Amtrak trains are the opposite of polite children: they are heard but not seen. You can hear the rumbling when you walk under the platforms at Union Station. You can hear the distant honking and screeching at various places throughout the city. But you rarely see these shy beasts in their shiny steel flesh. Yesterday, though, as I took in a simple circuit of Cesar Chavez, Vignes Street and Spring Street, I glimpsed one. The sight made me hanker for a leisurely rail trip up or down the coast.



And I saw something else novel en route. I'd heard that the area of semi-beautified wasteland hugging the Gold Line just north of Chinatown and going by the old-time soubriquet of "The Cornfield" had been renamed and rebranded. But this was the first hard evidence I'd seen.



The clear postcard view of Downtown, juxtaposed with a hinterland track of weeds, dust and dirt, iced the cake and made an ordinary run slightly less ordinary.