By Erika Howsare, c-ville.com; March 28, 2019
Three days a week, an Amtrak train called the Cardinal rolls through Charlottesville on its way from New York to Chicago. Unless you’re planning a long trip to a city along the route (Indianapolis, anyone? Cincinnati?), you may not look twice at the train. But it’s more than a means of transport. For a family, the train can be an outing in itself.
I have a longstanding romance with trains, from the battered freight cars I saw snaking along the Pittsburgh rivers of my childhood, to the coaches I rode through Switzerland and Greece as a college student, to the BART light-rail cars that carried me to work in San Francisco. I love them all, and I consider a train journey to be a special window in time, when one’s only job is to gaze at the fascinating world crawling past.