Obama’s train trip may open his eyes

ABOARD AMTRAK 181 NORTHEAST REGIONAL

The centuries-old right of way between Philadelphia and the District is marked by shimmering waterways and industrial sprawl, well-kept suburbs and urban blight.

President-elect Barack Obama won’t be sharing a ride with thousands of long-distance commuters when he travels on a private charter train from Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station to the District’s Union Station on Jan. 17, three days before he takes the oath of office.

But the 135-mile route will be exactly the same, and the views should provide Mr. Obama with more context for his inaugural theme of “Renewing America’s Promise,” frequent riders say.

Gifty Kwakye, a student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who commutes daily from Philadelphia, says the need for such renewal will be clear in the five minutes before Mr. Obama’s train pulls into Baltimore’s Penn Station.

“You see those deserted houses, and you know you’re in Baltimore,” said Miss Kwakye, 27.

The tracks pass through some of East Baltimore’s most impoverished neighborhoods, where abandoned and burned-out row homes seem to outnumber inhabited ones. The city has nearly 30,000 abandoned properties.

A gaze out the window also could remind Mr. Obama, Illinois Democrat, of the troubles of the auto industry, the decline of American manufacturing and the strain on the military.

Johnnie Walker, a 60-year-old Amtrak operations supervisor from Middletown, Del., who has been with the railroad for 29 years, finds profound scenes throughout the journey.

At the Chrysler plant outside Wilmington, Del., “you see it’s in the process of closing, and you wonder what’s going to happen to all the employees there,” he said.

At Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, “you start thinking about the military personnel in Iraq or Afghanistan, wondering where they’re being deployed to.

“There’s a lot of emotion when you travel on these trains,” Mr. Walker said.

The landscape has transformed since Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural train ride. But Lincoln, like passengers today, made the dramatic crossing at the mouth of the Susquehanna River, where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay.

“That’s my favorite scene,” said Amtrak employee Peggy White, 50, as she served coffee to groggy commuters. “I have to leave my counter just to look out. It’s a beautiful scene.”

The tracks also cross the Bush River and the Gunpowder River as the train zips down to Baltimore. It was just south of the Gunpowder, in Chase, Md., where one of the worst crashes in Amtrak history occurred. In January 1987, a Conrail engineer under the influence of marijuana sped through a warning signal, and the locomotive collided with an Amtrak train. Sixteen people were killed.

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