“Episode 6:
The finest long distance train in the Amtrak fleet, the Coast Starlight, successor to SP’s most famous passenger train, the streamlined Daylight, arrived in Sacramento CA about 3:25am almost 3.5 hours late, primarily because of track maintenance needed due to flooding on the UP lines it uses in southern CA. We boarded our Superliner and found we were on the lower level, not a cause for complaint at that time of the morning, especially since the attendant had the beds already made up. I never did get good at the climb up to the upper berth (I need a lot more practice, on a lot more train trips). It’s an agile, young person’s sport, but I didn’t have any trouble that night, was pretty much asleep before the climb started. And we slept right through the big left turn before Roseville Yard to head us north and right through the sunrise.
Our attendant already had coffee ready when I rolled out about 6:30 am, up around Redding. We were in beautiful but somewhat repetitive fir forested northern CA scenery, and Dunsmuir was coming up so I got a shower and dressed for another grueling day of spectacular sightseeing and fine dining. Weather could not have been better, visibility was forever. I let Dad snooze awhile longer and went back to the first-class-only observation lounge car. Carla, a massive and exceedingly friendly black lady, was attending and kept the coffee coming. She had recently transferred to the Coast Starlight from the Capitol Limited that runs between Chicago and DC through PA. When she learned we were taking the Capitol back to DC, she autographed my Starlight schedule and wrote a note for the Capitol crew to “treat the bearer of this note to the finest service that I would have provided.” (They remembered her – and the service was good. But not as good as was hers on the Starlight.) Dad came through looking for his kid and after introductions and some more fir forest and Mt. Shasta viewing, we went back to the diner for breakfast and more coffee. I had just finished when we got to Dunsmuir, a 10-minute smoke stop. I got out, took a few pictures, went through the tiny station cut into the side of a mountain, and collected some Chamber-of-Commerce information. UP has a big classification yard there, but I didn’t see it. It was noticeably cooler there than when we left Sacramento.
For almost the whole Starlight trip we stayed in the Private 1st Class Lounge. Great viewing from the top and lower levels, constant quality refreshments, no kids, and otherwise sparsely populated, considering how well appointed the car was. But of course Dad made new friends of the few people who were there, mostly talking about what we’d already seen and where we were going. Everyone would say it sounded like the trip of a lifetime, and he’d say, No, it’s just the first, that the next one will include Canada also, probably in the summer of 2006. And everyone wanted to know where LaPlata MD was, and several heard about the F-5 tornado that destroyed the downtown a few years ago. Pop is an entertaining person to travel with. People gravitate to him.
I spent a lot of time taking pictures of Mt. Shasta to the east, and the incredible vistas to the west after Dunsmuir. You are NOT supposed to open the windows on the lower level dutch-doors while moving according to the signs and the car attendants, but they were smudgy and the scenery outside too photogenic to shoot through smudge. So I opened the windows and shot several rolls over the next few hours on the way to Eugene OR. Mt. Shasta is so huge it dominates the scene for hours. It always happened that when the best photo op occurred, I was out of film or was changing rolls. Missed a great shot of the southbound Starlight passing us going downgrade on a right-hand curve going over a long trestle – definitely a Trains magazine cover. Generally my pictures of the vast valley vistas were disappointing because the little camera just couldn’t accurately capture the incredible expanses seen. What looks in the photo like a field and a mountain in the background is my attempt to record the whole Rogue River valley bounded by the Siskiyou range. You find yourself repeating “How Great Thou Art,” often.
At some forgotten point in the afternoon, probably before Salem OR but definitely after lunch, Carla announced the wine and cheese tasting party. Then, she passed out…
…four or five bottles of different CA, OR and WA wines to the participants and let us all into the plates of cheeses and crackers. Dad and I forewent the wines and stuck to our sodas. But realizing there was at least an hour or two until first call for dinner in the diner, we proved that diet Pepsi went well with about every cheese they offered, properly cleansing our undiscriminating palates with liberal doses of more diet Pepsi, a fine Spring ’05 vintage, enticingly served at room temperature in an attractive can, (my preference) or over sparkling ice in a genuine Amtrak-monogrammed plastic highball container. Every sample we tried looked and tasted a great deal like cheese, none of the wine bibbers got fighting drunk, so we considered the party a success.
One of the highlights of the trip was going over the Columbia River north of Portland during dinner. But to be honest, I wasn’t sure when we did it, or if we crossed it a couple of times. Once we left the station at Portland we crossed some biiiiggggg rivers, with ocean-going freighter and tanker traffic, and one or more of them had to be the mighty Columbia. We weren’t far from what’s left of Mt St. Helens, but it got cloudy and the sun was going down and I wasn’t sure if we saw it or not. OK, so whatever we crossed and whatever we saw a little north of Portland was really cool.
Then, since we were now in WA, it started to rain, and the late afternoon sun (~7:30p) created 2-3 simultaneous rainbows to the east, as we flew through dozens of little Portland OR/Vancouver WA suburbs and townlets. With the Cascades as backdrop in the East, we could clearly see where each rainbow started and stopped and the whole arc. I tried to get some photos, but again (and always) GOD did a better job making them than I did shooting them. Smudgy windows.
Our last light of the day came somewhere south of Centralia WA. Amtrak had well-planned an 8 pm arrival at Starlight’s northern terminus, Seattle’s King St. Station, that would have allowed perfect viewing along the whole southeastern shore of Puget Sound, all the way into Seattle, IF we’d been on schedule. But since we were now about 4 hours late, and it was dark, the only Sound we saw (get it?) was an occasional bridge, ship, or coastal factory of some sort. Around midnight we rolled into King St. Station, which turned out to be in the same parking lot as the new Seattle Mariner/Seahawk stadium, and half a block from the original Union Station, now a bus/trolley stop. We were in line for just a few minutes to catch a taxi to our Ramada Inn in the center of town about a mile from the station. The Ramada turned out to be right on the monorail running between the Central Business District about 4 blocks south, and the World’s Fair Park and Space Needle 8 blocks north! – Just a coincidence? I think not. Eagerly anticipating almost 2 full days in Seattle, but without one single thing planned, we hit the rack, not too disappointed that it wasn’t moving.
Next, part 7 – the coolest moment on the whole trip. (You can’t plan it. You can’t make it up.)”
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