Planes, trains & automobiles: Transport nightmares

My First American Train Ride

Train travel in the United States has been around forever, of course. But in 1967 there was no outfit called Amtrak as we know it today. This was the year I immigrated to America and the last leg of my immigrant journey was a train trip from San Francisco to Chicago after an eighteen-day voyage from Manila to San Francisco on the SS President Wilson.

My wife, Francisca, purchased first class tickets on what I recall simply as a Santa Fe train. She and our ten-month old son Reggie, who both arrived in the United States a few months earlier, flew from Chicago to meet me at the piers in San Francisco.

We spent a night at a YMCA hotel. That’s where I had my first American dinner – a cold, greasy hamburger from a vending machine. No, I think I should take that back. My first American dinner, a more sumptuous one, may arguably be on the SS President Wilson while she was anchored on Manila Bay taking in passengers. An American ship, in my perception, is already American turf although the piers on Manila Bay are on the other side of the world from America.

Next day our train was supposed to leave at 10:30 a.m. so we felt we had time to visit a fellow immigrant, a young widow who has been living in San Francisco these past few years. When she learned that it will take us two and a half days to get to Chicago she fed us old-country breakfast – garlic fried rice, sunnyside up eggs, fried fish… stuff that I missed during my

eighteen-day voyage from Manila.

On top of the old country stuff she also served crisp bacon and fragrant American coffee. Wow, what a novel breakfast at the time! She warned us that we may get tired of train food although she admitted that she was not sure what train food is like.

Before we sat down for breakfast she discovered, to her horror, that we asked our cab to wait while we were visiting. We thought it would be tough to find a cab again after our visit and we wanted to be sure we had ready transportation to catch our train. She hastily went out to pay and dismiss the cab and assured us that we had plenty of time since she will drive us to the depot herself. It was only 7:00 a.m.

Then when it was time for us to go it was our turn to be horrified. She forgot that we were strangers to San Francisco and when she asked where to take us back we didn’t know, of course! Not used to taking train trips herself she did not know where the Santa Fe offices were. Instead of getting information from a phone