food not so much!

Phil Foley — Staff Writer Long ago, in another life, as an assistant Scoutmaster, I learned you could take people camping in a monsoon with alligators lurking in the shadows, but as long as the food was good everyone would swear they had a good time.

When my boys were 9 and 4, a couple of years after the divorce, I decided to bring them home to Michigan to see their grandparents. The choices were, drive with two small boys, stopping every 70 miles or so to find a clean restroom, and spending the night in one of I-75’s infamous motels or taking the train.

The travel time, 24 hours from Miami to Ann Arbor, was the same as was the cost, so the train just seemed logical.

Except for the train food, it turned out to be one of the best travel choices I ever made. While modern expressways cut through fields and woodlots for the most part, rail lines cut through the heart of everything. On the way up the boys got a chance to every little podunk town along the way.

In Washington there was a brief layover between trains, just long enough to step out of the station and look up at the Capitol dome. It was an adventure.

The food, however, was not. Fortunately a kindly ticket agent had warned me how bad Amtrak food was and told me what kind of Rubbermaid cooler to get and how to pack it. It’s shape meant I could put it in front of my train seat

So we loaded up with a stash of frozen juice drinks and kids snack and had a great time. Somewhere east of Toledo the boys begged and pleaded to go to the dining car. I relented and Robert ordered a hamburger, Matthew asked for a hot dog and I decided to try their pepperoni pizza. The boys didn’t finish half their sandwiches and I found the pizza, at best, lame.

Fast forward 17 years and

Michelle and I were on the train to Chicago.

Though the cars looked as though they could have been the same ones I took with the boys from

Miami, they were clean and comfortable with as much, if not more leg room in coach class as you’d find in first class on an airline.

With the memory of the earlier train ride in place, I swung through a fast food drive-thru on the way to Lapeer’s old Grand Trunk station. Somewhere west of Flint Michelle asked for a coffee. To say Amtrak’s coffee is strong, is like saying World War II was a misunderstanding. The rest of the cafe car’s offerings seemed to be early vending machine.

Amtrak has brought in a dozen nationally known chefs to advise it on its menu selections, but that work doesn’t appear to have made it’s way to the tracks yet. Amtrak officials say we’ll have all new rail cars within two years for the trip to Chicago, hopefully by then they’ll have food service to match.

In the meantime, while the train is a relatively stress-free, cost effective way to travel across the state, I’d bring a cooler.