Trail & Rails on Condé Nast Traveler

This article was written by Sarah Kuta and published by Condé Nast Traveler on May 20, 2022

Meet the Retirees Who Serve as Volunteer Guides on Amtrak Trains

By Sarah Kuta, May 20, 2022

When he retired in 2010, Jim Eagen remembers asking himself: “What am I going to do now?” Without his job as a regional human resources director for the Social Security Administration, Eagen filled his schedule by riding his bike and volunteering and, a few months in, he heard about an intriguing program that needed some help: Trails & Rails. Through a partnership between Amtrak, the National Park Service (NPS), and Texas A&M University, volunteer guides ride trains that pass by or through national park sites, sharing stories and information about the region’s history, culture, geology, flora, and fauna. Pointing out landmarks as they whizz past the window, the guides—many of whom are retired—chat with travelers who’ve opted to make their trip by train, rather than by plane or car.

Eagen signed up and has been riding the rails in the Pacific Northwest ever since. For the 75-year-old retiree, who lives in Kirkland, Washington, Trails & Rails is an ideal blend of being social, staying active, and keeping his mind sharp. “I’ve lived in this area since the 1970s and there is so much I’ve learned about the nature, the geology, the scenery, the history,” Eagen says. “You have this desire to read, to keep up to date—magazine articles, journals, anything. And an equally important part of it is meeting people from, literally, all over the world and hearing their stories.”

Though the COVID-19 pandemic kept the guides mostly off the trains for two years, they’re officially back on board once again. This year, between 200 and 250 volunteers are riding sections of more than a dozen Amtrak routes with ties to places like the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, to name a few.

Trails & Rails officially launched in October 2000, making this its 22nd year in operation. But the program’s origins actually date back to the mid-1990s, when Jim Mičulká—then the head interpreter for Louisiana’s Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve—took a fateful train ride from New Orleans to San Antonio. He and his staff were on their way to Texas for a work project when fellow Amtrak passengers began asking questions about the cypress trees and the nutria (aka “swamp rats”) they saw out the window. “We weren’t uniformed, but just being park service people, we overheard questions so we answered,” says Mičulká, who today, at age 66, serves as national director for Trails & Rails.

An Amtrak staffer who was aboard the train overheard the conversations and immediately saw the potential; Mičulká agreed to help launch a pilot program on trains running into and out of New Orleans. A few years later, Bob Stanton, then-director of the NPS, got wind of the initiative and secured funding to expand it nationwide. Stanton, the first Black American appointed to lead the NPS, saw Trails & Rails as an innovative way to reach diverse audiences and “bring programming out of the park and to the people,” says Mičulká.

Indeed, Stanton’s original vision became a reality and is still playing out on trains today. Volunteers like 73-year-old Carolyn Hartfield ride Amtrak’s Crescent train between Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama, describing the struggles of Black Americans during the 1960s Civil Rights movement in partnership with Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park.

After a career in telecommunications marketing in Detroit, Hartfield retired and moved to Atlanta, where a friend introduced her to the Trails & Rails program in 2016. Now, she fields questions and points out places where important historical moments took place—the birthplace of Thomas Dorsey, the father of American gospel music, for example, and the site of the Freedom Riders bus firebombing on Mother’s Day in 1961. “So many times when you’re traveling, you wonder, ‘What is that over there?’’ she says. “I like being an interpreter of what’s out the window.”

Guides on other trains discuss the forced incarceration of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II and the 1969 Stonewall riots that sparked the gay rights movement in America. Though guides cover lighter topics, too, the park service is actively seeking volunteers with diverse backgrounds to share the nation’s history from their perspectives. “It’s being able to tell some of these stories that maybe aren’t as popular—the good, the bad, and the ugly, it’s all part of it,” says Mičulká.

Guides don’t need to be experts the first time they step onboard a train. With a curriculum developed by professors at Texas A&M, they spend two days in training, learning about general topics like safety, as well as the specific highlights of their route. Volunteers spend time shadowing more experienced guides, too, before heading out with pamphlets and other shareable materials (though they’re still typically paired up with another volunteer for each journey). It varies from train to train, yet volunteers will typically start their day in the train’s sightseer lounge, using a portable PA system to tell passengers what they’re seeing. They also spend time wandering through the cars, talking with groups of travelers and answering impromptu questions. In most parts of the country, they’ll ride through the spring, summer, and fall, when train travel is most popular, though there are a handful of year-round routes. The program isn’t just for retirees, either, though it tends to skew that way—it’s open to anyone with time to ride once or twice a month (the schedule varies by route), including college students who can get course credit through a pilot internship program that started in 2018.

What unites these volunteers though, is often a love for history in one form or another. For Sandi Dunlap, a 69-year-old who works full-time as an office administrator in New York’s Hudson Valley, volunteering aboard the train compliments another one of her hobbies: re-enacting World War I history.

Though she typically wears the same uniform as every other volunteer—forest green shirt with the Trails & Rails logo, khaki pants—every once and a while, her volunteer boss asks her to do a special living history presentation, complete with early-1900s garb. On Veteran’s Day last year, she described WWI’s impact on New York. “I went to catch the train out of Penn Station and I was dressed like it was 1917,” she says. “That was pretty interesting, I was carrying my carpetbag and I had on a brown corduroy suit and a flower Edwardian hat and my circa-1918 flu mask.”

Volunteers like Dunlap, willing to put themselves out there and engage with total strangers, are helping to break down the barriers created by age, class, race, ethnicity, gender identity, politics, and other differences, Mičulká says. And at a time when people are divided on just about everything, even a small moment of connection—discussing a shared love of hiking or a memory from a national park visit—is a bright spot. “Trains are a good place for socializing and interconnecting,” Mičulká says.