Some of the comments I got from my most recent blog posting really made me think! (If you haven’t read the post entitled Train Trouble for Granny on 50(24), you might want to read it.)
I think we have among train-lovers, just as we do in our society, a pecking order that is based on money. It’s clear to me that some who ride in sleeper cars or business class every time they board a train really believe that many passengers in coach class are borderline criminals and thugs. Others, who have ridden in coach most of their lives, see the coach passengers as people who are ‘more like me” and view the sleeper car crowd as a hoity-toity bunch. Does a love of trains bring these people together? I don’t know.
On my next trip, leaving in only nine days, I’m going to do a little research. I’m going to look for riffraff in the coach seats and try to determine what percentage of those in coach actually fit into that category (by my own standards, of course). On the first and last legs of my trip, I will actually be riding in coach, as I have done for most of my life until recently.
Stay tuned for the riffraff count! I am packing lighter every time I pull away from the station! If I run out of deodorant and clean t-shirts, I may become riffraff in the middle of the trip!
Below are two questions. Why not answer the questions and help me define and count the riffraff?
I thought they rode on the bus.
If I can’t afford a sleeper, I don’t go. I really like traveling in a sleeper, but the coach passengers are rough.
I do ride coach most of the time as it is usually overnight. Being a railroader, I can sleep in most any position. In fact, I do better in the coach seat than lying down. Of course there is the advantage of having meals in your fare but I don’t mind patronizing the diner.
Most people are quiet as they are plugged into their various electronic gizmos.
The Lounge car really turns out to be the worst especially on 5 and 6—must be the rowdy Californians.
One time back in the 70′s I had a 21 day pass and would buy a sleeper room overnight if it was available to get cleaned up. But really if you are a good boy/girl scout you can improvise.
My worst coach trip was on MLK Day out of Chicago to New Orleans……They nicknamed the train, “The Chicken Bone Train” as most of the coach passengers dined on box chicken dinners going South. It never did calm down and I voted to buy a roomette from Champaign, IL to Memphis. By then the box lunch crowd had departed overnight.
One time I was refused in the diner as the First Class passengers were to be fed first—I complained to the conductor and he got me seated immediately to the shugrin of the steward.
The train was running late and we were going to get “Free” beef stew a la Dinty Moore. Not for me, thank you.
This is really treading on shifting ground because definitions of “riff raff” are going to vary widely depending on the viewpoint of the person and his;/her background, socioeconomic place etc. etc. This isn’t a black and white thing but a very “grey” area. WHen our kids were growing up and were in the junior high school age one of them asked me “Are we rich people?” and I said that “rich” doesn’t necessarily mean just how much money you have, but the quality of life you have “in comparison to—————–what or who?” It is that relativity that makes quantifying your assessment of who is riff raff and who isn’t a very problematical issue. I don’t think the poll questions are a very good assessment of the differences between riff raff and non-riff raff. Now we have ridden both sleeper and coach—for a day trip, coach is just fine. Does that make us “riff raff”? but we have also ridden sleepers and private cars—so does that also make us “hoity toity”? ‘In the words of the inimitable Yul Brynner in Anna and the King, ” ’tis a puzzlement”.
C.
PS–when I first started riding ATK in ’96 for the fun of it, I noticed very quickly that many of the riders were people who feared flying (and that was before 9/11) were grossly overweight and couldn’t fit in airline seats, were smokers, or were in many cases young families who wanted their kids to have the train experience, or were retired people who had the time to take advantage of the leisure of train travel. . That demographic may have changed over time—-your research on your trips may show that.
C.
I put the survey in this post primarily as a joke! But, some of the results on the first question are interesting. Not what I expected. Maybe, like Carol Voss said, it’s because of the wide range of definitions of “riffraff.” AND, Karl, having ridden the bus recently from Savannah to Atlanta, I can tell you that your assumption is correct!
Years ago, I was showing friends from California a small historic town on the Fraser River. I’ve been visiting there for years and have never felt threatened in anyway. There is a large First Nations (Canadian Indian) population, many of whom still live traditionally by fishing. They have a tendancy to hang around in town on street corners, and engage passers by in conversation. My fiend’s wife was terrified. Oddly enough she was from northern California, and was used to street people from the small agricultural towns there. We camped well outside of town. I assured her she was safe, and no one would bother us. (No one did). I felt sorry for her because she was tense with fear of the unknown. She was unconsolable. I guess she felt “a stranger in a strange land”.
Like Franklin Roosevelt said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”.
When I was a boy vacationing with my parents, both my mum and me were nervous about encountering an eccentric old woman on a beach in Oregon. She was an American Indian, surf fishing. My dad engaged her in conversation and we chatted for hours. What misconceptions we had of each other. We thought American Indians all lived like Sakajaweah, and she thought English people were all Lords and Ladies living in castles and on speaking terms with the Queen.
By and large, most people travelling coach are “just folks”, but some of the people that travel first class are convinced they are criminal riff-raff.
I prefer to travel in Business Class on the Palmetto because I can afford it, the car is usually less crowded and the wifi works better. If traveling overnight, I always use a sleeper because it is more private, more comfortable and I can plug in my laptop to monitor the signals on ATCS and turn on my scanner without having to use earphones. Its a matter of convenience and comfort for me, not a class or “riff raff” issue.
I won’t ride coach on Long Distance Amtrak trains because I don’t want Amtrak conductors or coach attendants telling me where to sit. My last experience in coach on an empty Silver Star train the coach attendant insisted that my party of 3 (including a 3 year old child) share a set of 4 seats with another passenger. Again, the coach was 90% empty, but he insisted that we must sit in those exact 3 seats. We kept moving (and getting yelled at), and then the attendant insisted that we sit in a row without a window! Even though the train was 90% empty, he insisted that row was was the only allocated to our destination station. Finally, I caused such a scene that the attendant walked us to the next car – which was 100% empty – and let us sit wherever we wanted. The car remained empty the duration of the trip. At one point I asked the attendant why he cared so much where we sat, and he said “because it makes my job easier”. I’ve heard from other Amtrak riders that this “Kindergarten Cop” mentality is only a problem on East Coast Long Distance trains, and that Western train conductors don’t do this.