Rolland Graham’s Mountain Outin’ Tours is running a tour of “all” of BC Rail (British Columbia’s provincially-owned railroad, formerly the Pacific Great Eastern), as it has done for the past several years, but will not do again. Let’s Travel Tours has collaborated in advertising and booking this tour. We have elected to get to and from Seattle using Amtrak.
This morning, we start our journey by taking the shuttle van from home to Los Angeles Union Station. Because it was a workday the shuttle picks us up about 8:00 am (for our 10:00 am departure from LAUS). The booking had been for 7:30 am, but when we weren't up when Metropolitan called to confirm at 6:45 am, they canceled the booking and then frantically recreated it when we called to complain at 7:30! In the event, we run into little traffic before getting to downtown LA, and with a diversion through the downtown streets, we’re at the station with plenty of time. We’re supposed to check in with Ed von Nordeck on arriving at the station, and Ed was going to handle the luggage; but Ed is nowhere to be seen, and so we all walked out to the train when the stock arrived in the platform, finding our rooms by ourselves and loading our luggage on the sleeping car. I walk the train, note down the locomotives, and return to the room.
Some of the people on this trip were also on the Royal Gorge trip back in June, so we recognize them and they us. One couple asks me if we have seen Ed, and I confirm that I have not. Ed shows up before the train leaves (he had been stuck in traffic on the Riverside Freeway), and asks us to carry a couple of packages north for Jim Fredrickson, who will be boarding at Portland (since Ed is not traveling with us). Now we understand why Let’s Travel has upgraded our reservation to a deluxe Bedroom! Our train departs reasonably on time, makes its usual meet with the southbound Central Coast San Diegan before reaching Simi Valley, and proceeds to Oxnard and Santa Barbara.
[consist]
F40 340
F40 365
F59PH SCRX843
Baggage
Transition
Sleeper
Sleeper
Sleeper
Pacific Parlor
Diner
Lounge
Coach
Coach
Coach
Coach
Coach (to Oakland only)
Train 14, 9-24-1997 |
Schedule |
Actual |
|
Los Angeles |
9:30am |
9:40am |
|
Glendale |
9:53 |
10:06 |
|
Simi Valley |
10:34 |
10:51 |
|
Oxnard |
11:06 |
11:31 |
|
Santa Barbara |
12:05pm |
12:44pm |
|
San Luis Obispo |
|
3:20 |
|
Paso Robles |
3:55 |
5:04 |
|
Salinas |
5:45 |
6:50 |
|
San Jose |
7:20 |
8:20 |
|
Oakland |
8:15/30 |
9:20/32 |
|
Emeryville |
9:20 |
10:18 |
|
9-25-1997 |
|
|
|
Chico |
1:29am |
2:39am |
|
Klamath Falls |
7:42 |
8:12/20 |
|
Chemult |
8:55 |
9:35 |
|
Eugene |
12:00 |
12:31pm |
|
Albany |
12:45pm |
1:35pm |
|
Salem |
1:20 |
2:08 |
|
Portland |
3:20/55 |
4:00/22 |
|
Vancouver, WA |
4:18 |
5:02 |
|
Kelso-Longview |
5:01 |
5:45 |
|
Centralia |
5:47 |
6:39 |
|
Olympia-Lacey |
6:09 |
6:59 |
|
Tacoma |
6:53 |
7:43 |
At Portland, we meet Jim Fredrickson, “Mister Northern Pacific”, a former Dispatcher on that railroad and one of its greatest aficionados, who is one of the tour leaders on this trip. Jim works trips for Carl Fowler’s “Rail Travel Center”, based in the northeastern US, who share this trip with Rolland Graham’s “Mountain Outin’” and Ed von Nordeck’s “Let’s Travel Tours”. Jim is walking up and down the platform trying to figure out where we (whom he has never met) are located. But before he does so, I figure out who he is and get him together with Chris, who has the packages. We give Jim the packages from Ed, happy to let him handle them from now on.
The passenger load is dwindling now, so dinner is as and when we want to go, not by reservation for specific times as it had been the previous night. In Tacoma, we unload the bags from the Sleeping Car, and Jim Fredrickson and John Anderson (who has been staying with Jim for the past several days since flying up from Los Angeles for last weekend’s University of Washington football game (Jim has season tickets)) move them over to the waiting bus. Jim and John then depart, and the bus takes us to a hotel in the SeaTac area, where Chris handles the task of getting the keys and handing them out. This done, we go to bed.
After the night in the SeaTac area hotel, and consumption of the included continental breakfast, we board a bus for Vancouver, BC. First, however, we stop by the SeaTac airport to pick up Edna Tooker. We had met Edna during the Royal Gorge trip, and while we were not particularly impressed by her, we were impressed by the attention Rolland Graham paid to her. Rolland will not join this trip until Vancouver, so meantime Edna has to find someone else to listen to her monologues. On this bus, she sits down with Kathryn Madara, on the seats right behind us, and by the time we get to the motel in North Vancouver, I think I've heard Edna's whole life story (she's in her late 80s), at least since she first saw San Francisco as a teenager in the 1920s.
The bus heads north on Interstate 5 through downtown Seattle the northern Seattle suburbs, and Everett. From time to time, we see Puget Sound off to the west. We stop along the way to pick up a local couple who have parked at a hotel north of Everett. We stop for lunch at a mall outside Bellingham, where I have steak and kidney pie for lunch. North of Bellingham, the bus takes the inland route through Sumash (because the border crossing is easier), then heads across the big bridges over the Frazer River and Vancouver Inner Harbor to North Vancouver, where we stop at a motel for the night.
What had merely been a cloudy day in SeaTac has now turned to steady rain, but Chris and I nonetheless walk over to a mall about half a mile to the west (past the northern approaches to the Lion’s Gate suspension bridge to downtown Vancouver) to purchase a recording that isn’t available (at this price) in the US—Karl Bohm’s entire 1967 Bayreuth Ring of the Nibelung for only the price of five CDs. Later, we have dinner with Jim and the bus driver at the nearby Denny’s. By now, those who have flown in today have all congregated at the motel and another one nearby. We go to bed ready for an early start in the morning.
We’re up early this morning, check out of the hotel, and board the bus to go over to BCRail’s North Vancouver station. There we check out the souvenirs and buy a book containing a picture history of BCRail and its predecessors and coverage of the entire route we’ll be taking this week.
We’re riding in three of BCRail’s Budd RDCs, running as a special train ahead of the usual morning passenger service to Lillooet, which also uses RDCs. Our group takes up two-and-a-half RDCs, so Rolland has sold the remaining space to a group from the Okanagan region of BC, who will join the train at Lillooet. We’ve been assigned space in specific cars (and individual seats that will rotate from one day to the next within a span of a few rows of seats). Others on the same car as Chris and me (the rear car, which will include the Canadian folks) include Don and Jane Wynn, from Orange County, and Doug Walsch from New Jersey, who was with us on the Royal Gorge trip in June, as well as people from the Rail Travel Center community whom we have not met before.
Each of the three cars has a refreshment serving area at the rear, with coffee, water, soft drinks and (at specific times) snacks. The organizers have provided two servers per car to deliver drinks and snacks to tour members at their seats. Unfortunately, the Styrofoam cups in which the coffee is served are quite small—much too small to be able to absorb a single sweetener tablet. No sooner has this become a problem, than a solution appears—our friendly assistant conductor has BCRail insulated mugs for sale, which hold a full 12 (fluid) ounces of coffee. “Souvenir” purchase completed, I am set for coffee drinking for the entire trip.
Along Howe Sound, we stop for quite a while at a siding to wait for a southbound freight. BCRail freight is largely loads south (mostly wood products), empties north (plus some supplies for the far north). Freights are largely composed of BCRail’s own cars. For a long time, BCRail’s locomotive fleet was composed entirely of Alco products and those of their successor Montreal Locomotive Works (MLW). The mainstays of the fleet were a set of RS-18s in the longtime two-tone green color scheme. Later Alcos included MLW M-420s, cowl units with the “Draper taper” feature permitting rearward visibility from the cab without leaning out of the cab window. Now that new products from these suppliers are no longer available, more recent purchases have been of GM/EMD SD40-2s, and GE C40-8M and C44-9WL models. These are painted in the red, white and blue horizontal stripe scheme into which older models are being repainted. All of the RS-18s remaining on the roster have been re-engined with Caterpillar prime movers (to make RS-18c models), and have been modified to control slugs (converted from even earlier RS-3s) for yard service.
Somewhere along Anderson and Seton Lakes, it becomes Chris and my turn to visit the cab in the front car, and observe the workings of the engineer and conductor as they operate the train.
From D’Arcy to Kelly Lake, our train is preceded by a high-rail truck checking for rocks that may have fallen from the sheer cliffs and obstructed the track. Midway along Seton Lake, we perform a photo runby for those passengers interested in detraining for the event. This also gives us a closer look at the lakeshore. Following the runby we proceed into Lillooet, where a service stop is made, the Canadian folks board and fill-up the rear part of our car, and our friendly assistant conductor greets his wife, who will be conductor on the southbound passenger service this afternoon.
Along the plateau area, after the climb up the east side of the Fraser River, where visibility is somewhat limited by the trees alongside the line, Chris and I spend some time in the rear vestibule watching the line recede. Another service stop is made at 100-mile House, aka Exeter. We reach tonight’s stopping point at Williams Lake, after dark. Here, our buses are waiting to take us to hotels in town. There is nothing to attract our attention at Williams Lake, so we eat dinner at the Denny’s adjacent to our hotel, then go to bed. The room is too hot for me, and there seems to be no way to defeat the heating, so I spend a restless night.
This morning, we’re up early, checkout of the hotel and take the bus back to the station where our train is waiting. At the high bridge over Deep Creek, we stop and do a photo runby with the train on the bridge. By shortly after midday, we arrive at at the large BCRail yard at Prince George, a location different from the normal passenger station, but rather near the yard office where the regular passenger cars are stored overnight during their stay here.. This is as far as regular passenger service on BCRail goes. Here, our buses are waiting to take us on a tour of the town.
The guide in our bus is a local businessman who just happens to enjoy doing this sort of thing. Our first stop is at the new facilities of the University of Northern BC. We tour many of the buildings, including the connecting tunnels that permit passage from one building to another even in the coldest or snowiest of weather. The library facilities are especially impressive. In a lobby area, we are given a demonstration of Indian dancing by representatives from local tribes.
Next, we visit the local railroad museum. Here, our guide has a very thick West Yorkshire accent. He’s from Ossett, just west of Wakefield. Most of the equipment at the museum is from the Canadian National, which also has a line through Prince George. Finally, we visit a local park that has both a museum of the area and a miniature railway.
Our hotel for the next two nights is very much oriented to handling the wintertime here in the north country—it has the rooms arranged motel-style, but around an enclosed “atrium” that has a lake with bridges crossing it, surrounded by trees. The restaurant is “open” to this landscaped area. We go to bed early, because we have an early start on Monday.
Today, we’re doing an out-and-back trip as far as we can reasonably go up the Dees Lake line, which BCRail started many years ago, but has never really completed because the expected traffic never arose. We take the bus back to the station, where we board our train.
The Dees Lake line leaves the Fort Nelson main north of Prince George. We turn west and head for Fort St. James, which is the last real settlement along the line. West of Ft. St. James, the line passes between banks of trees on either side. Doug Walsch opines that if he had wanted to see trees, he could have been driving his truck along Interstate 95 through Virginia and the Carolinas. We all laugh, but of course there’s some truth to what he says about today’s scenery. This day is really only of value to the mileage collectors!
The train limps along at ten or fifteen miles per hour until after midday, when it stops at the west end of a lake that we had been running alongside of for an hour or more. Here, the crew changes ends, and we head back towards Prince George. At Ft. St. James, the serving crew from the restaurant that had provided our box lunches boards the train, with a complement of food, and serves us dinner at our seats. Later, the servers mingle with the passengers. It seems that most of them are students at the University that we had visited on Sunday. One of them has come all the way from Nova Scotia to study here.
It’s dark by the time we get back to the main line. In Prince George, we are bussed back to the hotel, where we go directly to bed.
This morning, we checkout of the hotel and bus back to the train. Today, we’re going to visit the electrified Tumbler Ridge line of BCRail, built to access the coal mines of that region. We will then take the buses directly across the mountains to Fort Saint James, where we will spend the might, while the train backtracks to the main line, and then comes north on trackage we will see on the way south.
The line starts out exactly the same as on Monday. However, at the junction with the Dees Lake line we continue north. A couple of hours later, all of the time spent in the north woods, we start to see electrification paraphernalia and overhead catenary. Then we see a couple of large electric locomotives on a siding. Soon, we reach a junction at which the Tumbler Ridge line leaves the mainline to head east into and across the mountains.
We leave the main line at the junction and start the climb into the mountains. The weather turns cloudy then heavily overcast. We can’t see most of the mountains because of the very low clouds. We pass through a long tunnel, then enter the valley where the coalmines are located. The clouds still shroud the vistas of the surrounding mountains. We traverse one of the sidetracks as far as a mine loadout, then return to the main branchline, where we stop alongside a paved road. Here, we detrain. After a while, the buses appear, and we board. (A few people stay aboard the train with the train and serving crews. They will reach the hotel at 3 am.)
We head out across the mountains for Fort St. John. Along the way, Jim Fredrickson reads from a poetry book containing the poems of Robert Service (??), including Dangerous Dan McGrew, that seem to have some connection with the area. We stop at a large hydroelectric dam along the Peace River (which flows eastward into Alberta), where we have a tour of the dam (including the control room), but not the power generating room itself. Then we head for the hotel in Ft. St. John, where we have dinner and go to bed.
The tour is setup so that half the people will ride the train between Fort St. John and Fort Nelson, while the other half will ride the buses on the Alaska Highway, then the groups will trade places for the ride back on Thursday. We are taking the Alaska Highway today. Our start time is an hour later than the train-riding group, whom the buses have already taken to the station.
The highway runs on quite a different route from the train, climbing up and over a ridge while the train follows a river valley. The far north scenery is interesting for a while, just because it is different from what we’re used to, but soon becomes dull from its sameness. At noon, we stop at a restaurant called Mae’s Kitchen, where lunch includes a large bowl of soup and a thick toasted slice of the ‘largest bread slice anywhere’. Chris buys a tee-shirt at the gift shop as a memento of the trip.
Arriving in Fort Nelson mid-afternoon, we pass the railroad yard where the others will be arriving later, then take the opportunity to visit a museum that has lots of artifacts of far northern living. While we’re here, snow begins to fall. Later, we have a group dinner at one of the hotels.
Today, we’re up early to get back on the train for the ride south over the track that we didn’t get to ride yesterday. Overnight, the snow has turned the ground white, but will soon start to melt. There’s time to photograph some of the locomotives and cars in the yard, then we board the train, which is now facing south. We back up to the very north end of the yard (as far as the track goes) before heading off to the south..
Not far south of town is a place where a by-road and the railroad both cross a river on a single-lane through-truss bridge. Here, we stop and do a photo runby with the train reversing across the bridge and then coming forward through the truss again. After restarting, we head at a leisurely pace (the track won’t handle anything faster) along the river valley (a Peace River tributary) back to Fort Saint John. There’s actually much less scenery along here than there was along the Alaska Highway, so ‘sameness’ sets in much earlier. Thankfully, we have books to read and the coffee is available all day long. By late afternoon, we reach the BCRail yard at Ft. St. John, where we park the train by the yard offices.
We take the buses back to the same hotel and room that we had stayed at on Tuesday night. Again, we have a group dinner. At dinner, we’re seated across from the Winns. Don Winn has been asking all sorts of questions about what I do for a living, so I take the opportunity to explain the process of developing a new product, compared to implementing a custom system to the specifications of a single customer. As a high school teacher, this is something he’s not encountered before, so he’s very interested in what I have to say. Also at our table is a couple from Skagway, Alaska, who drove down the Alaskan Highway to Vancouver to join this trip! He is an engineer on the White Pass and Yukon tourist railroad, and she works in publicity for the line.
Today’s trip is south to Prince George, including the section of line that the train covered on Tuesday, but the passengers did not. Buses shuttle us over to the yard where the train awaits us.
Departing from the Ft. St. John Yard, we head a few miles south to the bluffs above the Peace River. Here the line turns from running southeast to running westerly for quite a while. At the top of the bluff, we stop where we can see and photograph the line descending to and crossing the big bridge across the Peace River. Then we follow the line down to and across the river, then climb out of the valley on the other side. The whole area is well into autumn colors, so the scene is spectacular. Many miles to the west, there is a small town with a yard and a BCRail office (Chetwynd), where one of the tour managers (Denny) goes in and returns with a stack of BCRail Employee Timetables. I gratefully accept one. Some miles further west, the line turns south again and crosses a ridge to reach the area where the Tumbler Ridge line trails in. The scenery crossing this ridge is quite spectacular. Somewhere along here we stop for a photo run??
There are again electric locomotives in the siding south of the Tumbler Ridge junction. We also see a coal train headed by CN power (the trains head to Prince Rupert, on the CN line west from Prince George, for export to the Far East) as we head south. We arrive in Prince George in late afternoon, and are bused to a different hotel from the one we used heading north. Dinner in the hotel is adequate, but we didn’t feel like exploring the town.
This morning we’re up well before dawn. Our three cars will travel south today at the rear of the regular passenger train, which starts from Prince George at 7 am. We’re required to be on board at least a half hour before that, before the train is switched from the yard into the station where the regular passengers board.. As we check out of the hotel, we realize there has been a steady rain over night. Our bus trip back to the BCRail yard confirms that, as we board the train making sure we miss the large puddles. However, the coffee is ready and the sky is starting to lighten (if not clear the clouds), so all is soon well.
On the way south, the Canadian folks leave us at Kelly Lake, the station stop just before the train begins the steep descent along the canyonside to Lillooet, reboarding their bus to return to Penticton and Kelowna. We retrace the route we took last weekend, as far as Whistler, where, as darkness falls, we leave for the final time the train that we have been with for the last eight days to spend the night in one of the resort hotels. We have dinner in a local restaurant, then watch baseball and college football on TV until bedtime.
We have some free time in Whistler this morning, so we have breakfast and walk around the town. Whistler is a typical ski resort, but rather well laid out with some interesting buildings. In a shop window, I see a tee shirt with a cat laid out on its back and the words “I don’t do mornings” on it, and draw Chris’ attention to it so that she can buy one. Then we check out of the hotel and walk over to the buses. These are now specific to departing passengers’ destinations, so we board the one that will take us back to the hotel at SeaTac. Rolland boards our bus and makes a speech about having “come to the parting of the ways”, and the buses leave.
We head more or less in convoy over the mountain to the inlet at Squamish, then alongside the rail line (where possible) as far as West Vancouver. The road then runs along the hillside behind the town and becomes the road we had used nine days previously coming north to North Vancouver. The buses then split up, with some going to Vancouver Airport and one dropping people off at our starting point in North Vancouver. We retrace our route from SeaTac, including a mid-afternoon stop at the same shopping mall near Bellingham (there was no lunch stop, hence our breakfast), then drop off the couple who had boarded north of Everett and finally reach our hotel.
We patronize a nearby Pizza Hut for dinner, then go to bed.
[consist]
F40 334
F40 328 (to Oakland only)
F59PH CDTX2006 (from Oakland only)
Baggage
Transition
Sleeper
Sleeper
Sleeper
Pacific Parlor
Diner
Lounge
Coach
Coach
Coach
Coach
Coach (from Oakland only)
Train 11, 10-6-1997 |
Schedule |
Actual |
|
Tacoma |
10:57am |
11:02am |
|
Olympia-Lacey |
11:43 |
11:48 |
|
Centralia |
12:06pm |
12:12pm |
|
Kelso-Longview |
12:52 |
1:00 |
|
Vancouver, WA |
1;35 |
1;42 |
|
Portland |
1:55 |
2:12 |
|
Salem |
3:45 |
3:52 |
|
Albany |
4:17 |
4:26 |
|
Eugene |
5:07 |
5:19 |
|
Chemult |
8:07 |
8:15 |
|
Klamath Falls |
|
9:35 |
|
10-7-1997 |
|
|
|
Chico |
3:33am |
3:53am |
|
Sacramento |
|
5:52 |
|
Davis |
6:50 |
6:58 |
|
Martinez |
7:45 |
7:52 |
|
Emeryville |
8:30 |
8:56 |
|
Oakland |
9:20 |
9:56 |
|
San Jose |
10:30 |
11:16 |
|
Salinas |
12:01pm |
12:43pm |
|
Paso Robles |
1:41 |
2:32 |
|
San Luis Obispo |
3:30 |
3:35/48 |
|
Santa Barbara |
6:15 |
6:46 |
|
Oxnard |
7:05 |
7:54 |
|
Simi Valley |
7:38 |
8:31 |
|
Glendale |
8:22 |
9:13 |
|
Los Angeles |
9:00 |
9:27 |
We arise early, grab some of the supplied continental breakfast, checkout of the hotel, and board our bus for the trip to Tacoma’s Amtrak station. There, we find that one of the serving crew from our Budd car, who works as a driver for BNSF, has come to say goodbye to us all, and to one woman in particular with whom he had spent much time on the trip. Our train arrives and the tour leaders load the baggage on the sleeping cars. We say goodbye to Jim Fredrickson, board the train, and settle in to our room.
The return journey is uneventful, over the same route as our northbound trip ten days ago. South of Centralia, we eat lunch with two members of a family of seven (the others are in the table opposite). The father seems so proud of his five kids, yet I’m restraining myself from asking why his family should consume so much more than its share of the earth’s scarce resources. At Portland, the American Orient Express is parked in the adjacent platform, with Amtrak P40 815 and P42 20, and the complete luxury train, facing south. At Eugene, our car attendant steps off to greet his father and mother, who live there and come out to see him whenever he passes through.
There is a power failure at the Dispatching Center in Denver between 8 and 10 am. Between Emeryville and Oakland, we spend 31 minutes in West Oakland Yard, adding a coach and changing locomotives (CDTX 2006, an F59PH, replaces 334).
At Grover, we pass Amtrak 14 with P40 824 and P42 113. At Surf, we spend 24 minutes sawing-by UP 9451 “east”, a 7000 ft. train in a 5500 ft. siding.
Arriving back in Los Angeles, we take the shuttle home and go to bed. Tomorrow is a workday!