Nashville, day 1* (continued)

[awesomelies]

Late night porch on a hostel. Cold beer; warm breezes and mournful train whistles blowing in from downtown, all of them from freights or from Amtraks heading any place but here. How is it possible that a city built on country music, to which railroads are as misery is to the blues, has no passenger train service? Went past the old Union Station earlier, a massive old pile oozing grandiosity and Civic Weight, like all good railway stations, which deserves to be the heart and soul of the city. Making it a hotel is like turning Trafalgar Square into a car park†. Of all the many things I don't understand about America, how the railroads have fallen so far, so fast is the most baffling. Even if I understand the economics behind it... dammit, a city like Nashville needs a railway station, one as grand as the building it used to have. And maybe one day it will once again have one.

*except it's really day 2 etc and so on blah blah
†except that might actually be a goodthing