BOSTON -- On Amtrak's Acela train to New York City, cellphones chirp and laptops clack, an intense fluorescent light pours down, and the unreeling landscape is for the most part urban, according to an editorial in the Boston Globe.

The combination manages to bring out your inner striver. ''I should be working,'' you think.

The new Downeaster train is the anti-Acela. From Boston to Portland and the half-dozen stops in between, you are an ambler, not a striver. The trip to Maine induces a gradual uncluttering of even the most harried city mind.

The Downeaster, which has been running for almost five months, departs from North Station, the most anarchic sector of Boston. On the platform, the guts of the Big Dig project press in from every direction. Untouched overpasses swoop overhead. Piles of gravel and rubble sit hodgepodge. Columns rise all over, some of them alone and waiting to be of use. This could be an ancient ruin but for the towering cranes. Caught in the background is the rusted green elevated highway, a structure not long for this world.

Step inside the Downeaster, and a cathedral-like quiet falls across you. Unlike the Acela train, the light is dusky, sunlight glancing in as if you were on a wraparound Cape Cod porch or the windows were stained glass. The seats are roomy enough for a plutocrat with steamer trunks.

Right on time the train pulls away. Many of the seats are occupied, yet with such legroom, and the hum and clank of the engine, it's easy to slip into languor. The Big Dig falls away where a new length of highway stops in mid-air. You've been launched into the dreamy North Country.

The conductor stops to punch your ticket. For sure, train conductors are among the happiest people on earth. They wear their stiff-billed hats and starched uniforms, throwbacks to a time when travel was grand. Proud they still are, presiding over big, elegant machines and this one-of-a-kind experience. When I asked if I could hop off midride for lunch and then catch the next train passing through, one conductor consults another and says with barely contained Yankee reserve, ''Don't know why not.''

When the city is gone from the window, it is not gorgeous landscape that replaces it, though this is hardly an aesthetic problem. Instead, there's the pleasant sensation of seeing the real objects and alleyways that keep so many pretty New England facades pretty. As an overheard passenger puts it, ''This is like seeing home from the back end.'' There are warehouses, stacks of pallets and railroad ties, junk piles, transformers, dumpsters, and metal chutes. The stops along the way to Portland aren't exactly picturesque, either, but small working cities that once were busy mill towns. You know they're approaching when you see church spires, smokestacks, and sleepy brick factories perched over churning rivers.

Nature does thicken the farther north you get, with stretches of golden pasture, dappled pine forests, meandering brown streams, the occasional swamp. Unlike car travel, you feel as if you're getting rarely seen glimpses of the backlands. At this point, about halfway to Portland, your stomach may well begin to rumble. The club car offerings, though serviced by a company called Epicurean Feast, appear less than feast-worthy. In the spirit of a hobo, why not hop off in unsung Dover, N.H., and find a real lunch?

If you take the early train, which leaves Boston at 9:45 each morning, you can get off at one of the stops along the way, take a couple hours to explore a city, grab a bite, and hop back on. In Dover, you need only walk 300 yards along Third Street to hit the main drag, Central Avenue. Before you are many shops and the requisite mill, with the water of the Cocheco River swirling at its base.

Walking from one end of Central to the other takes no more than 10 minutes, and a dozen dining options line the way. Peek into any of the lunchtime spots and look into the past. Walls are papered with flowered prints, brass lanterns dangle over naugahyde booths, and the waitresses' hairstyles seem untouched by time.

Baldface Books, a used book and music store at the far end of Central Avenue, is a good turnaround point. Proprietor Clyde Allen is as pleasantly fusty as his stock is not, and he will guide you to good train-reading fare. In your calm state, you might pick up an old copy of Robert Frost poems or a church league cookbook.

For lunch, I sat at the counter of Jake's City Kitchen, packed with people, most of whom were ordering breakfast even though it was past noon. On the grill stretched a pile of sizzling hash browns. Omelets the size of catcher's mitts passed me. A spunky waitress recommended the turkey club and a root beer. At the counter, an old gent pulled up and ordered his regular, a western sandwich and a cup of coffee, totaling under $5. After a sturdy worker's meal, museum-gawk at the very used clothing and fun knickknacks across the street at Deja Vu Consignment Shop. Delightfully, it's still 1983 in parts of Dover.

Back at the station, a few passengers and several non-riding fathers with kids wait to see the new sensation pass through. The tooting horn of the train can soon be heard, and when it rounds the bend all hearts are twirling. This same horn can be heard regularly when you're on the train, and it's a soothing sound -
''We're coming,'' it seems to announce, ''and don't we look good!'' - far from the stridency of a car horn. A new cast of conductors with their steady Yankee accents help us up the metalgrate steps.

Once again, the gentle swaying rhythm settles your bones, making it easy to drift in and out of sleep. Wake in New Hampshire, then in Maine, and the landscape has shaken the industrial angles, running closer to northeast idyllic. Marshes open up to the east, the golden sea grass swept in one direction waiting for another tide to sweep it back. Terns, pipers, herons, and gulls flirt and peck at these stretches, along with the occasional casting fisherman or paddling kayaker.

It's hard, at this point, to contemplate ever loading into another automobile. Portland comes up on the horizon, a more serene version of the larger cities to the south. The train creaks to a halt. Just outside the station, a Metro bus will pick you up and drop you off in the old port for $1. The journey is over, but the ride has put you in the mood for what the Italians proudly call slow food.

I took a spot at the bar in Cinque Terre, a swank new Italian restaurant tucked on a cobblestone street in the Old Port. The lighting is low, the walls are battered brick and lime-chiffon, the furniture and fixtures sensuously curved. You could not be farther from Jake's hash browns in Dover. The menu offers a Spanish spin on Italian (specifically Ligurian) courses, in that you can order a ''mezza,'' or half portion, and taste a stream of small dishes. Trenette with wild mushrooms, a spinach salad with a red wine pancetta vinaigrette, a very simple preparation of sole with capers and white wine, all of this washed down with a glass of Amarone that tastes mysteriously of a Maine forest. As a patron says, '' It's more about the journey than just getting there.'' Is there a better description of our Downeaster state of mind?

A not-to-be-missed finale to the night sits at the top of the Eastland Park Hotel, which offers nice, decently priced rooms. The Top of the East, like Boston's Top of the Pru, overlooks the immediate city, but then the great, silent darkness of the Maine woods and ocean. The bar is luxuriously furnished with marble, walnut, and dapper waiters. The bartender offers flights of every sort of liquor, then lines up three different single malt scotches: ''Island Malts,'' she declares, ''and the ocean air can be tasted in each of them.''

Simultaneously the far-off train station can be spied out the panoramic windows. City lights twinkle, and the port waters reflect them back. As fine as this moment can be, you'll have no problem returning to your quiet seat on the rails, even if it must deliver you back into the clutter.