For these people, Manhattan is home, journey's end.
For me, it is a point of departure, journey's beginning.
This is Penn Station, once one of the great railway termini of the world.
Today it doesn't look or even feel like a railroad station, more like a lower level
shopping precinct, a sanctuary from the hubbub above.
I buy my ticket at a counter that looks like a bank, and as at banks, there are always
those who think they got there first.
Excuse me, ma'am, I'm just getting a ticket here.
Could I have a ticket from...
I have none, ma'am.
The slips that I created with the number on it.
I have no slip here, ma'am.
I haven't got your slip.
I'd like a ticket from New York to Los Angeles, please.
New York to Los Angeles?
All the way, sir.
When do you like to travel, sir?
I'd like to travel this afternoon, on the Broadway.
The Broadway Lemonette to Chicago departing 3 o'clock is now receiving passengers to the
West Gate of Track 14, West Gate Track 14.
Stopping at Harrisburg, Altoona...
The place names are reeled off as casually as stopping places on a bus, but they'll take
a day and a night to cover.
There's nothing quite like the sense of anticipation at the start of a long journey, and this one
to Los Angeles is 3,000 miles.
One knows what one thinks it'll be like.
How different will it be in reality?
Apollo 4 Nav credible
This train's on its way to Chicago, a thousand miles away.
Last time I made this journey 30 years ago, it was in one of America's crack expressies, the 20th century.
Then, before the great glut of motorways and jumbos, a score of similar trains left New York daily.
The Broadway is one of a handful of survivors.
In the last hundred years or so on this route from coast to coast, millions of passengers have preceded me.
One was my fellow countryman, Robert Louis Stevenson.
He found, as I hope I shall, that taking a train journey across a country is as good a way as any of getting to see it and meet some of its people.
His train was crowded with immigrants. This one is half full.
Had we been making the trip in midsummer, we'd have had to book a month beforehand.
Americans go by train for several reasons. Some belong to the 20 million who are too scared to fly.
Some belong to the 20 million who don't own a car. And some just find the train a pleasant relaxation, having the freedom to move around, play cards or read, eat or drink at leisure, or even complain about the trains.
You pay as much for one trip from Harrisburg to New York as you would pay probably for a month or two months transportation costs.
They just did away with five trains.
Yeah, they took five main trains off.
But it still, economically, is cheaper to use the train than to drive to New York and spend days there.
You pay $12 a day for a car. You take a train, you have a couple hours trip. You get in a cab, you have 15 minutes, and you're at any hotel you want to go to New York.
Economically and trackability, it's more feasible to take the train with a lousy service.
Our trains are never on time, one to two hours late. They don't try to accommodate you, they try to decommodate you.
American railroads are nothing like what they were. In the 50s, when air and automobile travel came into its own, the big companies went bankrupt one by one.
And in 1971, Congress established Amtrak, the US equivalent of British Rail, to take the long-distance passenger trains over.
For Amtrak, it's been an uphill struggle, operating engines and coaches that are more than 30 years old, using lines that still belong to the private companies and where their freight always has priority.
Little wonder that Amtrak's trains are often slow, noisy, and uncomfortable, and only rarely arrive on time.
Today, the Broadway Limited has an extra coach attached to it. It's the Pennsylvania, built 51 years ago as a perk for the president of the Penn Railroad.
In those days, millionaires' private coaches were almost too a penny. This, one of the few survivors, is the hobby of a New York lawyer called George Pins.
I think that there are certain things in one's life that we look at and say, I am going to have that, whatever the cost may be in money or other things. And this was one of those things in my life.
I saw this car very much by chance, but when I saw it, I realized it had great historical value, and I resolved that I was going to be the person who would purchase it and restore it and operate it in the grand tradition of American railroading, which is what I've attempted to do in the nine years that I've owned it.
If you want to hire the Pennsylvania for a holiday, complete with Cook and Stewart, it'll cost you $500 a day. It still costs George Pins about $20,000 a year to maintain it.
It's a big loser because the cost of maintaining something like this in operating condition is considerable. However nice it might look, it's 51 years old.
And there are appliances on this car which must be maintained, which must be kept in a safe operating condition, and they shake and rattle down the railroad, and they are expensive to maintain. It's like an old house that vibrates all the time. You have to love it.
Maybe it was the state of the track or the age of the coach, maybe the sameness of the scenery, but I didn't find traveling in Mr. Pins's coach quite the joyride I'd expected. And as for the observation platform, it was not only drafty and cold, but I had to hang on for dear life in order not to lose my balance.
As the sun goes down, we approach the Susquehanna River. The beauty of whose name, said Robert Louis Stevenson when he arrived here, equaled the beauty of the land.
And a little later we glide into Dark and Harrisburg, named after a Yorkshireman who settled here 250 years ago.
On this short leg of the journey, 150 miles from New York, we are miraculously on time.
Here they unhitched the Pennsylvania and shoved it into a siding, an operation that cost Mr. Pins another $120.
In the siding, I was Mr. Pins's guest at dinner, along with 80-year-old Rogers Whitaker, generally acknowledged to be America's greatest railroad buff, who on tracks all over the world has traveled 2.5 million miles and who's seen the American passenger service decline year by year.
Now, if I'm going from New York to Seattle by rail, it now takes approximately 30 hours, that is a day and one quarter, more than it did 20 years ago, simply because of the miserable scheduling brought on by the miserable state of the track, by the miserable state of the equipment, and by a certain number of miserable employees.
But if I said to you, Rogers, you know, you're really a dinosaur living in the past.
Well, I've been a dinosaur for over three, four generations now, and I'm beginning to like the road.
What's the rest of the question?
Dinosaur or not, Rogers knows what he's talking about. He worked on the railroads in his youth. He was one of Amtrak's early advisors. Trains may be old and slow, he says, but compared with other forms of travel, by God, they're safe.
We were told that the highways are magnificent on the day of a small accident on Amtrak in the New York Times. Picture of the wreckage is on the front page. Back on page 24, it was a small item, two inches high in type.
The National Transportation Safety Board had said that in 1978, 50,000 people had been killed on the highways. Right. Don't get on the safe old trains, get on the safe old highways and get yourself killed.
Two million, three hundred thousand people hospitalized in one year. What is that, 40,000 people a week?
Rogers, tell me about the old days of riding on the great trains like the Supercheese. Did the romances bring up on these trips?
Well, in regard to that, it's a terribly personal question. Yes, in a word, as far as I'm concerned, twice. Not bad either, as I recall. I hope you don't need more questions like that.
May I propose to those? God save the railroads.
God save the railroads.
But today, not even the Almighty could save the railroad at Harrisburg.
Here in the ruins of the capital of Pennsylvania's mainline station is the story in miniature of the decline of the American passenger service.
It's a far cry from what the Harrisburg Times wrote in 1906, just two years after this building was completed.
There is no town in Pennsylvania, it said, that is so advantageously situated with respect to railroad connections as Harrisburg.
From every point of the compass, these great public thoroughfares of travel and trade enter the borough, and passengers and freight trains arrive and depart almost every hour.
Giving to the town, or at least that part of it adjacent to the depot, a scene of constant bustle and activity.
That evening, having said goodbye to Mr. Pins in the Pennsylvania, we were on our way again on the Broadway's overnight journey to Chicago.
Early the next morning, all three set to work. Judy thought she would grow some flowers, and Jonathan started to make a paved garden.
But Paddington didn't know what to do. Gardening was much harder than it looked, especially with calls.
Although for most passengers it was bedtime, a group of us in that very American institution of the club car, and led by some teachers from a deaf and dumb school, began carousing the night away.
That's what. What do you want? Do you want a table of steaks? That'll be the day.
Give me a rich table, what a beautiful table.
Give me a two-hour dog.
Give me a drink.
Serve a thing. I love you. But I'm not worthy of you. So why waste your tears over a thing?
By morning we were into Illinois and the makings of a fine, fresh autumn day.
When I wake up in the morning love, and the sunlight hurts my eyes. And something without one in love, bears heavy on my mind.
Then I look at you, and the world's alright with me. Just one look at you, and I know it's gonna be a lovely day.
A lovely, lovely day.
Have you been in Atlanta? Yeah. Oh that's a beautiful one. We went by it, but I went before I met you.
At breakfast the relaxing news that we're running two hours late. But as we near Journey's end there's still plenty to see.
Here, the discreet houses of the Chicago bourgeoisie.
And then, like the curtain rising on a grand opera back cloth, the city itself.
That toddling town, the song calls it. And there's no doubt that Chicago still is, as it always was, the pivotal city of America.
The place where all lines meet. The biggest merchandise center in the country.
If you care for facts and figures, Illinois, of which Chicago is the principal city, has more miles of railroad track than any other state except Texas.
Forty thousand freight cars come in and out of here every day, carrying everything from prefabricated houses to liquid gas, frozen meat to gravel.
Freight is and always has been the profitable side of American railroading.
But not so long ago the long-distance luxury passenger trains, what used to be called the crack varnish, earned their keep too.
The Super Chief, which ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, was one of the great trains of America.
You had to be rich to ride it, for there was a surcharge for every passenger. And the standard of service was incredibly high.
The food had to be prepared perfect. You'd see the arm go up and stop the waiter, take it back, put fresh parsley on there.
That steak don't look good. Get a better one. I don't like the skin on that potato. Get a better one.
You had to be just shining. You had to be able to look in their brass buttons on their white jackets and see yourself.
If one of the waiters should happen to get a spot, a coffee spot or a gravy spot, any spot on you, immediately after setting down his tray and doing what he was doing,
immediately get out of that car, get a clean jacket or a clean apron on, and get right back so the service was never interrupted.
Well, I started working on the Super Chief as a waiter. And from there I went to a valet. We had valet service at that time.
And then the bartender. And my final days on the Super Chief was a dining car steward.
Most of our stewards at that time were European stewards. And Peter was one of the best.
Everything that he would fix, especially for the celebrities, was always, it's a la Peter Lombardi. I'll fix you some shrimp a la Lombardi.
I had a passenger ask him once, is the trout fresh? He said, lady, I'll show you how fresh it is. He said, chef, take the trout out of the water and kill it for dinner. For this lady.
When the Super Chief came on, it was just that much faster and that much more luxurious.
I always thought they were very romantic. And you're going right through the Wild West territory. And then at night you just hear this woo woo woo.
We had a sort of sense of being all alone in this vastness and this one bit of progress in civilization moving through the night. It was rather exciting.
This is where the Super Chief, the Chief, the Captain and all the other grand trains that travel to the West Coast used to arrive and depart.
The skeleton of Chicago's once famous Dearborn station. Here the famous movie stars of the 40s and 50s changed trains for engagements in Los Angeles and New York.
There used to be tracks out there in the Santa Fe. The Chief used to pull in and the movie stars used to come right through here and go right out through there and through the side.
And drawn by the magic of the great names of Hollywood came a boy from the Chicago back streets Len Lizovich. For him it was the gateway to another world.
I was about 16 years old. My brother gave me this camera and I used it. I started taking pictures. 79 cent camera. Nothing fancy, you just shoot. No flash.
If the sun wasn't out you were in trouble. At one fifteen a train would come in. So I'd be up there waiting. The old waiting game.
Then I'd shoot my pictures. Of course they'd look around and catch them. Laurel and Hardy, they were nice. They stood around. They had time so.
And the three stooges they posed for me. He sat down. He says right by the no parking seat. You got enough pictures kid? I say yeah. Are you sure? He says oh yeah. Nice. Very nice.
And Dorothy Lamour, Joey Brown, Ralph Balamie, Gareo Garson, Hedy Lamar. Big stars.
They came in and they had state troopers protecting them. But I got pictures. I got to find a way to get them. All to myself.
And don't forget, you know, I was no professional. Just a kid standing around in a jacket and asking actors and actresses to pose. While here they maybe just got through posing for professional photographers sake.
Emptiness. Just look back and see all that stuff that happened before. Nothing's there. I mean it's a shame. I lost something. It was part of me. You know it's a station like that. What was happening. The things that were going on was really terrific.
Step up there's two lines there.
But if Dearborn's dead, Union Station on any weekday evening comes very much alive. In a little more than an hour and a half, a quarter of a million Chicagoans set out for families and home.
A hundred double-decker trains whisked them off to suburbs like Cicero and Harvey and Skokie.
Newspaper readers in the dress circle, games players in the stalls.
The rest of us California bound will be following the old Union Pacific route, the first line ever to span the country.
This was the route the early settlers took when seeking a new life in the undiscovered wilderness of the West.
For Union Station, the end of a busy day. The last commuter has gone home. The concourse will not be needed until morning and the Zephyr hedges out to the West.
With each new journey come the same old questions. Who's aboard? How's the food? What's to see? For those going all the way across, it means two nights and most of three days aboard.
Down there in the dark, I'm told, but I can't see it, is the mighty Mississippi.
In the old days, the Mississippi stood as the last great natural barrier to the West. What lay beyond, you had to discover for yourself.
In the morning, an awakening in another world, the vast, golden, empty spaces of Nebraska, the heartland of America.
When Stevenson traveled this way, he wrote, we were at sea. There's no other adequate expression on the plains of Nebraska.
It was a world he went on almost without a feature, an empty sky, an empty earth. Front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a queue across a billiard board.
On either hand, the green plane ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. The train toiled over this infinity like a snake.
Pablo S departments because they loved就可以 that's clear ever hence notify the
Eating scrambled eggs and bacon while going through country like this was one of the pleasantest
parts of the whole trip. And the relaxed atmosphere on board, in contrast to air travel, both
cramped and disorientating, is perhaps one reason why Amtrak has gained an additional
four million passengers a year in only nine years of operate.
Well, we wanted to try Amtrak. My wife hasn't been on a train in a long time and I was on
a train in Mexico in April and I wanted to see how the trains here work.
It's been many, many years since I've been on a train in the United States.
What do you think of me? Well, so far it's been very nice. I slept
like a baby. After breakfast, one can move around, visit
the observation dome or the club car, when, unlike in English trains where we all try
and avoid each other, one can meet plenty of fellow passengers just dying to pass the
time of day. Being on the train, it's a little tiring at
times. You don't get all the sleep that you'd like to get. But for what you can see, and
the most beneficial thing out of the whole thing, I think, is the people that you meet.
Cross-sections of the country, different people that you've never seen before, who at the
first time you meet them, they're kind of like a stranger to you. But after you've met
a person once, then they become your friend. I've had a daughter living in Marin County,
that's near San Francisco, since 1961. And I've been on this train twice a year since
1961. And now I live out there now. Now I'm just
back-vistic. Do you like flying?
No, I like the train better. I don't like planes. I don't trust anybody,
let alone pilots or these men I've never met. And I get very uncomfortable on a plane,
and I feel it physically. Even the movement of the train bothers me, but planes isn't
tolerable. I'm going for the 9th annual National Free
University and Learning Network Conference, which is being held there in Denver this year.
And it's a weekend conference, and there'll be about representatives from some of the
200 free universities around the country. I had a teacher who was an anthropologist,
and each year we take a different, like we read about the Eskimos, and we read about
the Africans the next year. I'm an English major, and I hear about books from her that
I'd never heard of, because she lived with an African tribe for a year. And so she's
well informed. She's an anthropologist. I help operate full circle resource exchange,
which is what we call a learning network. And the network is a telephone information
referral service. And so that we put people in contact with each other so that they can
teach, learn, and share interests with each other.
Each planet and each constellation has a certain vibration. And they manifest in different
combinations in different ways, and in effect, human beings in different ways.
When we had King Tut, you know, in San Francisco for all those months, the argument exhibit,
I took a wonderful course in that, a gal who had studied, really studied. And I've taken
history of art courses, so I knew a little bit about King Tut, but I really enjoyed that
course.
Astrologers can certainly tell, you know, homicidal maniacs. You can certainly, you
know, see that in a chart.
I belong to one group of over 50s, and everybody in that group has moved out there because
their children, his or her children, have moved out there. That's the history of California.
Denver, Colorado. Time for a wash and brush up for the train, maybe for some of the passengers,
too.
We're going to tie a string to the train so it won't get away from us. We're coming back.
Most will be back on board when it pulls out later. But I'm going off into the Rockies
on a brief excursion, and will rejoin the Zephyr in a few days' time.
Please be carful. Leave one pass back in the car. Thank you.
After the Mississippi, the Rocky Mountains were the second great natural barrier to the
building of a railroad west. But after the discovery of gold and silver in these hills,
the early pioneers soon opened the country up. The rolling stock and equipment of those
early steam trains has now mostly disappeared. Though only Americans, perhaps, would think
of dismantling an old water tower like this and rebuilding it as a mountain greenery home.
A whistle toot away stands another home fashioned from old railway stock. Two cabooses carted
8,000 feet up a mountain and knocked together by a new style pioneer, a young Easterner,
Jim Keith.
We were looking for an alternative lifestyle, alternative kind of house that we could afford,
and we got the idea of using a railroad caboose. Our biggest problem, starting out, was people
were used to the Grapes of Wrath kind of idea of a box car where the migrant workers are
living in this little structure. So it was kind of hard to convince people that it was
okay to bring them in and do it. And luckily we started long enough ago that the restrictions
from the counties and such just weren't so strong as they are today.
Was it a hell of a job getting this caboose up here on top of this 8,000 foot hill?
Well, this was a little easier. I had the first caboose for experience and Charlotte
and I, my wife, were able to live up here with our boys throughout the summer and the
weather was good enough and we could stay in a tent and do it ourselves. We did it without
hooking up electricity so we hand drilled all our connections and hand sawed everything
and just did everything. It was very aesthetic and it felt good to do our own house and yet
do it financially where it wasn't a burden. After three cars we found we had the equipment
and the know-how to do it, continue doing it. So immediately we were done here in our
local town, put together a store out of several more train cars and now we sell the train
cars and deliver them anywhere someone would like.
If Jim Keith is one example of successful free enterprise, the railroad that operates
the other side of the hill from him is another. It's the Denver and Rio Grande, the only long
distance passenger train not owned by Amtrak and which goes through some of the most spectacular
scenery in the country. Three days a week its six coaches make the 600 mile 14 hour
trip from Denver to Salt Lake City. On the other three it returns. The company makes
so much profit on its freight trains that Amtrak refuses to take over its passenger
service. It's a happy train this, for most of the passengers are on holiday, bound for
the skiing slopes in winter for the lakes and rivers in summer.
The Union Pacific route bypasses the Rockies by going north of them and a day or two later
I drove from Denver to Cheyenne and also from summer to winter to board the Zephyr once
more. But when I reached Cheyenne and made my way to the old Union station in the centre
of the town, I found that the Zephyr didn't run there anymore and some of the passengers
went best pleased.
I think they stink, at least this one from Cheyenne to San Francisco. Well not only that,
here in the last month since we've been here they've had three derailments right outside
of town here and then I understand the month before that they had another one, a big one.
And it just seemed like they, well it looks like the whole thing is sort of deteriorating,
running down. They say that they don't stop here now because they back it in about ten
miles and they have to back it out and it'll save an hour from Denver to San Francisco
by doing that and it'll save thirty minutes from Chicago to San Francisco. But I think
that's ridiculous, we've been riding this train now at least fifty years and I don't
see why they want to change it now because it certainly doesn't help that much.
So the Zephyrs passengers were all ferried out by bus to a halt called Borry, some ten
miles away and here a path was hacked out for us through snow and ice to reach the expected
train. As you can see there's not much more to Borry than its name and to add to the general
view, funnier, the Zephyr, are you surprised, was almost an hour late.
Can I give you a hand? Just a minute, just a minute, let me come down.
Schmelz is a 일man.
I believe I asked one earlier.
Amtrak 5.
We're 10 minutes ago. You can proceed at normal speed.
Proceed at normal speed. Thank you very much.
Beyond Cheyenne is the desert.
Mile upon mile of it wrote Robert Louis Stevenson,
and not a tree, a bird or a river.
The train he went on was the one piece of life in all the deadly land.
It was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed
in this paralysis of man and nature.
It was across this wilderness in the winter of 1868
that the Irish labourers of the Union Pacific
forged the tracks of the first railroad to the west.
With them went a brilliant young photographer named A.J. Russell,
who has left us this record of their endeavours.
The labourers had much to contend with.
The harsh weather, primitive living conditions,
and nothing to spend their pay on but whores and liquor
in the shanty towns that sprang up along the track.
Roaring impromptu cities, Stevenson called them,
full of gold and lust and death.
In addition there were often attacks by local Indians,
who rightly saw the coming of the iron horse
as a lasting threat to their buffalo grazing grounds.
But despite all, the men pushed on, surveying, grading, blasting.
Meanwhile, across the high sierras, another line was coming from the west,
that of the central Pacific with its workforce of some 5,000 Chinese.
They had to carve a track up to and over the 7,000 foot high Donner Pass.
At first their physique was suspect,
but they soon proved to be every bit as hardworking and efficient
as the Irish of the Union Pacific, and a good deal more sober.
In the spring of 1869, when the two lines were only a few miles apart,
the central Pacific's chief engineer won a wager of $10,000
when his men completed laying 10 miles of track in one day,
a feat that has never been equaled anywhere in the world.
Today the meeting place in northern Utah has become a national park.
The main line no longer runs here, but they've relayed a mile or two of track
and built replicas of the two engines that originally faced each other that day,
the central Pacific's Jupiter and the Union Pacific's 119.
The two engines are now in the same line,
but the main line is now a little bit more
together that day, the central Pacific's Jupiter and the Union Pacific's 119.
And on every anniversary of the joining of the two lines,
local townspeople dress up as the chief participants,
and in their actual words, reenact the ceremony of the Golden Spike
as it took place on May the 10th, 1869.
Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the officials of both railroads,
the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, I bid you welcome.
We are met today to commemorate the completion of a project
which is a remarkable example of the vision, the determination,
and the labor of thousands of men in a union which this day shall be consummated forever.
We are assembled here to link the ends of the earth,
to complete a new and shorter route between Europe and the Orient,
and to join the raw riches of the American West
with the finished products of our industrial east.
It's also noteworthy that the Pacific Railroad was completed six years ahead of the time allotted for its construction.
How about that? Yeah.
The grains, the sweat, and the muscle of thousands of men have joined in this great venture
under the guidance of Almighty God.
But it is with profound sorrow that we remember and pay homage to the hundreds of men
who in completion of the Pacific Railroad gave their lives.
I should like to draw to your attention this spike.
On three of the sides are the names of railroad officials,
and on the fourth side is this sentence,
May God continue the unity of our country as this railroad unites the two great oceans of the world.
Now an iron band spanned the country from coast to coast,
and henceforth the railroad became an integral part
not only of the country's travel and commerce, but of American folklore.
It was a situation that the movies, when they came, were quick to exploit,
and when it came to acting out people's fantasies,
no expense was too great, nothing was impossible.
That evening we went to Ogden to board the Midnight Zephyr for the West Coast.
Who could have guessed that Ogden's Union Station now features regular dinner dances,
and that there would be some delightfully tipsy Mormons on hand to ply us with loving cups
and drink a toast to my 60th so healthy birthday.
In the night passed Reno and across the humble desert,
and in the morning up into the snow line of the Sierras.
This was where the Chinese built 15 tunnels 112 years ago.
The country reminded Robert Louis Stevenson of his beloved Scotland.
I am usually very calm over the displays of nature, he wrote,
but you will scarcely believe how my heart leaped at this.
I had come home again, home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.
Every spire of pine along the hilltop was more dear to me than a blood relation.
And a man from Maine, after enduring days of sultry desert, declared among the pine trees,
by God I smell pitch again.
From the snows of the Sierras we came down to the sunshine of Sacramento, California's state capital.
Here they've built a railway museum on the site of the town's original station.
And the day we were there, its stock was being swelled by a person from the Santa Fe Railroad
of engine number 1010, one of the 19 engines that had taken the eccentric millionaire Death Valley Scotty
on his private record-breaking run from Los Angeles to Chicago back in 1905.
We're impressed by what we see so far and we know it's going to be something that everybody in Sacramento
and the state of California will be proud of for years to come. Thank you.
Applause
Music
This was a great day for the local rail bus, those with an eye for the finer points of rolling stock.
Few of them knew that one of the staff helping to show them round was a former hobo, U.P. Jones,
a friend of all the old-time hobos seen here at the annual convention.
Frying Pan Jack was just down here not too long ago. He came down from Oregon.
Hood River Blackie, he was down. Of course, steam train Murray, he's the king of the hobos.
And they always have elections every year in Britt, Iowa. I only went once.
And I think he ran unopposed this year and I think he's still a king of the hobos.
He was king last year, steam train Murray. So a colorful old gentleman.
Music
I was only 10, I guess. First time I didn't get too far, maybe a couple hundred miles.
He grabbed me and sent me back home. I was a good boy, yet, well, for quite a while then.
Then I decided, well, got to go again. So I hopped the first freight out of town.
I ended up in Los Angeles, California. And took quite a while to get there, maybe three weeks.
Stopping here and stopping there and seeing the sights. But I really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it.
Music
It was moving pretty slow. You could run alongside of it and jump in the boxcar door.
Of course, today you couldn't do it because most of the boxcars are plugged doors and they're all closed when they're running so you can't get on them.
So you'd have to ride a gondola. So you'd run alongside, just grab on and climb up and get in there.
The bulls, which I mean railroad police, they were very tough. It all depends where you were at.
At one place in San Luis, they didn't shoot at you. Illinois Central had one where they all had nicknames.
The one I especially remember was Winchester Pete in Carbondale, Illinois, because he'd shoot first and then ask later.
And Houston, Texas was another bad place. If they caught you, they'd beat the hell out of you.
And I mean working over, but good.
And by and large, why you didn't meet too many, but when you did, you better be moving.
Music
This is Oakland, San Francisco, where we change trains for the last lap of our journey west.
This train, which runs from Seattle to Los Angeles, is called the Coast Starlet.
It's the most successful of all Amtrak trains, and on public holidays like Labor Day and Thanksgiving, it's impossible to get a seat.
I don't want that again. I do not want that again.
With a return fare from San Francisco to Los Angeles almost half what it is by air,
it's not surprising, as Amtrak's man on the west coast explains, why so many young people ride this train.
We feel the train is popular because it serves every major college, university, and campus along the west coast,
starting from Seattle and going all the way down to Los Angeles.
Now this train carries upward of 600 people. A trip during the peak periods is our number one ridership train in long distance,
right here in the land of where the automobile is the most prevalent.
Perhaps the largest per capita of automobiles in the world is in Southern California.
All the same, you have to have the time to make this trip. This is a lazy, ambling sort of train.
The distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles is about the same as from Edinburgh to London.
That journey, as you may know, takes around five hours. This one, when the train isn't late, takes 11.
If you want to in a hurry, you fly. If you need flexibility, use the automobile.
But it's the safest, most comfortable form of transportation is riding the train.
We will make it. We can make it because it's a good way to travel and it's a dependable way.
And most important right now, it's the most fuel efficient mode of transportation when you run at least 100 passengers or more on a trip.
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There, at long last, is the Pacific. We've crossed America.
On no other coast that I know, wrote our old friend Robert Louis Stevenson,
shall you enjoy such a spectacle of ocean's greatness, such beauty of changing color, or such degrees of thunder in the sound?
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Now I'm at Journey's end. It's been a great trip. If I'd gone by air, I'd have saved much time.
But what would I have done with the time I'd saved?
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I'll remember, for a long time, some of the things I saw, some of the people I met.
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Don't get on the safe old trains. Get on the safe old highways and get yourself killed.
I had a passenger ask me once, is the trout fresh? He said, lady, I'll show you how fresh it is.
He said, chef, take the trout out of the water and kill it for dinner for this lady.
They all had nicknames. The one I especially remember is Winchester Pete in Carpindale, Illinois, because he'd shoot first and then ask later.
And Dorothy Lamour, Joey Brown, Ralph Baloney, Gareer Garson, Hedy Lamarr, big stars.
How does that poem go? My heart is warm with the friends I make, and better friends I'll not be knowing.
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going.
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Next week in Great Railway Journeys of the World, Michael Frayn traces the Australian Transcontinental Railway from Sydney to Perth, half past seven, next Thursday.
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Seven distinguished writers, seven of the world's most famous trains, they all contributed to one of the most highly acclaimed series ever made for television.
The story of each journey is included in a magnificently illustrated book, Great Railway Journeys of the World, available now from ABC shops and bookshops.
They're available from the ABC shop in Hobart and from the ABC and Street Lawn system.
Nationwide is next tonight on ABC, reporting on the state budget. At nine o'clock, Eddie Shoestring gets involved with a religious sect in I'm a Believer.
The news is at ten to ten, and every man at ten o'clock looks at the problems of compulsive gambling. That's tonight on ABC.
Australia has been lucky with gas. Abundant reserves of natural gas have been discovered both on and offshore, but the gas is not easy to bring into production.
Weekend magazine reporter Jerry Maher has been looking at progress on Australia's most remote and expensive energy resource development, the Northwest Shelf Natural Gas Project.
I'm aboard the Thor, the derrick ship that's building the first production platform for Woodside's north rank in gasfield. That's the platform taking shape behind me.
Its huge legs are anchored to the bottom, 125 meters below the surface. In fact, to sea level alone, it's as high as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Making its way out to the platform is a 130 kilometer pipeline that will bring gas ashore from this Australia's most ambitious energy project.
This week, Weekend magazine takes a look at the 2000 million dollar Northwest Shelf Gas Project, which now is starting to take shape. That's in Weekend magazine after the seven o'clock news on Sunday.
It's been a gray day for the public sector, but free enterprise gets the green light.
Good evening and welcome to Nationwide. On this, the day of the first state budget brought down by a majority liberal government.
The day on which Tasmania takes, according to Premier Robin Gray, a new economic direction after four decades of almost unbroken labor rule.
In this special edition of Nationwide, Mr. Gray has joined us in the studio. Thank you, sir, for coming in. As has the opposition leader, Ken Reid. Thank you all, sir.
Later in the program, we'll also be talking with an economist and a businessman about this, the 1982-83 federal budget. But before we go any further, here's Michael Catchpole to recap the budget details.
When Premier Robin Gray walked into the budget lockup this afternoon, journalists were still wading through the usual pile of financial paperwork.
For them, the first question was an obvious one. Where were all the horror cutbacks the government had said would be necessary? And if they didn't exist, had the Premier tried to condition the public in the best traditions of the Fraser government, hoping we'd expect the worst and welcome a budget that brought less bad news than anticipated?
Mr. Gray had some difficulty singling out any economically horrific measures. But laughing, he remarked that the heads of several government departments had been suitably horrified when they'd been asked to make cuts in their own areas.
And that's where much of the budget's bad news is centered, on government services, most of which will experience cuts in funds.
Again, no real surprises for reasons I'll mention in a moment. But a significant change in the direction of government spending, away from the public sector and towards private enterprise.
In that, Mr. Gray has been helped by the federal government's decision to allow statutory authorities such as the Hydro to borrow money on the open market.
That's freed state loan funds for capital works, and it's had a significant short-term impact.
No doubt encouraged by the response to the HEC's first loan offering, the government has asked the Commission to repay 15 million in previous loan funds and recover that amount through public borrowings.
That 15 million has artificially reduced the budget deficit from almost 28 million dollars to 13 million, a practice that Mr. Gray himself admitted couldn't go on forever.
And with other public sector borrowing by the Commission, it's likely to have its own horrific side effect, increases in electricity charges, so the Hydro can meet its higher interest payments on public borrowings.
Mr. Gray compared his budget strategy with the decision during the Depression to build a road to the top of Mount Wellington, and stressed that creating employment was a major concern, provided those jobs were in private enterprise.
Of course, there were the increases in taxes and charges to offset abolition of such things as death duties, although the Premier thought the smoker had been hit hard enough by the federal budget and so didn't introduce a tobacco tax.
As those increases came under the heading of bad news, they'd been officially announced or unofficially leaked well ahead of the budget, more shades of praiserism.
So to summarise the budget, it takes from the public servants and gives to the small businessmen, and from a party dominated by small businessmen, you couldn't really expect much else.
Mr. Gray, why have you leaked all the bad news so that all that remains is the good news?
Well, I haven't leaked the bad news. You know, there was a lot of speculation around about what was going to be in the budget.
We indicated that this budget was going to be a budget that would create jobs, that would in fact turn Tasmania in a new direction, and it would provide for Tasmania to get its finances under control.
Yes, but why have a budget speech when you can read about it in the papers a few days before you deliver it?
Well, you know, you've read a lot in the papers. I heard last night there were all sorts of reports about a state income tax and about other charges that were going to be introduced.
I didn't notice those in the paper. There's been, as I say, a great deal of speculation and a good bit of it wrong.
But the real issue is that this is a budget for Tasmania. It's a budget to create employment right across the state, and that's what the government is about doing.
It's also a budget which honours most of the election promises that we made before May 15, and which we believe will provide a new direction for Tasmania to really get some growth in our economy so that in future we have jobs for Tasmanians.
You talk about jobs for Tasmanians, but this budget coincides with the release of new unemployment statistics.
Fifteen and a half thousand Tasmanians, the greatest number since the Second World War, are out of work. Now, can you say that this budget will help them in any way?
Well, I should correct you firstly. There were 18,000 out of work when we came to government.
But apart from that fact, it is an unacceptably high level of unemployment, and that's why we are providing for additional capital works this year.
We have to do something about unemployment, and that's why we want to get more work in the private sector, why we want to get more capital work spending,
and we've increased capital work spending by $91 million by over 30% this year, and that in itself is going to be a great boost.
But that's where we're laying the emphasis. That's the direction we're going, to create jobs for Tasmanians.
How many jobs?
I think the announcements that we made today will probably result in, directly, between 2,000 and 3,000 jobs being created.
That's hard to estimate, but I would believe that that's somewhere near the figure.
If you divide that $90-odd million, for example, in two and say that half the money is going to be on materials and half is going to be on labour,
then the $45 million would employ about that number. In addition to that, of course, there will be the multiplier effect of that.
That's the most important thing, as far as I'm concerned, as far as the State's concerned, is to get people back to work.
One reads, throughout the Budget speech, of the previous Government's economic mismanagement of living beyond its means with a $34 million deficit.
Could I suggest to you, too, sir, that you are living beyond your means, a $14 million deficit?
Well, we don't argue about that, and we've said right from the word go that we had to get our financial position sorted out as quickly as possible.
The $34 million deficit that we inherited has caused enormous problems.
That's equivalent to the salaries of 2,000 people alone, and that's money that has to be paid back this year.
We are determined that we will get that financial position under control, but it will mean cuts, it will mean reductions in the numbers of people working in the Government area.
We plan to reduce by about 2 per cent per annum, and that's an essential part of the program.
We can't go on living beyond our means. We recognise that.
Well, let's come back to that point and others later in the program, if we may.
Of course, it should be said that the size of the Tasmanian Budget, just over $770 million, is in comparison to other States' a trifling amount.
But the way in which it's bent profoundly affects the lives of half a million people.
Not unnaturally, economists like Dr Bruce Filmingham observe such spending proposals with more than passing interest.
Dr Filmingham, Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Tasmania, has been studying the Budget.
He's now talking with Michael Catchpole.
Dr Filmingham, can we begin then by asking you what your assessment is of today's Budget?
Well, I think, Mike, it's a very sound and responsible document from an economist's point of view, and I say that for three reasons.
Firstly, it directs a much-needed stimulus into the private sector of the Tasmanian economy.
That, I think, has been lacking in recent years.
It does that by cutting it down on the effects of an iniquitous tax on employment, the payroll tax,
and at the same time gives a great stimulus to capital spending, which will increase the demand for labour in the private sector,
and in particular in relation to skills that are currently underemployed in the State.
The second reason, and I think we can't divorce this reason from the operation of the Budget strategy,
is that it throws back the onus on we, the wage earners in Tasmania, to moderate our wage claims so that the Budget surplus does not blow out.
One thing that will cause it to blow out, and this plan to fail, is if wage increases are particularly high.
Or if, in fact, there are, according to the Premier, any increases in the public sector.
Yes, that's right. I think the big problem for modern economies is that the wage rigidities that occur occur in the public sector.
I think if in the private sector they could fall, we would have a resulting increase in employment.
Because they are fixed in the public sector.