My Train Recollections: Mike Harrison – TVRM/NS 21st Century Steam Trip – Part 1

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Saturday, 9 March 2013, Bristol to Radford, VA

“I called for tickets the same day I heard about the trips on a local radio station in Knoxville, TN.  As part of their 21st Century Steam program, Norfolk Southern had teamed with the Tennessee Valley RR Museum in Chattanooga and Johnson City’s Watauga NHRS chapter to run refurbished Southern Ry consolidation 630 on steam excursions from Bristol, VA up to Radford, VA and back on Saturday, March 9, 2013. Next day the same consist would steam from Bristol to Bulls Gap, TN and return, all mileage on the NS main line from Shaffer’s Crossing in Roanoke, VA to Sevier Yard in Knoxville, TN. Tickets were very reasonable, $65/person for each trip, including tax, all coach seating.

I asked a friend & classmate to teach our Sunday School class on Sunday the 10th. My wife didn’t want to go, so I got a room at the Budget Host Inn on State Street in Bristol for Saturday night for $45 (however for a minimum 3-night stay the next weekend, $600 – for the Bristol NASCAR race). I found the motel online, looking for the closest to the station. It was accurately reviewed as quite pleasant, clean and convenient, just over a mile from the recently and beautifully renovated Bristol VA/TN RR station. The station is now an artsy mall but unfortunately was closed before our departures and after arrivals and couldn’t be internally explored.

Tickets for each run arrived separately in the mail from the TVRM Chattanooga office and I was assigned to car 6, a Watauga restored ex-N&W Powatan Arrow coach for the Radford leg, and to car 1, TVRM’s ex Southern Ry coach 907 to Bull’s Gap.

The radio alarm went off at 3:30 am, Saturday morning and I was showered, dressed in Little River RR Museum finery, on the road by 4:30 for the 2.5-hour drive to Bristol, fully provisioned w/ Rush Limbaugh diet tea, water, cola, snacks, and ham and cheese sandwiches for the trips. Our consist held a commissary car but lacked a diner. Since there was no traffic on I-40 or 81, I arrived at the motel about 6:40 just as the proprietor was changing the sign in the lobby from “Closed” to “Open,” so I went in. They weren’t crowded, so I got the room early and a cup of coffee, then unpacked clothes, selected victuals for the Radford leg and put the rest in the room refrigerator, loaded the camera and set out for the station by 7 am. The cool weather could not have been nicer, but the walk down State St (on the VA side) was a mile due east, and the sun was blinding.

Parking lots at and around the station were full and I assumed the train was sold out. There were about 600 on each trip, including 100 crew mostly from Watauga, some TVRM (including the 630 cab crew), many actual NS employees, and NS security who chased the train to all stops. Behind 630 our consist was an NS slug, GP 40 assist loco, tool/parts car, 11 coaches and the commissary car, a redone 40 ft mail car (not an RPO). Passengers were milling about the station concourse and appeared to range in age from <1 to over 80. I spoke with one man who had spent nearly $1,000 to bring 13 family members on this excursion, none of whom he said had ever seen much less ridden a passenger train before.

Our train was steaming on the ready track a quarter mile north of the station in what’s left of the once sizable Bristol yard. At 7:40 am, she gave three brief low-throat toots and slowly backed south past the station across State St and into TN to switch onto the main. I (and ~50 others) was waiting with a Pentax SLR and two rolls of 200 speed 35mm film. Got several shots as 630 eased back into VA to a stop heading north and we began to board. Except for car assignment, seating was unassigned, first come, first choice. I got a seat at the back of car 6, nee N&W coach 829, on the left (west) side in front of a full window, maximum viewing. About 8:15, two toots and we imperceptibly slowly and gently started rolling toward Radford about 115 miles up the track; so gently that we were several hundred yards out of the station when I heard from several nearby seats, “Hey, we’re moving.”

We had just cleared the station when I also heard commotion from the front of our car, “the water’s everywhere.” An unknown traveler had flushed the toilet, the fill valve stuck open and the gratefully empty bowl had overflowed flooding the bathroom and front half of the car. Only one mop on board but it was eventually located and water cleaned up in about 30 min. Only then could we go forward to the commissary/souvenir car where I left about $40 in exchange for some neat TVRM stuff, of course including the 630 T-shirt. The 5-foot tall cashier asked me to pull some hats from an overhead bin that she could not reach (and I barely could) and put them out on the shelves for which she offered and I accepted a 630 3-D refrigerator magnet.

Railfans were waiting with cameras at literally every grade crossing and overpass between Bristol and Abingdon, VA where we stopped to pick up more passengers. Still our car did not fill to capacity, and I spread out on my double seat for both trips. Very helpful route guides were passed out early and were ideal for familiarizing oneself with where we were and the points of interest we were passing on the way to Radford. I had forgotten how blissfully bucolic Emory is. Their little station is still standing but could use a dose of TLC.

Our engineer was making up time, and we hit speeds of 45-50 mph and held them on the occasional tangents. We actually arrived in Radford 5 minutes early, but not before passing 100 miles of beautiful SW VA countryside, including the Glade Spring’s Y and spur to Saltville; Chilhowee, where it seemed the whole town had turned out to watch and hear us pass; Seven Mile Ford and Marion with the beautifully restored and often photographed Main St (US 11) depot and last crossing of the Holston River; and Rural Retreat, site of one of Southern’s most disastrous high speed wrecks. We crossed the well-photographed high trestle coming into Wytheville, and later whistle-saluted many more than the whole population of Max Meadows where Winston Link shot one of his famous photos through a too-long-gone trackside parlor window.

After the short and only tunnel on the route we steamed through Pulaski and hundreds more envious fans, and held the main line to Dublin (instead of bending SE on the also scenic Galax branch). After several minutes descending the long grade down to the New River we slowed to cross the New River bridge into Radford. Along the way a couple of ladies came through the train handing out maps and info packets about Radford and explaining which busses to take to get to restaurants, museums and other attractions in town. They were really helpful, and since I’d already polished off a ham and cheese sandwich, when I detrained I caught the blue line to the Glencoe museum, where the ladies had promised they had a RR exhibit. The museum, a Civil War General’s mansion, also had a gift shop and I could not resist the two N&W books, a Pulaski Station history book and post cards they offered, even though they only took cash. I walked back to the train and looked into a couple of antique shops, bought a Grif Teller cover RR comic book and took some more photos before retraining about 2:20 pm for a 2:30 on time departure. Radford has a “Y:” and NS turned the whole train, so we all kept our original seats and what we missed on the right side of train coming north, we saw on the way back south to Bristol.

The return was pleasant and relaxing, except that our car lacked AC and many opted for cooler cars. We had brief holds at Marion for opposing freights to get in the hole but with those exceptions NS kept us priority the whole day. A lady representing the “Fire up 611″ committee showed two DVDs promoting restoration to service of N&W’s big streamlined J-Class 4-8-4 locomotive, now resting peacefully, but cold, in Roanoke’s Virginia Transportation Museum. We reached Bristol at sundown. The walk back to the motel was markedly slower, not just because I carried four bags of souvenirs, camera and remaining food. We’d covered about 230 miles, and I’d walked about 4-5 more. Take out supper from Hardee’s was definitely the low-light of the day. I set the clock ahead an hour, watched “cousin” Ric Harrison on TV, and slept until the 6 am alarm.”

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Rock on Trains © 2024, Tom Rock + T.D.R. Productions. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from Tom Rock is strictly prohibited.

My Train Recollections: Mike Harrison – Best Train Trip Ever – Part 10

“Th, th, th, that’s all folks!  Hope you enjoyed the series enough to plan one similar if not the same.

    This is strange to write. The ‘best train trip ever’ took place from May 27 – June 12, 2005. I wrote the first nine episodes of the saga over the next year, finishing in May 2006, while memories were freshest, still reasonably vivid, including the original final part 10, and sent it, along with the others as they were completed to friends and family. I have (and occasionally re-read and continue to edit) parts 1-9. But Part 10 is gone. Cannot find a hard copy anywhere and probably the only computer on which it may still exist is at LLNL in Livermore, CA, so I am now rewriting it six years later (July 2011) but the memories are no longer freshest.”

–mike

“Best Train Trip Ever: Part 10 – You Can Go Home Again

There are 3 main entrances in Glacier National Park: at East Glacier, West Glacier, and Canada. We had tried 2 of the 3 and had been stopped, praise the LORD, because He might want us to see it in July. [We probably won’t though. Dad is now 91 and no longer seems as interested in extended travel. S’OK. We couldn’t reasonably expect to duplicate, much less exceed, the wonder and excitement of such a great trip again. Trains are more crowded and expensive now that airline travel has been made intolerable, the dining car food is no longer chef-prepared, and surely by now global warming has melted all the ice in Glacier Park.]

At about 10:30, Friday morning June 10, 2005, both Summer and the Empire Builder arrived at Glacier Park. The weather was as big-sky beautiful as was the Genesis-led Train 8, eastbound for Chicago. Dad and I were still overstuffed from the mammoth Glacier Park Lodge buffet breakfast as we climbed aboard along with more than a dozen other passengers and were shown to our first class roomette. No possibility of an upgrade this time since soon the train was going to be full. I lost no time getting back to the observation lounge to watch the Rockies recede and the rolling Montana cattle country roll by for the rest of the day. The BNSF (Great Northern) track used by Amtrak closely parallels US route 2 all the way across Montana, and I’ll let you easily guess which was put down first. And James Jerome Hill paid for every bit of right-of-way himself, no federal subsidies. By late afternoon we passed the restored Wolf Point fort still guarding the upper Missouri River. But by the time we crossed the MT/North Dakota border and stopped in Williston to change crews (and so I could closely admire and photograph the little depot and static GN 2-8-4) it was dusky, then black by Minot with its huge and well-lit BNSF classification yard.

We bedded down shortly after Minot but Saturday morning, June 11, were up, showered, shaved and coffee’d before pulling into Minneapolis-St. Paul for a lonnnnnnnnng smoke break/crew change. The new-ish Amtrak depot resembled in way too many ways a big 1960’s Greyhound terminal, but successfully atoned by housing a faithfully restored beaver-tailed Milwaukee Road Hiawatha observation car on the grounds, along with several more vintage Santa Fe and CMnStP&P passenger cars no doubt belonging to members of the local RR Historical Society.

We followed the Mississippi River south from St. Paul, and saw some of its really wide, really shallow dams/locks until we crossed the river into Wisconsin near La Crosse and sped across America’s Dairy land to the Wisconsin Dells where lots and lots of people trained and detrained. I remembered it had been a popular 1920’s vacation spot, but I was surprised as to how popular it still is. We both stayed in our Sleeper compartment during our stop in Columbus so as not to risk catching any of the pervasive liberalism contagions rampant at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a mere 28 miles distant. Very shortly after leaving Milwaukee’s depot the conductor announced our first view of Lake Michigan, if you squinted between the Mercantile and a docked Great Lakes freighter. We were soon in Chicago’s Union Station, before 5pm and less than an hour late after 1,000 miles. Turned out we needn’t have been concerned with missing the 6:20pm scheduled departure of Train 30, the Capitol Limited, bound for Washington, DC and home. Because we were really late leaving Chicago.

Although we were “All Aboard” by 6pm, almost as soon as we had settled into our familiar roomette the conductor confessed over the intercom that we’d be delayed briefly while mechanics repaired a bad HVAC unit on one of the other sleeper cars. Three hours later they gave up and replaced the whole car. We left at nearly 9:30pm and passed the Illinois/Indiana south shore in the dark, including what is now described as “the most miserable city in America” abandoned Music Man throwback, Professor Harold Hill’s Conservatory steel town, “Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, Gary Indiana, My home sweet home,“ now best seen at night from a distance. There were other distinct advantages to the late departure also. We passed the vital but monotonous farmlands of the Midwest in the dark and having seen much of it from the Cardinal windows on the way out, we didn’t feel overly deprived.

We were up, clean, sweet and fed after Cleveland and saw the whole crushingly abject Ohio river approach into Pittsburgh, passing dozens of shutdown, never-to-reopen steel mills and fabrication plants both before and after the Station, done in by EPA, old technology and age, questionable trade agreements and labor union issues. Pittsburgh was another lengthy smoke stop and crew change before the Capitol eased away from the platform weaving through the steep valleys south of Pittsburgh toward Connellsville, PA. Here we joined and followed the scenic Spring-swollen Youghiogheny River and began our slow and interminable climb up and over the Alleghenies, passing a half dozen even slower CSX unit coal drags bound for Hagerstown, Baltimore and points south, all the way to the gap at Cumberland, MD through which virtually every train from the Midwest to the Mid Atlantic must pass, another train-watcher’s busy paradise.

Soon after Cumberland, we crossed back into WV and drifted down the Potomac’s SW bank until the brief stop at postcard-scenic Harpers Ferry and the bridge-tunnel back into MD. We were due into DC’s Union Station shortly after Noon, but since we were so late, or possibly because I’d showed our car attendant my note from the Coast Starlight’s Carla – he did remember her, the Diner crew gave us sandwiches, chips and drinks on the house for lunch. Somewhere along the revived C&O canal I cell-phoned brother Kevin to arrange for his taxi service to meet us at the station. My profuse apologies, Kev. We were within sight of the station when the train just stopped. Eventually someone announced that we were too late for our normal arrival track and arrangements had to be made for an alternate. We sat there for an hour, probably timed out and replaced our crew, but eventually pulled in and dropped all air at 5pm, four hours late. But I still think that eight hours tardy over 7,000 miles was/is a pretty good record. Really not too bad if you consider that half the delay was on the last leg, and exceptional when realizing one-eighth of it was within the last few hundred yards.

So, on Sunday, June 12, 2005, at 5pm my father, Joe Harrison of La Plata, MD, with his oldest son Michael, pulled into Washington, DC’s Union Station on Amtrak’s Capitol Limited having just completed THE BEST TRAIN TRIP EVER from Manassas, VA to Washington, DC, about 30 miles distant. But for a true rail fan the best trip is always the longest, so we had taken the scenic route from Manassas to DC, via Chicago, Denver/Colorado Springs, Sacramento, Seattle and Glacier Park, 7,000 miles in 17 days. We loved 6,999.9 miles of it. Kevin was there to meet us. We were home, and glad to be there.

Much thanks to Amtrak for an exceptional and unforgettable travel experience. We never met a surly or even brusque train or station employee, though among our train crews Carla on the Starlight wins our Miss Congeniality. All employees were knowledgeable, courteous and professional. Never a cross word even when we were running late and a few passengers were complaining. The preponderance of dining car meals surpassed our high expectations, but Dad admitted he would have ordered something besides the prime New York strip steak after his seventh consecutive. It was and remains difficult to consistently name the best leg, so I’ll equivocate that it is a close tie between the Zephyr, Coast Starlight, Empire Builder, Cardinal and Capitol. But if you can only ride one in your life, take the California Zephyr, Denver to Emeryville… Wait, maybe the Starlight, from Santa Barbara to Sacramento Union Station. No, the Empire Builder, Harve to Whitefish, MT. Or the Cardinal, Charlottesville to…

All praise and thanks to GOD for the opportunity and means to see so much of His glorifying creation in such style. And for bringing us back home safely, and by His schedule exactly on time. By His grace may He someday permit another trip.

20 Oct 2013: Very last post trip note: Dad took the “Going to the Son” road without me. At 8:27pm on August 27, 2013, with all work and all trips completed, by His grace and mercy GOD brought Dad Home to stay with His Son Jesus and rejoin our Mom, Ruby Joan, his wife of over 60 years. He rests in peace and I look forward to joining Him and them soon. He would have been 93 today.”

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Rock on Trains © 2024, Tom Rock + T.D.R. Productions. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from Tom Rock is strictly prohibited.

My Train Recollections: Mike Harrison – Best Train Trip Ever – Part 9

“Episode 9 – Glacier Park in June

They say Glacier Park is glorious in July or August. The same park across the border in Canada is called Waterton. Sightseeing, fishing, camping and hiking and canoeing/rafting without par, and of course the unparalleled Going-to-the-Sun Road. In September the cool down starts, with the onset of Winter’s pure white frigidity shortly thereafter and lasting at least until June 10, 10:30 am. We arrived June 9th.

Our Train 8, the eastbound Empire Builder arrived at East Glacier, MT mid-morning on Thursday, 6/9/05. The station was open and staffed. It is a beautiful example of what a Great Northern turn-of-the-last-century-now-fully-restored-and-used-by-Amtrak station should look like. The structure is original, just updated to meet all MT State building code requirements, i.e., should be made of trees. When we left Seattle, one of us had the brilliant idea (borne of need since there is no baggage handling at West Glacier) to send our bulk luggage on to East Glacier, keeping just an overnight bag for the night at the Belton Chalet in West Glacier. We got off the train along with a bunch of other folks and when they dispersed, we collected the forwarded bags from the Station Agent, who gave us a quick tour of the baggage room (still just like it was in 1904) and history lesson, including some of the noteworthy carved inscriptions and artistry left on the bare fir log walls by earlier agents or patrons. I got some good GN and Amtrak postcards and we walked the 200 yards across the not-yet-blooming-but-at-least-level garden grounds separating the station from the Glacier Park Lodge. It was magnificent, crowded and busy for 11am. When it was our turn at the front desk we got nothing but bad news. “You’re too early for check-in, the room won’t be ready until 11:30 (later, 12:00, 12:15, 12:30, etc.)” and, “You’re too late for the Going-To-The-Sun Road tour, but the road is closed today, anyway. It was reopened after yesterday’s snow storm but there was a big avalanche this morning that buried it and they will have to blast ‘er open again. You should have come in July!”

It was too early for lunch, so we wandered around the GPL admiring the place. The main lodge is open in the center like a hotel with a massive atrium, only no skylight, with guest rooms on the second and third floors, a huge dining room on one end of the main floor and breezeway connecting an annex on the other end. The primary structural supports are giant Douglas fir trunks, probably 5-6 ft in diameter at the base and 5-6 ft in diameter at the top. Not much taper on these monsters. The whole lodge was hung on about 16 of these, and if we’d moved the furniture to one side, you could almost have painted a regulation football field on the floor. Everything was decorated in 100% American West. There weren’t just moose and elk heads hanging on the walls, there were entire buffalo, GN big-horn sheep, and stuffed grizzly carcasses to photo op with. I took pictures and got postcards. Also got a book about the GN/Glacier Park history and sat down in a really comfortable chair in the enclosed breeze way from the main lodge over to the new (c1909) annex, to read while they got our room ready. Dad was writing postcards on an old desk until he and, as it was later relayed to me, several of the other guests were disturbed by prodigious snoring. When he succeeded in shaking me awake and quiet, I checked on the room and it was ready – on the 3rd floor, of course, – no elevators, of course. (And no elevators means no wheeled luggage carrier, which meant the only way to get your stuff up to the room was to carry it up the stairs the old-fashioned way because one of us was too cheap to hire a local coolie.)

After carrying and unpacking, Pop’s coolie was hungry, so we came back to lunch in the main dining room. We waited for just a minute or two and got preferred seating at the north-facing window looking up the snow-covered eastern slopes of the Montana Rockies. I think I got the house special, chili. The waitpeople were all east-Europeans just like on a cruise ship, here to make a fortune, practice English, and party. East Glacier, MT could not have been their most sought-after party spot, but the ones we talked with liked the area and many were repeaters, returning for the 6-8 week Summer season that started in July. 

After lunch Pop went to the massive fireplace at the west end of the main lodge and made friends with everyone there. The lodge lobby stayed pretty crowded because nobody could get into the Park. Dad talked to one woman, a retired Fed like himself who explained she’d come to see the Going-to-the-Sun Road and wasn’t leaving until it opened. I went out to double expose a few rolls of film in town, at the station, and just a quarter mile west of the station, at the long trestle across a pitiful little stream 100 ft below. This trestle had an unusual appurtenance, a 20 ft high wind screen across the top of the entire span. I found out part of a freight train had been blown off the tracks into the ravine the year before. You could still see damaged areas where cars had hit the bridge, and where cranes and other heavy equipment had been used to clear the mess. So, to prevent it from happening again, BNSF added the wind screen on the north side, which eliminates any scenic viewing while crossing the ravine, but cuts down on potentially devastating wind shear thereby compensating in more useful ways. If I had only read a little more of my new book before snoring off earlier, I’d have found 2 (or 3) Medicine Creek less than a mile east of town, a RR photographer’s dream because it is bridged by a monster of a rickety old trestle, 10 times as long and high as the one I did find. We crossed it the next day. Of course, when you’re on the train crossing a RR bridge, you can’t see the bridge. All you see is how high in the air you are, with no discernible support, and how happy you are to not be falling. At least I have photos of 2 (or 3) Medicine in the book.

East Glacier is a little bigger than West Glacier, but neither is going to need to build a stadium for a major league baseball team anytime soon. West Glacier is snugged into the mountains. East Glacier dramatically marks the end of the MT rolling prairie and the start of the Rocky Mountains just a sharply as the period to your right marks the end of this sentence. No transition. If walking west, and step “x” is on the rolling plains, step “x+1” is climbing the first mountain (unless you know the way through Maria’s Pass). East Glacier supports a US Post Office, so I mailed some souvenirs home so we wouldn’t have to carry them anymore. After a careful accounting, I packed the Royal Gorge stemware in a mailing tube with mostly-clean undies to keep them from breaking. Everything arrived intact, and all travelers had sufficient apparel to complete the final days of the trip.

We had a fairly late supper (for us) and turned in early when it got dark. For such a large open place it was quite quiet by 10 pm. It was too cool to open either window overlooking the station, and we couldn’t turn on the wall heater in the room because it was adjacent to the bed/covers, and there wasn’t room to move the bed away. But we had plenty of authentic western blankets and spent a restful night, exhausted after 2 brutal days of doing nothing. Early to bed, early to rise, so we were among the first to sample the ponderous GPL breakfast buffet. I’d enumerate the dishes available if I could remember, but I am comfortable and mostly accurate in stating that if what you sought was an edible breakfast/brunch item, it was available somewhere in the dining room if you could locate the right serving table, though I never saw (or sought) the famed Rocky Mountain Oyster Bar.

After breakfast, we packed and checked out. This time our luggage was driven the 200 yards and left waiting for us to give to the Station Agent/baggage handler, a very friendly young lady who graciously searched her poster stock for any remaining Amtrak advertising posters. She found a beauty of the Empire Builder, but only had one bent, worn print of the Pioneer, a great train that used to run from Salt Lake City to Seattle through imaginably spectacular National Park-like scenery (also used on occasion by the American Orient Express) until Amtrak killed it. She apologized for its condition and gave it to me, along with several baggage tags. Gratis. The gratuity she got when checking our luggage was not for her great baggage handling abilities. GOD bless her generosity, and He has blessed her, with that job in that location.

Train 8 was about 30 minutes late. No matter. It was a beautiful warm, sunny morning and we were standing on the platform of a genuine Great Northern working RR station/museum, dutifully looking west into the famous Pass for our train. At about 10:30, Friday morning June 10, 2006, both Summer and the eastbound Empire Builder arrived at Glacier Park. I firmly believe the doors to our Superliner opened at the same moment Going-to-the-Sun Road re-opened. There are 3 main entrances in Glacier National Park; at East Glacier, Belton, and Canada. We had tried 2 of the 3 and had been stopped, praise the LORD, because He might want us to see it in July.

Last – Part 10: You can go home again.”

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Rock on Trains © 2024, Tom Rock + T.D.R. Productions. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from Tom Rock is strictly prohibited.

“Train Wrecks from the Movietone Outtakes Collection, Volume V”

Video courtesy of Speed Graphic Film and Video via YouTube.

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Rock on Trains © 2024, Tom Rock + T.D.R. Productions. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from Tom Rock is strictly prohibited.

My Train Recollections: Mike Harrison – Best Train Trip Ever – Part 8

“Part 8, World’s Greatest Train Trip – Glacier Park, MT

Our half of the Empire Builder, Train # 8, bound for Chicago and a host of points in between, eased out of the King Street Station about 5 pm, Tuesday, June 7 and headed north under and through Seattle towards Everett, WA, where it turned east for the next 2000 miles. The other half of the Empire Builder starts from Portland, OR, heads east up the Columbia River valley, and in the middle of the night (if everyone stays on schedule) the two trains merge at Spokane. If the engineers are really good, the sleepers never even notice.

The first day (night) on the Empire Builder was not surprisingly the most forgettable on the entire trip. Not that the Empire Builder was an unenjoyable experience: far from it. My whine was that shortly after supper, while we were still in beautiful western WA mountain, valley and apple country, it got dark. Most of this leg of the trip, from Seattle to West Glacier, we spent playing cards and sleeping. We missed the whole WA eastern desert, the hook-up with the other half of the EB in Spokane (never even noticed), and the entire panhandle of the State of Idaho! I think my only photo on this part of the trip was of the Whitefish, MT depot, a large uniquely Tudor-style station. This 15 hour segment can be boringly summarized as follows: sleep, shower, shave, dress, eat and get off (practically in the middle of nowhere), though in fact no moment on a train is ever boring.

We arrived at West Glacier exactly on time, 0800. It was cool, overcast and misty/foggy. The only people getting off there were my Dad and his No. 1 son, and a hippy-looking backpacking couple. No one got on. There was no traffic on the one road in sight (US 2), and a local freight train parked on a passing siding was cold iron. The station was locked, empty. I had a moment of partial insight to how people riding the Alaska RR or VIA’s Canadien, might feel when they ask to get off at MP 429, only 68 miles to the next nearest human habitation. They might feel lonely, even a bit panicked when the train slowly pulls away. Especially since the name on the station was Belton, not West Glacier. Did we get off at the wrong place? Too late now, the train is pulling away! Panic moment over, I re-realized our first Glacier National Park stop went by both names.

West Glacier consists of the Belton/West Glacier RR Museum (the old Great Northern RR station) that graciously allows Amtrak to drop/collect passengers there, a gas station on the opposite side of two-lane US Rt 2, a couple of motels, joint US-Canadian GNP Information Center, and a restaurant with excellent huckleberry ice cream, huckleberry cake, huckleberry pie, huckleberry soup, huckl …you get the picture…, and the Belton Chalet. The chalet is the original and first tourist lodge built by the GN RR to attract tourists to the area that became Glacier National Park, primarily through GN’s lobbying efforts. GN saw GNP, eventually with it’s incredible Going-to-the-Sun Road, as their answer to Northern Pacific’s exclusive access to Yellowstone. The Chalet is about 100 years old, just a few hundred yards up the road from the station, and we had reservations in a third floor room with private balcony overlooking the mountains to the north, east and west, and the BNSF main line on which we’d just arrived. The view of the mountains to the south was greatly obscured by the face of the mountain into which GN had tucked their chalet.

We walked the 200 yards to the Chalet entrance, past the Chalet Restaurant; then climbed basically straight up the side of the mountain to reach the front door of the lodge office. The difference in elevation from the road up to the big log/stone lodge looked and felt to me like several thousand feet (actually less than 100 ft). We were both puffing when we reached the 2nd floor office, and we still had to climb to our room on the top (third) floor. And I had to stop every so often to turn and encourage Pop because he was slowed by his emphysema and could barely get up the mountain carrying our luggage. Just joking… Dad had had the brilliant idea to ask our EB Attendant if we could send our luggage on to East Glacier, have it off-loaded and held at the station until we arrived the next day. “Of course,” he said, so that is what we did keeping just an overnight kit for the single night at Belton. All three floors of the place were essentially at ground level, depending on how much mountain you wanted to climb before you went inside. The hotel offered hot and cold running water, private bath, no elevators, no TV, and so much peace and quiet that the desk clerk suggests leaving your ears at the desk because they won’t be needed until checkout. We kept ours to listen to the trains pass.

The hotel lobby had a big functioning fireplace and a self-serve coffee thermos and we used both until a lady showed up to check us in and tell us the good news and the bad news. We were too late to take the Going-to-the-Sun-Road autobus tour (the main reason we stopped here). But… even if we’d arrived early enough to do so (the tour starts at 0730, before the train arrives at 0800, an unfortunate sequence considered by me to be a serious marketing flaw on the Park’s part), a big snow storm in the Park had all the roads closed. We got the room key, which was chained to a small log to assist us in remembering to turn it in at checkout time. We had the place pretty much to ourselves. We soon came to find we had the whole town pretty much to ourselves. Our corner room was cozy (i.e., small) but all the 100-year-old stuff worked, and there was that great view of the RR climbing to Marias Pass that did not disappoint. Every 15-30 minutes a BNSF freight would come by, either drifting down the mountain frighteningly silent heading west for Seattle with a trainload of empties, or dragging east up the mountain to the pass, slower than a federal bureaucrat, all 6 locomotives straining noisily with a full load of fresh-off-the-boat Chinese, Japanese, and Korean stuff bound for Wal-Mart and the Honda dealerships.

Dad elected to rest up some after our mountain climbing while I returned to the lobby to see if there was the possibility of doing something else on our one day in W. Glacier. There really wasn’t. I went back to the station/museum and found it open. They had an admirable display of some of the old GN RR china and some early Amtrak pieces.  I got some postcards and took pictures of the station, the parked local freight train, complete with BN-green caboose and now smoking stovepipe, and the frequent road freights. I went on through “town” and walked across the bridge over the snowmelt-swollen and fast-moving Flathead River to the sign noting the west entrance to Glacier Park, and the bike path to McDonald, upriver about 2-3 miles. I was going to take the path when 1) it started to rain, and 2) I spotted another sign warning bikers/hikers to frequently ring their bike bells or otherwise make noise all along the way so as to not startle and cheese-off the recently awakened and seriously ravenous bears who also liked to use the bike path to get to the river to eat fish and rafters. No kidding. (I figured ringing your bike/dinner bell would just tip ‘em off to wash up and get ready to eat.) I photographed some uneaten rafters who flew by, then headed back to get Pop and scout our lunch. Saw maybe 3-4 cars the whole morning. My kind of traffic congestion. Needless to say there are no traffic lights in W. Glacier. There’s really only one intersection. The 2-lane road into the Park (and Canada a scant 22 miles north) T’s into US Rt 2 which parallels the GN (BNSF) RR tracks across the whole State of Montana.

When the shower let up, we had lunch in the village restaurant and later, supper at the Chalet Restaurant which was surprisingly crowded. Both were good but I can’t recall for sure what we had. On the train I would always take an Amtrak logo sugar packet and write on it the train name or number, date, location, and what I was eating because 1) it made a good souvenir and, 2) I wouldn’t be able to remember the next day. I think I had a tuna or patty melt, veggie soup and huckleberry ice cream for lunch. Come to think of it, I may have gotten our waitress to autograph a placemat and could have written the lunch menu on it, but wish I’d taken a sugar packet. And at the Chalet I’m pretty sure I had the ultra-lean, slightly-too-dry buffalo meatloaf for supper.

Our non-eating time was spent resting in the Chalet lobby by the fireplace and watching the trains, or writing postcards in the room and watching trains while it drizzled on and off the rest of the day. Dad sent several cards back to his friends at La Plata town hall. I used my postcards to record the day’s events and sent them home to Carolyn with instructions to save them. “Don’t throw this away!!!” Our balcony went pretty much unused because of the weather, but since it had cost extra I had to stand out there enjoying the foggy mountain view and the drizzly chill as long as I could take it.

In the morning we were pleasantly surprised to find a substantial Ewell Gibbons breakfast buffet waiting in the lowest ground level of the Chalet: Yogurt, granola cereal, blueberries, huckleberries, bagels, milk, coffee, and OJ. We ate a lot knowing there’d be no meal for us on the train this morning, turned in our key-log, checked out and walked back to the station to await our fate this date on the late Train 8 (I did that on purpose. Read it aloud). The eastbound Builder should have been there at 0800. It arrived at 0855. We settled into our spacious coach seats for the 1½ hour trip through the southern end of Glacier Park and around to East Glacier, home of the massive Glacier Park Lodge, another GN establishment, the base for our second assault on the Glaciers and our home for one night. This was the shortest leg of our 17-day USA tour and our only ride in an Amtrak coach. The seats were larger, more comfortable, with much more legroom than in our 1st Class Superliner day-seats. But they sure are harder to sleep in, and of course, you have the same degree of privacy as an internet user.

In good weather, this easily could have been the most spectacular hour and a half of the trip. Nothing but winding slowly through snow-covered mountains, along the icy Flathead, through an occasional snow shed to keep the avalanches from spoiling the day. But the weather was still misty/drizzly and the clouds were low obscuring some of the mountain peak views. We stopped momentarily in Essex, near the Isaac Walton Inn, the lodge that I had just learned in West Glacier is where we should have stayed, and not just because there was a caboose-cabin for sale not 60 ft from the BNSF double tracked main line. A whole troop of Boy Scouts and chaperones got on for a day trip to the big city (Browning, or maybe Cut Bank, MT). Montanans living near Rt 2 use the Empire Builder as New Yorkers use the IRT.

Essex was near the summit of Marias Pass, the lowest elevation RR route through the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Phoenix, AZ. Great Northern had a big yard and maintenance facility there (nothing now) and the Issac Walton Inn was a bunkhouse for workers. It’s been spruced up a bit and all the real railfans go there because in addition to being an authentic RR museum piece itself (as was Belton Chalet), it happens to house 100’s of genuine antique GN artifacts. We’ve decided to visit there next time, because it’s a cool place, the caboose might still be for sale, and we never did get into the Park on this trip.

“Why not,” you ask. Good question.

Next: Glacier Park – we’ll take their word for it.”

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