The devil went down to Georgia...

...but I didn't see him there. Or does that mean I'm the devil? I couldn't tell you, since I didn't look into any mirrors or particularly reflective windows on Saturday, but it was Halloween, after all, so you never know.

Yes, I visited Georgia on the weekend, yet again. It's not that I have a particular compunction to see the place. This time, it's where the train took me. I took the Autumn Leaf Special down to Chickamauga (the town named for the Civil War battle).

Excursions like this are sponsored by the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum. I chose this particular weekend for my trip using a highly logical method. The house where I grew up had a Sugar Maple tree in the front yard. Every year, at Halloween, my mom would make me rake its leaves off the sidewalk. "But, Mom," I complained, "kids like shuffling through the leaves." Her point, however, was that someone might slip and fall and get hurt and then his/her parents might sue us. (And this was in the 1970's, before the U.S. got lawsuit-happy.) Ergo, if the maple tree in NJ turned pretty colors around Halloween, then the trees in TN, farther south, wouldn't turn color until at least that weekend. Given that this autumn has been colder than average, according to my coworkers, I was spot on for the date.

The trip wasn't as pretty as I would have liked, since the railroad tracks were lined with naturalized Privet shrubs (which are evergreen), and the trees along the tracks were pretty good at obscuring the view of anything more than 10 to 20 feet away. There were some spectacular individual trees, though.

It was also the slowest train I've ever been on. We departed the station, on time, at 9:30 a.m. We passed a part of The Noog I remember driving through once. After a while, we passed a part of The Noog a couple of miles from my house. After a while, we passed a part of The Noog I drive through every Friday on my way to and from my weekly cheesesteak (and discovered that those railroad tracks I cross over aren't abandoned after all). After a while, we passed a hardware store where I once got some supplies for work. I finally looked at my watch. It was little more than an hour and a half since we left the station, and we had just reached the city limits! No, the city is not that large.

I had no seatmate for the trip, so when the train made occasional stops (to allow a crewman to get off the train and run up to the crossing to signal for cars to stop, since they don't have the budget to fix crossing signals as rapidly as they'd like to), I entertained myself with a book. I had no seatmates in the dining car, either - for a while, anyway - and I was wishing I had brought the book from my seat. It turns out that the mismatched couple (short woman of Oriental extraction and tall, Anglo cowboy with leg braces and crutches) sitting in front of me in the coach car joined me after I had finished my tropical fruit salad. "Those who are late do not get fruit cup." (Can you guess from which movie that line is?) I mentioned that my friend Gimpy has cerebral palsy and walks with crutches, so we ended up discussing how the cowboy boarded the train, and how the modified steps that the railroad thinks are more accessible because the risers are shorter actually are next to impossible for the cowboy and Gimpy to use because they have no hand rails. We assumed that, since the railroad can't afford to fix all its crossing signals, then they weren't about to retrofit historic train cars with wheelchair lifts.

The lunch was nice: beef (I think) vegetable soup (heavy on the tomatoes, with nearly no distinguishable meat whatsoever), smoked turkey and Swiss on a croissant, cole slaw, crinkled potato chips, and a slice of devil's food cake for dessert. Was it worth $20? Maybe, for the experience of trying to eat soup on a moving train. However, if you come visit, I'll say let's save our 20 bucks apiece and try out the pizza place in the middle of the quaint, touristy, gewgaw shops in Chickamauga.

On the return trip, the train stopped at the Chickamauga Battlefield, where passengers could disembark and either climb a tower to look out over grass and trees or listen to some shmoe in a replica Confederate uniform drone on about the battle. Yes, you guessed correctly; I stayed aboard the train with my book.

The trip was nice, even though I wanted the train to move faster. I figured it out, though. The longer they took, the cheaper it was per hour, so I got my money's worth.