A Railroad Trip That Passes through Time

In late August, I was on a train heading to a Republican Party presidential candidate debate that was happening in the Midwestern city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Including transfers, it was a 20-hour one-way trip.

At a way station in eastern Pennsylvania, a family that looked like they had sneaked out of “Little House on the Prairie,” a TV series that depicts a family traveling the American frontier in a covered wagon, boarded the train. The men sported straw hats and large beards, and the women wore old-fashioned dresses and bonnets (a type of women’s hat.) I ended up riding with them to the last stop.

In the eastern and Midwestern parts of the U.S., there are many Anabaptist Christian communities, such as the Amish and the Mennonites, scattered about. Many of these people have maintained the lifestyle they lived when they immigrated from Europe, from primarily German-speaking countries, in the 17th and 18th centuries, traveling only by horse-drawn carriages. They continue to use a mixture of various German dialects called Pennsylvania Dutch, rather than English, in their daily lives.

I gathered that because they were also using the railroad, this family was allowed modern conveniences to a certain extent, but I could not understand the words they spoke at all.

Without the railway, I probably would not have been able to experience such a different culture first-hand. This trip became a precious opportunity to really feel the vastness of the U.S.