Word: crescentic
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However that may be, no funeral vapors suffuse Platform 14 at New York City's Penn Station, from which the Crescent pulls out each day at 2:45 p.m. under Amtrak's auspices. (Southern takes over at Washington.) Rather, for the passenger embarking on the 1,378-mile, 28-hour trip to New Orleans, the Crescent City, there is the comforting scent of soap and polish, the promise of solicitude, of pride and punctuality. Not to mention a rockaby sleep, punctuated by the occasional hissing stop, and a glimpse of some dimly lit Southern station in the dark...
...sure, the view from Bedroom A or the dome car exposes every automobile graveyard, garbage dump, trailer park, parking lot, drive-in, burger joint, shopping mall, sewage plant, forsaken factory, slum and rural hovel in the unwritten guidebook of desecrated America. Its obverse, as the Crescent weaves its whistling way south toward summer, is a varied, often startlingly beautiful landscape of feathery woods and forests, roses and rhododendrons, pastures and cornfields, laced with urgent streams and dreaming lakes. The earth turns from New Jersey silt to Maryland sand, from Georgia red clay to Alabama's black bottom. Grand estates...
Southbound, the Crescent serves dinner both evenings of the trip (the first night, until 10:30 p.m.). "Dinner in the diner/ Nothing could be finer." Well, almost. Each table is dressed with linen cloth and napkins, heavy silverware and a vase of three fresh yellow chrysanthemums. The fare runs to excellent Southern fried chicken with cream gravy, roast beef and steak; there are hot breads and lemon pie. One couple does object testily when the steward is unable to produce a corkscrew for the bottle of Moulin-á-Vent '76 they had brought to table. It turns out that...
...English couple, Donald and Tania Stewart, get off at Greenville to see the Great Smokies. For young voyagers who never rode the old Chiefs and Limiteds, the passage is the message. "Nostalgia," said one, "is for people who ride phony coal burners at Disneyland." (Note for nostalgia freaks: the Crescent no longer goes clickety-clack; the rails are now continuously welded in 1,400-ft. segments from Washington to New Orleans. En route, the train passes through 15,000 grade crossings...
Many of the Crescent personnel also are younger than they used to be. The Washington-to-Atlanta sleeping-car porter is amiable John Fox, a 29-year-old Bahamian. The chef who takes over in Atlanta confides that he is "25 years, six months and five days old." Not that the old guard has changed entirely. Grizzled Luther King, the black sleeping-car porter who replaces Fox in Atlanta, is a kindly, dignified gentleman, typical of the old Pullman employee. He has worked the rails since 1942, when he made $150 a month; now he makes a guaranteed...