California Zephyr

After my trip to San Francisco, it was time to board the next train, the California Zephyr, in Davis. The California Zephyr currently has a service advisory on the Amtrak website. Due to trackwork in Glenwood Canyon and recent flooding in Omaha, the Zephyr was running late. The service advisory said 3 to 5 hours behind schedule. I was taking this train to Galesburg, IL where I would board the Southwest Chief. I had a 6 hour layover there, so I was a little concerned about missing that connection. When the Zephyr pulled into Davis 45 minutes late, before reaching either of the service advisory areas, I really started worrying. I decided to put off the worrying until two days later, when I would have to change trains. Before then, there was nothing I could do except enjoy the ride.

After boarding the train, I found my way to the lounge car. The large windows there provide great places to take photos, and the train was going across Donner Pass through the Sierra Nevadas. Donner Pass is famous for two reasons. First, it earned its name when the pioneers were going west across the mountains to Sacramento. Donner was the name of a man leading a wagon party across the mountains when an early winter hit and stranded them in the pass. Some daring people went ahead to Sacramento to get help, which did not arrive for another five months, in the early spring. During that time, only half the wagon party survived the winter. They made it to Sacramento and recovered from their injuries and frostbite. Much later, after the railroad was built, a Southern Pacific passenger train was going through the pass when an avalanche fell off a mountain and buried the train. The train was stuck there for several days. Of the hundreds of passengers and crew on board, all survived, but some of the members of the rescue effort perished saving other people's lives. Fortunately, my journey across this mountain range was uneventful. The mountains provided some spectacular scenery when the trees allowed. The trees there are enormous, and are constantly in the way, even when the train is perched on the edge of a cliff. As a result, I did not get many good photos from the Sierras, but I did enjoy the view.

After the Sierras, the train arrived in Reno, the biggest little city in the world. Reno recently completed a project that put the railroad tracks in a trench through town. The railroad has always gone right through the center of town, blocking up all the traffic, especially in recent times with the long unit trains. Reno remedied this by digging a 35 foot deep trench and putting the tracks in it. Where the railroad crossings used to be, there are now bridges over the trench. The depot has a staircase going down into the trench so passengers can board the train.

After Reno was a big desert. The train picked up speed here, as it was a straight and flat run across the desert. I had seen a desert once before, from the California Zephyr in southern Utah. However, it was raining that day, so for the past two years my mental image of a desert included rain. However, this time it was a typical cloudless, sunny day in the desert. I got some photos of the desert, including the sun setting over the distant mountains. After the sun went down, I went back to my coach to sleep. I did not sleep well that night. The air conditioning on the train worked too well, and I had not brought a jacket or a blanket, so I was cold all night. When I got up, the first thing I did was go to the cafe car and order a hot chocolate. That warmed me up nicely, and I went upstairs to sit in the lounge all day again. Again, the scenery was desert. If I had never been to Utah before, I would have thought that was all the train passed through all night. However, during the night the train passed through Salt Lake and Utah valleys, both of which are the big population centers of Utah. They are probably the greenest parts of Utah, but I think they still qualify as desert. But they certainly are not flat and empty like the area the train was going through now.

After the desert, the real scenery started. The train crossed into Colorado through Ruby Canyon, a long canyon carved by the Colorado River. This canyon is so named because of the way the rocks almost glow red in the sunlight. It is really incredible, one of my favorite spots on the California Zephyr run. After Ruby Canyon the train stopped in Grand Junction, the biggest place between Denver and Salt Lake City. Two people from the National Park Service got on the train there to narrate during the scenic run between Grand Junction and Denver. It was very interesting, they often ride portions of the long distance trains during the summer months. I sat in the lounge car to enjoy the scenery and hear what they had to say about it. They narrated as the train wound its way around mountains and through canyons, gorges, cuts, and more often than anything else, tunnels.

Glenwood Canyon is a scenic highlight on this trip. The canyon walls extend so high that in order to see the peaks, you have to look through the windows in the ceiling of the lounge car. Interstate 70 winds its way through the canyon as well, on the other side of the river. This is another spectacular canyon carved by the Colorado River. The interstate through this canyon was not completed until the early 1990s at a cost of $45 million per mile. The railroad had gotten the only route through the canyon over 100 years earlier, so the interstate is built almost entirely on bridges and tunnels through the canyon.

During the Rockies, I met two other people in the lounge car who I ended up sitting with for the rest of the ride to Illinois. One of them was traveling to Milwaukee, the other to Syracuse. We hung out in the lounge car all through the Rockies. When we got to Denver, one of them got off the train during the long station stop there, found a pizza joint, and bought a pizza and a few cold ones to share on the train. I declined the beer but had my fill of pizza. While we ate, I uploaded my photos from the past two days onto my laptop, and they were both interested in seeing the photos I had taken. After we left Denver, it had gotten dark, and a poker tournament was forming at one end of the lounge car while a cowboy with his guitar was playing music. I listened to the music for a while before going back to my coach to sleep. By this time the train was running about two hours late.

I woke up the next morning in Lincoln, NB. If the train is on schedule, it passes all the way through Nebraska during the night. It was light out, so I knew we had lost more time. I went to the lounge car and ate some breakfast while looking out the window. As we headed east, we saw the Platte and Missouri Rivers in the Omaha area. However, the conductor explained that the nearest river was actually about a mile away, and the water that we were seeing next to the track ballast was in fact floodwater burying crops and entire neighborhoods. In fact, we were not on the normal passenger route. BNSF had kept a freight line around Omaha open by raising it five feet and building levies on either side of the track. There were a few places where the track would have been submerged if it had not been for the levies. We bypassed Omaha, but it was the only line open in the area, so the train had no other choice. There was water on both sides of the track as far as we could see.

When we crossed into Iowa, we were running about three hours late. I was starting to be optomistic about meeting my train on time in Illinois, because we had passed both areas that had a service advisory. However, there was a medical emergency while we crossed Iowa, and we stopped in a town called Fairfield where an ambulance met the train to take the patient to a nearby hospital. I do not know what happened, but I certainly hope he is all right. After that incident, we ended up waiting for several freight trains, delaying us even more. We finally rolled into Galesburg five and a half hours late. Fortunately for me, the Southwest Chief was running about an hour late already, so I did not miss my train. I sat at the station in Galesburg and watched freight trains come and go before my train arrived. There are a lot of freight trains there, it is a great place to visit to go railfanning. I did end up making my train, and I am sitting on the Southwest Chief as I write this. On this new train, I have new adventures ahead and new people to meet. Let's see where this train takes me!