Riding the Rails Through The Snow To Grandmother's House (In Chicago)

It's been nearly 40 years since private railroads threw in the towel and stopped transporting passengers from place to place in America and Amtrak took over that task.  Alas, we still don't have a national passenger train system that comes anywhere near that I found throughout Europe in September of 2009 when I rode the rails in comfort and style from Prague to Dresden, Dresden to Berlin, Berlin to Munich, Baden-Baden to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Brussels, and finally on the speedy Eurostar train under the English Channel from Brussels to London.

I took my first train trip when I was around 7 or 8 years old.  My Mother and I had flown from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C., on a United Airlines DC-6, and spent the day with friends from Seattle who had arrived in town sometime before us.  At the end of a long day, the two of us boarded a train back to Seattle. I remember having supper in the dining car at a table with a white cloth, wearing a suit and tie, just like a grown-up man.  The most fascinating part of the trip home for me was flushing the toilet on the train.  As far as I could tell, whatever went into the toilet went out the bottom of the train and was scattered over the rails as the train roared on its way down the track.  I must have played with the flushing mechanism a hundred times before my Mother fetched me back to my seat in the day coach, explaining that perhaps other passengers might want to use the bathroom, too.

Another six years would pass before I rode a train again.  At age 14, late on an August evening in1961, along with hundreds of other teenagers, I boarded a Northern Pacific train in Seattle's King Street Station, bound for a Luther League convention in Miami Beach.  We rode in day coaches all 6,000 or so miles to and from Florida, with a two-night stop in Chicago on the way down.  (I reminisced about that long-ago trip in a post to the blog I wrote about my 2007 trip, this time by air, to the Windy City).

It would be nearly thirty years before I rode the rails once more, taking a long weekend trip from the San Francisco Bay Area to Reno and back, this time aboard Amtrak's California Zephyr which runs between Emeryville and Chicago.  The trip up wasn't bad.  The sun was shining, and in late April, snow still hung on the trees and clung to the mountains.  Amtrak, not known then or now for running on time, arrived in Reno just a half an hour or so behind schedule.  But coming back was a real drag.  A slide between Reno and Chicago had delayed the west bound train by five to six hours.  When we left Reno about 6 pm we were ready to eat, but the dining car was closed since the train crew had been on duty for long hours and there was no "relief" crew to take over for them.  So we were left to "dine" at the snack bar.  To make matters worse, the toilets (sort of like "porta potties" on the bottom level of the two-level cars) were full to overflowing in our assigned day coach.  Finally, after the conductor realized that he had the choice of opening an unused car and allowing passengers to escape the stench rising from the toilets in the car we had originally boarded, or being thrown (like Mama) from the train.

My next Amtrak adventure came in September of 1999 on the Coast Starlight which runs between Seattle and Los Angeles.  We had flown up to Seattle, stayed a few days, and then headed for home.  After about four hours and lunch on the train, we arrived in Portland, nearly on schedule, and stepped off the train for a three day stay.  On Friday, we hopped back on the Coast Starlight, rode two hours south to Albany where a friend living nearby, west of Corvallis, picked us up.  The next afternoon, he dropped us off about an hour south, in the city of Eugene, where we re-boarded the train for the trip back to the Bay Area.  We had a pleasant, although delayed dinner in the Club Car (even though we had a table reserved in the dining car, dinner service was so far behind that we couldn't be seated there), and then endured a sleep-disturbing "rock n' roll" ride in our private compartment on the overnight leg between Klamath Falls and Sacramento.  Even though our fare included breakfast, Amtrak just couldn't get its act together to serve us during the two hour ride between Sacramento and Emeryville.  (Six months earlier we had taken a flawless overnight trip, in much more comfort, on a train between Florence and Paris).

I haven't been aboard an Amtrak train in over ten years.  But I've ridden many, many miles on European trains.  One day, I'm told, I may even be able to ride a high-speed train from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles --- the same sort of train that has been running between many cities in Europe for years.

In the meantime, I'm content to be an armchair train traveler in the U.S.  But even it the train is late, and the service is not that great, riding the California Zephyr over the Sierra and through the snow to Grandmother's House in Chicago could still beat driving or flying there.  (Click here to see the nifty one-minute video Spud Hilton, Travel Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, shot while riding the Zephyr through the mountains this past Sunday).