Train journeys - a new series
If you happen to be a hopeless romantic, nothing beats traveling by train. And if you've never been rocked to slumber in a sleeping compartment and wakened by the sun rising over a strange and ever-changing landscape, you've missed the thrill of travel as it used to be.
For the next week or so, I'll be remembering the trains and the places they took me over a period of 55 years, beginning with one I was too young to recall. The above photo was taken in 1950 in Ciudad de Valles, Mexico. That's my mother and I leaning from the windows.
At the time, my parents and I were living on my grandfather's sugar cane ranch in Aguabuena. Getting to and from the ranch and Mexico City involved a long journey by train that included a narrow-guage railroad. I checked with my father about this photo. It was taken in Valles as we were leaving for San Luis Potosi, capital of that central Mexican state. It was about a four-hour trip to San Luis, and a much longer one from there to Mexico City.
I recall nothing about those trains, or our life on the ranch, or the language I first began to speak. All I have of those times is a scrapbook of black-and-white photos with serated edges. Yet, somehow I think that my love of train travel began then and there.
