The Trip
For my mom’s birthday, we decided to take an Amtrak trip together. We decided to take the California Zephyr from the Bay Area to Chicago, spend a couple nights in Chicago, then take the Empire Builder to Portland where we’d connect to the southbound Coast Starlight back to the Bay Area.
The California Zephyr
Train 6: Emeryville to Chicago Scheduled: 53 hours States: California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois
California
We booked a connecting bus from downtown San Francisco, and were at the station at 8:30 for a 9:00am departure. We left Emeryville on time.
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I’ve done the Emeryville to Sacramento tracks tens of times but they were extra beautiful this time. Outside of Davis there were nut trees blooming.
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After Roseville we began our climb into the Rockies. A couple days before our train, the Zephyr had been cut back to Denver due to heavy snow fall (more than 10 feet!) in the Rockies, but we made it through ok. Last time I took the Zephyr, we lost four hours in the Rockies due to a downed tree and a slow plow.
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Donner Pass was breathtaking. It’s named after the Donner Party, who was stranded on the pass in 1847 and went as far as cannibalism, but these days it’s far less treacherous (unless you’re lame and get to Tahoe by car).
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It’s hard to capture just how magestic Donner Pass is, and how high up the train feels.
Nevada
We entered Nevada as it was getting dark outside. We had dinner in the dining car, I had the salmon, my mom had the chicken, both were good. We were sat with a nice English guy also going from Emeryville to Chicago who works for the PGA, eyeroll (to his credit, he says he hates golf and thinks it’s a stupid sport).
Reno was unremarkable, and Nevada was fully in the dark. I tried to get photos of Battle Mountain after Winnemucca, where Jerry grew up (bad place), but we got routed onto a track that went around it.
As I was about to go to bed, the conductor came up from the closed cafe and offered me a sandwich. It’s listed expiration date was in an hour and he didn’t want it to go to waste, so my three course meal turned into four courses.
Utah
I slept through most of populated Utah. Being on time on train 6 through Utah is kind of a bummer. Last time a took the Zephyr, we went through western Utah in the early morning, and I got to see the sun rise over the salt flats west of Salt Lake City. Towards the end of Utah, we entered Glenwood Canyon and began following the Colorado River into Colorado.
Colorado
The Utah/Colorado border was marked by white paint on the canyon wall that said <-UTAH|COLORADO->. Unfortunately we were going to fast to catch a photo.
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I got the first full look of our train at Grand Junction, CO. The Monday train out of Emeryville during the spring is not a busy one, so we were a short 6 cars. We were lead by two P42 locomotives.1 We had front to back a baggage car, two sleepers, a dining car, an observation lounge/cafe car, and two coaches.
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Grand Junction’s actual station building is a cinderblock shack (does this count as an Amshack?), but it’s old depot station is beautiful. It was built by the Rio Grande, but has since fallen out of use and into disrepair.
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There’s a group trying to restore it, maybe throw them a couple bucks. That lettering on the red is beautiful.
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As we were departing Grand Junction, I spotted an AT&T Long Lines tower! Long Lines was a Bell-then-AT&T project to build out an apocalypse proof microwave-based communication network for the national “defense."
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The pure scale of the Colorado terrain is awesome.
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Colorado is a beautiful state ruined by cars.
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Really, you had to put a highway through this? This is the last section of the interstate highway system to be completed. We should have known better by 1995.
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Do not pass at danger.
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Glenwood Springs is beautiful.
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The platforms are so low at Glenwood Springs that they have to wheel out these special stairs. I heard the conductor warn attendants to make sure to move them away otherwise they’d get clipped by the next train through, yikes.
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Lots of tumbleweeds out here.
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What a shame.
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The colors are amazing.
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We stopped here for the conductors to walk (inspect) the train after it clipped a rock. That little building is a post office! The dirt roads are kind of charming. They’d be fun to bike on. I think I want to do a tour following the route of the Zephyr through Colorado.
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We had hit a rock and split it about a mile back, but it punctured our main air reservoir. The crew determined it was fine to run until Denver, so about 30 minutes later we were back on the move.
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Our sister train, westbound Zephyr train 5!
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More dirt roads.
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Nobody should own this land.
I promise I’m not that much of a foamer, I just think the boowomp sound they make is really fun. ↩︎