Okay, from worst to best:
-1.
Worst—New York, New York’s Penn Station is a seething Orwellian hive which so assaulted my senses, that even though I was supposed to meet my guide somewhere in its bowels I simply surged upstairs as quick as possible in search of daylight, past so many automaton-like meat-puppets that I kept thinking, “I could never carry enough ammo in this pack to even make a dent in the surging sea of inhumanity!”
The volume is insanely high.
Rating: Hell
-2.
Worser—Washington D.C. [forgot] Station is like Hell’s food court, crowded by extremely rude humans of all types, as if some sardonic Noah had sought out the worst of every type of human to stock a dystopian post flood world. The place has the brutish lack of grace and grim efficiency of a slaughter house.
The volume is very high.
Rating: Hell-on-Earth
-3.
Worse—Baltimore, MD’s Penn Station seems to have been nice once in some long lost yore. It has the look of a worn out church abandoned by God to the thuggish police and private security patrolling the platforms and lounging at the front desk. The volume is very low.
Rating: Third World Shithole
-4.
Sketchy-Cozy—Rahway, New Jersey Transit Stop would be my preferred place to get mugged and made me feel like Charles Bronson in 1974 New York. The stairwells and hallways would be great for a midnight horror film setting.
Very low volume
Rating: Leave your frail at home
-5.
Zombie Apocalypse—Salt Lake City Amtrak Station is surrounded by streets full of junkies overflowing the adjacent bus station, as the waring cities of the west use Greyhound buses to launch junkies at each other. The interior looks like a ghetto medical clinic and the staff is very helpful, shewing junkies away like a horse swatting flies with its tail.
Moderate volume
Rating: End Time Friendly
-6.
Refugee Mustering Center—Lancaster, PA’s Penn Station has a modern pick up port in front of the classic old station that has enough Latino traffic to make the bathrooms unusable and the ebony clerks irascible. The passengers are mostly fleeing Philly, Baltimore and New York and have the air of someone who has just escaped a war zone, in a hurry and not yet comfortable with being comfortable.
Moderate volume
Rating: Family friendly
-7.
The Hub of all this is Chicago’s Union Station, a massive, low sprawling series of well-managed cattle chutes with clean bathrooms and plenty of vending machines. This is a model for what D.C. could be like.
Extremely high volume
Rating: serviceable and efficient
-8.
Rugby North Dakota—just a box with benches but not a rude soul in sight.
End Time low volume
Rating: ghost safe
-9.
Whitefish Montana, hipster express, where ghost faɡɡots from across the imploding nation flee with family is the last stop for urban blight.
Low volume
Rating: best place to be a serial killer
-10.
End of the line is Portland, Oregon, with saintly nice staff, big-assed, vacationing Canadian babes and an open layout that combines the standard wooden church pews and neo-gothic arches with clean iron.
Moderate volume
Rating: best place to be a cripple or a retard
-11.
Party Central for the California Zephyr is Denver Colorado’s Union Station, chock full of the best collection of paleface babes I’ve seen, with a hotel and microbrewery on site, protected by a battalion of limp-wristed faɡɡots with laptops and weed dreams.
High volume
Rating: Black Man’s Heaven
-12.
The best train station is Philadelphia’s Union Station, with vaulted ceiling supported by 100 foot marble columns, staffed with reasonably human police, well-cleaned and is a transit stop for all the prettiest girls of the South headed to New York strip clubs and call girl services. Aside from Colorado’s station this is the only facility worth looking at on architectural merits alone—and it’s as efficiently run as the Chicago hub.
Very high volume
Rating: Best launch pad for a westering man
A Once Great Medieval City: 2016: Impressions of Baltimore Maryland
