H<$>OW often have you heard the shrill, lonely sound of a train whistle echoing across the miles and felt a restless wanderlust set your mind travelling? No other sound so completely captures our spirit or creates such a rare mood of nostalgia.Many people have a thing about railroads . . . we start out as youngsters playing with model trains and busily crayon them into kindergarten colouring books.

There was a time when every boy thought being an engineer or conductor was on a par with being president or prime minister and very likely grew up with a compelling fascination for stereo tapes recording old steam engines tooting along under full power.

That fascination crosses all borders, whether it be South Africa’s Blue Train, Russia’s Siberian Express, Britain’s Royal Scotsman or Australia’s Ghan.

And rightly so because it was the “great iron horse” which played a memorable role in pioneering and developing frontiers — from such far outposts as India and Lawrence of Arabia’s famed Jerez route in Jordan’s Wadi Rhum to the joining of the Union Pacific routes at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869.

In America, it all got off to an inauspicious start in 1830 when a horse-drawn rail car actually beat Peter Cooper’s diminutive Tom Thumb engine. Locomotives like the DeWitt Clinton, John Bull and Old Ironsides soon followed, but rail travel remained a chancy thing. As late as 1834, the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad advertised that “in inclement weather horses will be substituted for engines”.

Those early travellers encountered all sorts of unique problems . . . like the mother bear and cubs which attacked the engineer aboard an early New York run, and the irate minority stockholders who chained an Indiana locomotive to a trestle.

Although rails came into early prominence in the eastern US, heroic hazards and excitement of pushing west captured the nation’s imagination. They sprang up among western sagebrush, often dynamiting routes into incredible high country remaining inaccessible by road even today.

Many were “bonanza routes” built to carry out fortunes in gold and silver from such legendary boom towns as Virginia City, Nevada; Bodie, California; and Cripple Creek, Colorado.One<$> of the most dramatic of them all started with a whoop and holler in 1881 and is still happily building up steam for its 45-mile climb to adventure. Denver Rio Grande &<\p>Western’s arrival in Durango, Colorado more than a century ago generated so much excitement that two bands on hand to welcome it deafened the audience with Anvil Chorus and The National Anthem <$>— both played simultaneously.Now daily departures via its Silverton special during summer season create almost as much pandemonium. Railroad buffs sprinkled with cinder ash roam the roundhouse overseeing preparations, joyfully clucking over the switching and general hubbub of departure.

Happy riders scramble aboard vintage yellow wood coaches designated as a Registered Historic Landmark and enthuse over the route’s dazzling scenery. David Niven won’t saunter down the aisle as he did in Around the World in Eighty Days <$>and Jimmy Stewart isn’t riding the flat car seen in Night Passage. But passengers are too awed over the wilderness scenery to miss them.

As airlines became more and more competitive with trains, the average traveller’s rail experience was pretty much limited to such daytime excursions. The Silverton special, which originally carried most of the $300 million in gold and silver produced in the region in the 1800s, became their closest connection to rail travel. But with 9/11 came an increasing airport hassle. There’s no need to elaborate on the stress level surrounding most airborne travel experiences today. It’s long since reached the point of being barely bearable!

More and more travellers are longing for a relaxed, stress-free way to get to where they’re going . . . one that lowers their blood pressure instead of escalating it.

Unless some sort of overnight cruise service is re-instituted sailing from Bermuda to North America’s shore, residents currently have no alternative. But once there, the romance of rail travel is an option worth considering.

Most of the whistles which once tooted into such gems as Vinegar Bend, Alabama; Cranberry, Tennessee; Rough and Ready and Hetch Junction, California are silent now, victims of the same progress which saw canal boats, stagecoaches and river packets pass into legend. But enough still exist to send vacationing railroad buffs into orbit.

Yes, some very special ones offering day excursions remain and are the highlight of many vacations. The White Pass and Yukon Railroad paralleling much of the famed Trail of ‘98 still climbs up into the clouds out of Skagway, Alaska to the border with Canada’s Yukon Territory. On my earlier trips, it went all the way to Whitehorse.

The classic came into existence during the wild days of the Klondike, a gold fever epidemic which triggered a madness never equalled before or since. Around the world men quit jobs, left families and set off for an unknown, unexplored, inaccessible area in search of fortune.

Much of Canada’s undeveloped north retains the off-trail flavour guaranteed to quicken the pulse of explorer types. Fortunately, some unique trains penetrate its most intriguing areas. We’ve enjoyed crossing some of Labrador in one of them and who could ever forget a trip on the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee, Ontario through whistle-stop wilderness en route to James Bay. Because it was the opening of autumn hunting season, that trip was made on a train filled with a high percentage of goose hunters, practising their calls enroute.

But there was a colourful collection of prospectors, fur trappers, geologists and assorted adventurers bound for posts on James and Hudson Bay. Landscape is pure frontier, a road-less bush of tamarack and pine where the railroad serves as lifeline to the outside.The<$> list of Americana owing its existence to the railroad is a rambling, romantic one. Boom towns like Laramie, Cheyenne and Durango sprang up to help push rails across an untamed frontier . . . the Chisholm Trail and boisterous cow towns of Kansas were other by-products herding longhorns to beef-hungy easterners.And where would Hollywood be without giants like Union Pacific and Santa Fe providing plots for countless westerns? Shoot-’em-ups involving them brought names like Errol Flynn, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, William Holden, Clint Eastwood, Maureen O’Hara and Glenn Ford to the screen.

Pinkerton men catapulted into prominence because train robbery became big business when the Reno brothers developed their taking ways in Ohio and Indiana, soon followed by such headliners as Jesse James and the Daltons. As late as 1899 Butch Cassidy was still making life difficult for baggage cars around Wilcox, Wyoming.

Who can forget Casey Jones <$>and I’ve Been Working On The Railroad <$>. . . to such music the great Iron Horse rode its one-way ticket to immortality.

Financial barons of those earlier days also did their share to put railroads in the headlines. Controversial names like Gould, Hill, Vanderbilt and Harriman created railroad empires and were often in conflict with each other over new routes.Some battles were subtly fought on Wall Street, but wars were actually waged along the right of way. Famed Bat Masterson captained one line’s private army for control of Colorado’s Royal Gorge.Modern travellers descending into the super-scenic gorge today via cog railway find it hard to believe rival railroads actually built forts and hired guns in this epic struggle.

With the evolution of Amtrack, many of those famous old routes were abandoned as passenger destinations, concentrating instead only on freight. And each year Congress continues to whittle away at necessary funding to keep other routes functioning.

Unlike airlines, which maintain a large stable of lobbyists and make sizeable contributions to political candidates, Amtrak is a quasi-governmental organisation. It seems to be on the perpetual radar screen whenever budget cutting is considered. It’s very say and unfair to areas depending on it totally for their only transportation.

But some very special routes still remain and we’ll be taking readers on two of them in the next few weeks. Since the most gorgeous and dramatic scenery is in the West, it was easy to make a decision. And since Chicago’s Union Station is the main starting point for them, it’s easily reached from Bermuda via non-stop airline service.

The Southwest Chief winds its way through the scenic southwest all the way to California, but we went only as far as Albuquerque, renting a four-wheel drive for further exploration in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. Amtrak’s most popular route is The Empire Builder, up through North Dakota and Montana to Seattle. We went as far as Whitefish, Montana to again rent a SUV and spend time in the Glacier National Park area.

Both were dream trips via sleeper, ones we intend to repeat. Hopefully, Amtrak will stay in business long enough for that to happen, but Congress is once again rattling its cage and threatening to close more routes.