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Thinking of Riding the Rails?

The Free Press
Thursday, January 30, 2003

If winter's frigid temperatures have you dreaming of getting away from it all, Lynne Williams can help. A Rockland lawyer and veteran of 30 years of train travel, Williams is the publisher of TheTrainTraveler.com, an award-winning Web site for travelers who want to leave the asphalt or the unfriendly skies behind and travel in style. On her site Williams has every kind of information the North American rail traveler might need, including planning and travel tips, information from Amtrak, and reviews of rail tours. She also reviews books about trains and suggests products to make trips more enjoyable.

Williams was inspired to create her site after noting that, while there was plenty of information about air, automobile and RV travel, there was little information about train travel in either guidebook or online form. Several years ago she began writing a guidebook on rail travel in New England which she hopes will be ready for publication this April. While gathering material, she thought of using the Web as a means of preparing a base for the book, reasoning that instead of information sitting around in folders, it could be getting feedback if it was out there for public use. The Web site would then be available, after the book's publication, for updating its material. After the the Web site was up and running, in Septermber 2001, Williams also started a twice-monthly e-mail newsletter which lets users know what's new on the site and provides a forum for rail travel-related questions and answers.

Williams turned to train travel while still in college because she hates to fly - not because she has a fear of flying, but because she is tall enough that there never seems to be enough legroom for her in airline seats. She is also restless, and finds it difficult to be confined in a small space for a long period of time without any way to move around. As a college student she traveled from her home in Brooklyn, New York, to college in Massachusetts. Later, as a graduate student at the University of Southern California, she traveled cross-country by train as well. On one trip she recalls from that time in grad school, she took an overnight train to New Mexico and got a single sleeper in a car set aside especially for single women traveling alone, one which provided an attendant who sat up all night to ensure that the women would be secure from any harassment.

After graduate school, Williams remained in California and worked as an organizer and fundraiser for Tom Hayden's campaigns. In the mid-eighties she traveled to New Hampshire to work on Gary Hart's campaign, but returned to California once again, where she ultimately returned to school and received her degree from Golden Gate Law School. Her decision to pursue a law degree stemmed from her experiences after her son, Brendan, was born with significant birth defects and spent much of the first six months of his life in the hospital. He subsequently needed a lot of special therapy and, after seeing how difficult it was to get the health care services and therapy her son required, Williams decided that the only way she'd get what she needed was to become an attorney. Here in Maine she continues to help those with disabilities in her work as a special education hearing officer for the Department of Education.

The story of how Williams got from the West to the East Coast is typical of the way she approaches life and its challenges. She loved life on the West Coast, and enjoyed taking advantage of California's rail system. When Brendan was still an infant she began traveling with him to the Tahoe area, snowshoeing with him in a backpack-type carrier. The train to Tahoe travels through spectacular country, going high into the Sierras and over Donner Pass (of the famous cannibalism incident). But California is also an extremely expensive place to live, and Williams wasn't convinced that it was worth working 65 hours a week to provide a good home for herself and her son. She began looking into other places to live, her only stipulations being that it be "on the coast, affordable and beautiful." Once Maine seemed to be her ultimate destination, she checked the alumni list of Golden Gate Law School and found there were seven alums in the Pine Tree state. The first one she contacted told her that there was a position open as a special ed hearing officer. Williams had both a new home and a job.

Williams is also a member of the Maine chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which was organized back in the student protest years of the 1960s and is dedicated to representing and advising those engaged in legal protests and civil disobedience. Williams was an observer for both the recent protests in Warren over the DOT's widening of Route One and for the rally last week in Lewiston to protest the white supremacists gathering in that city.

Despite all the time dedicated to work and being a single parent, Williams' book is almost three-quarters finished: the Maine section is done, and the other states are about half-done. Its theme is the towns where the Amtrak and Metrorail trains stop, excursion rail trips like the Acadian Rail, and specialty events like dinner trains, such as the one that plies a short section of track in Newport, Rhode Island.

Visitors to Williams' Web site will find enough there to keep them busy for hours. It is so informative and entertaining that it was selected as a winner of a 2002-03 Golden Web Award, presented by the International Association of Web Masters and Designers. Williams provides much of the material for her site, but the actual designers are located - sometimes - in Oregon. "I never know where they are," Williams confesses. "They have an old VW bus they travel around in and one is in Bali right now." But she pays them about $50 a month and they keep her site up-to-date.

In addition to such information as where to find the best inexpensive hotels and which rail pass will be the best choice, Williams provides articles on featured destinations ranging from Hollywood and New Orleans to Saco, Maine. Should you be planning a trip that includes a layover in any of these cities, Williams and a staff of freelance writers have compiled a description of such attractions as the scenic parks, best museums, and good dining spots - all of them able to be reached by public transportation or walking. There's even a link to the Weather Channel on each featured destination so a would-be visitor will know whether to bring an overcoat or an umbrella. International travel writers also contribute features on such exotica as rail travel in Sri Lanka.

Even the smallest details that can make for comfortable, safe travel are researched and reported on by Williams. Want to know the best deal in prepaid cellular phone service, information on train travel for those with disabilities, or which rail lines provide a lot of electrical outlets for recharging laptops? It's all there at TheTrainTraveler.com.

Williams also has a current editorial about her trip last summer when she traveled over 20,000 miles on Amtrak throughout the Northeast, Midwest and California. After meeting many travelers, she passed along their ideas for the improvement of services to Amtrak, with the hope that they might be implemented in the future. These suggestions included providing a treadmill or stationary bike, for use by sleeping-car passengers so they might exercise onboard, and selling paperback books onboard.

She also suggested putting Amtrak under control of the Department of the Interior so they might provide more onboard programs, like those found on the California Zephyr, where a narrator from the California railroad museum talks about the history of the Sierras and other history topics. She even compliments Amtrak's food - "clearly freshly cooked, and the use of local recipes and local produce and meats is very popular with riders. The full-size bottles of wine also seemed very popular." Her "perfect moment" came, Williams said, when she began talking travel with two gentlemen from Pennsylvania, one a former pilot who now traveled almost exclusively by train. "We began discussing travel, particularly rail travel, and one of these folks said, 'I found this great site that you should check out before you plan another trip.' Yes, I felt great when that site turned out to be www.thetraintraveler.com."

Once Williams has finished her book, she plans to self-publish it. In her legal work in California she learned a bit about the mainstream publishing business and found that some authors end up being paid very little for their work. She wants more control over her own book, and will set up "print on demand" arrangements whereby she can order 500, rather than an initial 5,000, books when she is finally ready to go into print. She has already talked to Amtrak about doing signings on board each of the New England lines this summer. Through some kind of serendipity that seems to guide Williams on her way, the Amtrak publicist is an old colleague from the days of the Hart campaign, so those traveling the Downeaster this summer should be on the lookout for a tall, curly-headed traveler sitting behind a table of books. That is, if Williams can manage to make time for these signings before she sets off for Alaska to do some research for her next book - a guide for the Pacific Coast train traveler.

- Georgeanne Davis