Dangers on a train

Maybe I’m just naturally suspicious. Or perhaps it’s just that, after a full day and night traveling the rails, I was starting to feel loopy. Either way, when the bro in the backward baseball cap started honing in on the young, pretty college student, it was difficult not to let my mind unravel the scene into a modern-day take on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 murder mystery Strangers on a Train.

Thankfully, no one was actually killed on my journey aboard Amtrak’s Coast Starlight route. But there was still plenty of intrigue and mystery. There was, also, breathtaking scenery. The Coast Starlight name—as Hitchcock as it gets, really—captures the spirit of the journey: Technicolor backdrops of the Pacific Ocean, fertile agriculture fields and overgrown forests, and some of the state’s best graffiti-covered walls.

But who needs gorgeous scenery when you’re treated to some of the best people watching.

And thank God—you’ve got to find some way to entertain yourself on a trip that stretches more than 14 hours between Los Angeles and Sacramento. In real, off-rail life, for example, it would be difficult to find anything remotely interesting about this particular frat boy, who will eventually disembark in Davis. For now, however, I’m captivated, listening in as he chips away at this young woman’s resolve.

Early in the game, she’s not impressed.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not fluent in macho flirting,” she says curtly.

But though her initial aloofness is impressive, eventually, she crumbles in the presence of Axe Body Spray and Hollister. And by the time the train rumbles into Martinez, the pair is intertwined, an unwieldy morass of limbs and hormones.

I resist the urge to jump up and shake her—this guy is, at best, a complete douche and, at worst, a serial killer in the making.

OK, granted I have an affinity for cinematic melodramatic. But this is a ride, after all, where passengers have already been subjected to a heavily intoxicated rider, who, after locking himself in a train bathroom (with a contraband 40-ounce can of Bud), is eventually rousted by a British cop on holiday and picked up by police in San Luis Obispo.

There is, too, the tiny nurse, clad in pink terrycloth and carting around a gallon of chocolate milk—drinks of which she will offer to any unsuspecting rider. That is, it seems, when she’s not preoccupied criticizing the choices of other passengers (“Energy drinks will kill you!”) or briskly correcting someone’s photo-taking techniques. Nurse Ratched would be proud.

And also, of course, the Australian college student who says, not at all ironically, that he majors in “Beat poets.” A crime if ever there was one.

And then, disturbingly, there’s the novice rider who seems far too excited about the train’s loose take on security precautions—“Wow, you can bring anything on the train. They don’t even check!”

So true. Thankfully, however, the train isn’t just one long transcontinental flip of the finger to rules and regulations. There is, also, an unspoken, unofficial code of conduct with other riders who will watch your belongings when you head down to the cafe car for another $7 Bloody Mary. They’ll ask you how you slept, swap rail stories and, always, roll their eyes in cheerful complicity as you both eavesdrop on astounding conversations, playing out the most evil of Hitchcock scenarios in your head.