August 19, 1998

A train ride to remember, and houses to forget

When Lydia and I took AMTRAK to Glenwood Springs, Colorado in late July, it was in many ways a new experience. Like getting through the airport, getting to the train can be a nerve-rattling experience. First you have to be driven to the Amtrak waiting room at the Ferry building. Then the bus is late, so you get a cup of coffee and an overpriced pastry at Omar's place, where the music is from the middle east and the smell is from off the bay. The bus arrived. We loaded on. Something went wrong. The bus pulled back into the parking lot, and the bus driver got on his cell phone to tell them to hold the train.

We hadn't started yet, and we were already late. Then, for the first time in at least twenty years, I visited Emeryville. Emeryville is normally a place I drive by on my way elsewhere. Berkeley is a destination. Even Oakland can be a destination. Emeryville is where Berkeley Farms used to bottle milk. No one I know deliberately GOES to Emeryville. We were directed to our car of the train, and up a narrow staircase to the second deck. The restrooms and a few seats for the handicapped are downstairs, but almost everyone went up stairs. The handicapped had better bring their own lunches, because to get to the dining car you have to climb the narrow stairs and walk through the cars. When the California Zephyr got going, though, the car we had settled in was almost empty. We had a pleasant conversation with a square dancer from Houston. Otherwise the emptiness was unnerving. As the train stopped in Martinez, Suisun, Davis and Sacramento more passengers filled some of the vacant seats, but the train was never over-crowded.

In Sacramento some volunteers from the state railroad museum came aboard to share bits of California and Nevada history with the passengers. As we passed a point a short distance east of Sacramento, they mentioned that this flat, low-lying place was where the railroad builders started to collect a premium to compensate for the difficulties of building through the rugged Sierras. And you thought political shenanigans were a twentieth century phenomenon?

As the Amtrak diesels huffed their way past gold rush towns, through snow sheds and high above trees and valleys, we admired the scenery and enjoyed the swaying cars. I particularly reveled in the lack of seat belts and the generous seat space, compared to the last time I was on an airplane. This train, unfortunately, averaged only about 44 miles an hour. Bullet trains to Reno or Denver aren't going to happen, not in my lifetime. That means that our destination, the middle of Colorado, took 27 hours and more.

From San Francisco to Colorado, the most common reminder of human beings (beside rusting car bodies strewn around) were mobile homes and their upscale relatives, manufactured homes. By the end of the trip I was both embarrassed at my insensitivity to the housing needs of my fellow human beings, and ready to pass a law banning houses that need to be hauled in by truck.

Perhaps a mobile home that doesn't look like a box could be an acceptable compromise.

The train Paul Azevedo would most like to ride would be on the tracks of the Ocean Shore Railroad, but he was born a generation too late.