All Aboard for Boston

A SCRAP of newspaper blows among the litter of the railroad tracks. A group of people wait on Platform 5 of Baltimore's Penn Station for the 9:45 a.m. train to New York. A middle-aged man dressed in a spotless grey-flannel suit waits nervously with his wife. Her face is heavily powdered and her hair is piled high on her head. Close to the track a wrinkled-looking man in a creased sear-sucker sports coat checks his watch and begins to pace in a narrow circle. His sparse white mustache stands out on his lined black face, and every few seconds his jaundiced eyes dart to his tattered straw-colored suitcase, checking to see that it is still there.

Within five minutes the Southern Crescent nudges slowly into sight. As the twelve-car Amtrack train sidles into the station, a gravelly voice on the platform speaker rasps out, "Southern Crescent, Amtrack train for New York, arriving from Washington, D.C. and points south, on Track 5. All aboard." In a rush the passengers grab their suitcases, shopping bags, and knapsacks and board the train. The engine starts up again and steam floats up to the steel rafters of the station. After a minute in a cramped tunnel, the train emerges into the early Sunday morning sunshine.

To the right stretch endless blocks of red-brick rowhouses, each indistinguishable from the next. Old Chevrolets and new Mustangs are parked along the grim treeless streets. Each house has a small grass backyard. The train passes through tracts of brick warehouses and lots of empty freight trucks. The towering buildings of downtown Baltimore fade in the distance. Soon the metal scrapyards and old industrial offices thin out, and pastureland marked by barns and silos rolls by. A horse stands blank-faced behind a wooden fence. Rows of trailer homes extend to the edge of the train tracks. An elderly woman, her apron stained with the morning's chores, is on her knees under the kitchen sink, banging away at a clogged pipe. "If this damned sink gets stopped up one more time..." she whispers angrily, thinking of her husband's disappointment when he returns from the repair shop to find that she has not yet prepared his usual big Sunday lunch. And she was going to try out a new pancake recipe.

A GOOD YEAR tire plant shines in the afternoon sun as the train slows down for Wilmington, Del. Children play in a puddle of murky water to the side of a windowless concrete warehouse. The decayed corrugated metal walls of the Phoenix Steel Corp sit icily in dank shadows. On through fields of belching smokestacks and huge storage containers.

The scenery passes less quickly. A five-story apartment building looks somber with its dirtencrusted windows and greasy Venetian blinds. Opposite, a group of tenement houses stand in the glare of DuPont's smoke and flames. The passengers waiting on the platform of Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station look like molish members of a dust-filled underworld. The train pulls out into a complex of electric power lines, intricately crossing tracks, and still freight cars. It then runs parallel to a river, crosses over, and continues through a residential area. To the right, a small rowboat drifts lazily on a pond set among grassy walkways and elaborate shubbery. To the left stand weather-beaten houses crushed together on littered asphalt streets. A middle-aged woman stands in her musty living room, the wallpaper peeling and the rug spotted with stains. She buttons the coat of her seven-year-old boy and looks over to her other three children: "Now, are we all ready?" They walk out the door, with the mother in front, then down three flights of dark creaking stairs and out into the street, on their weekly visit to the park across the tracks. More smokestacks, water towers, sooty deteriorating buildings of brick and steel and concrete, seeming miles of fencing and wires and telephone poles. Some open fields, with empty picnic tables. A threesome awaits its turn at the tee of a golf course.

As the train rolls across a bridge, a huge sign proclaims, "Trenton Makes, the World Takes." A sign on the railroad station advertises "A Little Night Music" at the Majestic Theater in New York. Outside Trenton, on a plot of farmland, a gaunt bird picks at some seeds among some neatly-plowed furrows.

Elizabeth, N.J. The Hotel Winfield Scott stares soberly with its tired, blackened bricks. A woman sighs as she sponges the counter of the coffee shop, wondering why the hell she has to work on a Sunday. There is only one customer in the small room, a slight, balding man with a white shirt and narrow check tie. He sits at the counter with a half-empty cup of coffee in front of him. "You know, I think things will be much better in the spring," he is telling the waitress. "I'm almost sure that I'll be able to sell more of this new line of table clothes." He takes a sip of coffee.

The train enters a tunnel as it crosses under the Hudson River. In a minute it has halted in Penn Station, where crowds of people swirl on the platform, rushing to get a seat. The loudspeaker announces, "The Southern Crescent leaving in ten minutes for points north...New Haven... Providence...Boston." A uniformed porter carries the heavy suitcase of a tall, slender woman who wears sunglasses despite the dimness of the platform.

Through another tunnel and into the light of Brooklyn, where the Ronzoni factory advertises its macaroni, spaghetti, and egg noodles. Tenement after tenement after tenement appear, endless duplicates of shambling brick, cracked windows, and beaten roofs. Behind, the buildings of Manhattan's East Side stand fiercely on the edge of the island, presenting a glittering metallic wall. A few blocks away, a teenage girl with red-painted finger nails picks up a laundry basket in the greasy kitchen of her small home. She turns down the light of the hamburgers crackling on the stove and goes out onto the back porch, where blouses, pants, and underwear hang on a clothesline. She begins taking down the garments, putting the clothespins in her pocket, when she sees out of the corner of her eye an airplane rising in the sky. A blouse flaps in her hand as she stares at the plane now soaring high above the slender office building of downtown New York.

A seagull drinks water off the roof of a factory. The narrow streets flash by perpendicular to the tracks. Down through a narrow gorge bordered on both sides by elevated highways, and then a flat plain crowded by a colony of monstrous housing projects, each twenty-story building in the shadow of its neighbor.

New Rochelle, Scarsdale, Rye. Freshly-painted houses look onto well-kept lawns and broad, winding streets. A ten-year old girl, wearing her new blue skirt for the first time, knocks at the door of her friend's house. "No, Betty, Sarah went for a ride with her father. I'll tell her you were here." Betty turns and walks back to her house.

In New Haven a hoarse voice intones, "All off for Hartford, Springfield, and points north." A billboard in the grim station urges its readers to buy TV Guide. Concrete storage vats rise from the roof of the Interstate Container Corporation. A woman dressed in black slacks and wearing a felt hat walks her dog on a residential street. She watches as a burly man in a light T-shirt walks slowly on the other side of the street and enters a liquor store. She shakes her head with contempt and pulls her dog by the leash. "Come now, Pearl, we must move on," she says in a high voice.

At Old Saybrook boats sit lazily in a sheltered marina while ducks congregate on a small sand island. The tracks open up onto a large body of water, where a group of three men sit quietly in a rowboat, their fishing poles resting on the sides of the boat. A sign at the entrance to Pawtucket, Conn. announces that it is "A Good Place to Live, Work, or Play." A woman walks into Ted's laundromat. A passing truck hauls steel canoes.

More and more trees, and then Providence, R.I. A dog sniffs at a pile of garbage by the tracks. The train looks out on a sea of identical brick chimneys. Hood's Milk Factory is followed by the Royal Sales Co. A young man has hesitated all day, but at last he makes up his mind. He walks over to the telephone, picks up the receiver, and dials the number. His throat is dry. As he hears the phone picked up on the other end, he goes over in his mind the exact words he will use in asking her out to the movies.

The train speeds on into Massachusetts and its fields and woods. A Zayre shopping center is deserted. Modern bungalow houses begin to appear. The sun is low now, and a girl shields her eyes as she looks at the passing train. Houses appear more frequently, dark-brown tenement houses with broken fences and rusted rainspouts. Shortly the inflexible lines of the Prudential Center appear, and the train glides into Boston's Back Bay. On the left is a series of gutted apartments, their red bricks turned black with age and filth. On the right renovated townhouses line well-swept streets. Mass Pike runs parallel to the train tracks on the left.

"South Station, Boston, last stop, all off," the conductor shouts, and the train slows down as it passes under the State Street Bank. Downtown Boston is dark as the high-rising office buildings shut out the last rays of the sun. A billboard advertises Playboy Magazine.

The Southern Crescent creaks into South Station, and in a minute its passengers have disembarked and are walking to the terminal. Inside the newstand and bakery are closed, and only a few people here and there wait in the high-ceilinged, dimly-lit hall. A wiry, haunch-backed man, wearing a plain grey uniform, whistles softly as he sweeps the floor with a lazy push of his broom.