Worst. Train Trip. Ever.

I love train travel. One of the best trips I even took was a Eurail-heavy tour of Europe right after college graduation with my then-girlfriend. When D-Jo and I went on our honeymoon to Portugal, we made sure to have a nice train trip in the middle of it. I regularly lament the cost of Amtrak here in the States -- I'd love to be able to load the family on the train to visit my mom outside Chicago, but not if it's going to cost more than three plane tickets.

Not every train experience is great, though; The Exile, an English-language free paper from Russia, has a story entitled Platzkart Hell, in which the author describes his 17-hour Izhevsk-to-Moscow train trip. He traveled third class, which is apparently the "all drinking, all the time" class, and to top it off he was suffering from a brutal case of food poisoning.

This tops my worst train experience, which was a second-class overnight train from Delhi to Lucknow in August, 2005. I was in India on business, and we needed to travel to Lucknow to do a product demonstration at the national railway. That demo itself is a story for a different time, but just getting there was an adventure.

Since it was August in Delhi, it was about 110 degrees during the day, but it cooled off to a reasonable 90 or so at night. Our train was scheduled to leave around 10:00 PM, so after a nice dinner Delhi's only revolving restaurant we headed to the train station which, like every other thing in Delhi, was a teeming mass of humanity. What I didn't realize at the time was that every single person in the station was going to be not only on my train, but in my car.

I'm not sure what class our tickets were, but whatever it was it was a step up for our business associates, who were apparently used to the class that forced you to provide the energy to keep the train moving. The car we were in was theoretically air conditioned and we had a semi-private berth -- what more could you ask for?

Well, air conditioning that worked, for starters. And a room that was separated from teh rest of the car by more than a curtain would have been nice. We had neither of those things. Instead, we had a two-foot wide "bed" that was actually just a bench seat, stacked three-on-each-wall, in which to sack out and rest up for the big demonstration the next day. While our Indian associates cheerily got ready for bed, I exchanged a look with my father (fresh off of back surgery) and said, "it's gonna be a long night."

And it was. I'd say I got a total of about two hours of sleep, which doesn't sound that bad until I tell you that it came in 5-minute chunks. Our "room" was at the end of the car, which meant that every single person tromping through the car looking for an unoccupied berth slammed the door six inches from my head. As I mentioned, the AC didn't work, so the only air circulating to dissipate the funk of dozens of snoring adult men was a thin trickle of air from outside, where the overnight temperature had dropped into the 90 degree range.

When I "woke up" the next morning, we were pulling in to Lucknow. For the last several miles, I got an up close look at how entirely too many Indians live: in cardboard-and-tin shacks lining the railroad tracks. I got to see several thousand people going about their morning routine, doing everything that a person does while getting ready for work in a dusty field mere yards from a speeding train.

Oh, wait, did I say "speeding"? That's funny. What I meant was "plodding, creaking, and stopping randomly." From what I can tell on the map, it's about 250 miles from Delhi to Lucknow. The train took seven hours. We blearily stumbled off the train and into our meetings with the various railway folks, did our demo (which consisted of cutting a giant hole in the side of a train car), and very politely asked for directions to the airline office so we could buy a ticket for the return.