Coolness aside, traveling by train gives us our lives back

The train to Washington, D.C., is arriving early.

Which is a good start for a train. Being early.

And when I read that announcement last week from Gov. Bob McDonnell, that the passenger train from Norfolk to Washington would be ready ahead of schedule and by the end of the year, I was unnaturally excited. I might even have let out a barely audible, slightly embarrassing "woo-woo," as though I were some kind of engineer.

But why?

I started counting the number of times I've taken a train.

There were a few kiddie rides through the zoo and maybe once or so around the mall at Christmastime, but I've only ridden an Amtrak train once, more than a decade ago, in California. I can barely tell you anything about the trip because I was so sillily in love.

Oh, sure, I've halfheartedly considered taking the train from Newport News to Washington plenty of times since then, mostly as an alternative to driving on I-95, but Amtrak isn't exactly cheap. The average trip can cost $40 each way. The train ride to the nation's capital isn't fast - about 4 hours - so the trade-offs seemed even.

Largely, the ride seemed inconvenient when a car provides so much freedom.

But last week the thought of me as a train-traveling gentleman in the modern era felt very turn of the century, 20th century, very cosmopolitan and very Joe Biden. I was a little giddy, and maybe you were, too.

Which makes no sense. Modern-day train travel is hardly romantic - except when you compare it to the process of driving to D.C.

Recently, on a trip to Washington, I was nearly run off the road by the same guy two different times. My wife and I alternated between gripping the steering wheel and determining what we should do with the other person's belongings if only one of us were to survive the trip. We faced long stops and short gos, spiteful merging and painfully outdated traffic reports. Gas was expensive.

By the time we arrived, our only accomplishment during those six hours was that we were still alive. Not bad, but hardly staggering.

Compare that to a recent flight I took to visit family in Ohio.

On the plane, I finished a book that I had been dragging out since October.

I slept. On the way back, I got to the airport early. I had a beer. I made a phone call. On the flight itself, I read 150 pages of a new book. I worked on my computer on a few stories that had been hanging over me. All that in a few hours.

Big deal, right? So why did that make me so happy? Why was that so much easier than driving in the thick tangle of minivans and Mustangs through Fredericksburg and Woodbridge? Because of what I was not doing: cursing, seeing how close I could get to someone's bumper, considering calling 911 to report aggressive and possibly drunken drivers. Instead, I was doing what I wanted.

The reason the train's impending arrival downtown is important - and is met with such good feelings - is that it makes time our own again, something we're not used to in Hampton Roads.

It's about having the opportunity to retrieve a few hours for yourself, and that's enough to make anyone let out a full-throated, slightly embarrassing, "Woo-woooo!"

Mike Gruss, 757-446-2277, mike.gruss@pilotonline.com, pilotonline.com/gruss