We find our sleeping car at the front of the train, and set up our gear in our Economy Bedroom 9. We are at the furthest forward point in the train that passengers can be, since the door to the crew dorm in the Transition Sleeper is immediately adjacent to our room. There’s about 20 minutes before departure, so I walk the platform to record the consist. Meanwhile, Chris seems to have made fast friends with our car attendant, Joanne Lindsey (who apparently goes by her last name). The train departs via the Metrolink line on the west side of the Los Angeles River, passing under the new light-rail bridge that replaced the former Santa Fe span for the Pasadena subdivision, and crossing over the river to the former SP line on the east bank by the recent three-track bridge below the Pasadena Freeway adjacent to CP Dayton.
Coast Starlight Route Description
Somewhere along the first stretch of the coast, the first call for lunch is made. We choose not to go at first call, but wait until near the end of lunch service. Thus, we don’t even respond when the steward, Marguerite, announces she’s starting a waiting list. We do, however, respond when she says they will stop taking names for the waiting list in ten minutes. I don’t ever remember previously hearing the dining car close a waiting list while there were still people wanting to eat in the diner who are not on it. Apparently, this is due to the number of passengers on the train, which has three completely full sleeping cars, and five full coaches. I have read that more cars could not be added to the Coast Starlight because that would require an additional diner, but it appears that one diner is insufficient to meet the needs of the passengers on a train of this size, not just a larger one! We’re called to the diner near Gaviota, where the finest of the trestles is located over a state park campground, and where highway 101 turns away from the coast. We’re seated with another couple from the PRS group, Ann and Joel Gread.
The crew in the Pacific Parlor car, the former Santa Fe high-level car that provides lounge service for sleeping car passengers only, has held off the afternoon wine-tasting and cheese service until after we left San Luis Obispo. Although we don’t want any of the wine, Chris collects a selection of the cheese and crackers and brings it back to out room. Then, Marguerite comes around handing out dinner reservations, starting at the front of the train where our room is located. We take 7:45 pm reservations. It is normal for the steward to start in the sleepers, when giving out dinner reservations, because dinner (as with breakfast and lunch) is included in the accommodation price for sleeper space. However, it is also normal for reservations to be handed out in the coaches, as well. Not so, on this train. Reservations are handed out in the sleepers, but names are taken in the coaches. As those with reservations at each time are seated, names from the list are called to fill up the remaining space allocated to that seating time (usually half or a quarter of the space in the diner at each time, at the steward’s initiative). Presumably, this means that those riding in the coaches have no choice in their eating time for dinner.
In the early-evening sun, the coastal mountains to the west are shrouded in haze. (abetted by light scatter from looking towards the sun). As they become clearer, they are seen to be covered in deciduous trees. Approaching Salinas, we pass a set of private cars in a spur off to the east side. It is not clear to us if these are restored (perhaps even Amtrak compatible), being restored, or will ever move again. In Salinas, there is a beautiful new or restored church a block west of the station. At Watsonville Junction, where there is a small yard and the Santa Cruz branch cuts off, the Santa Cruz local has just returned from its day’s work on the branch and is standing in the yard. It is headed by three SP ‘bloody-nose’ engines, which are getting quite rare as UP is painting them all yellow. Unusually, the local has returned before its crew timed-out, today. We’re finished with dinner in time to step out onto the platform during the San Jose stop. On all of our previous trips on the Coast Starlight, operating crews have been changed at Santa Barbara and then Oakland. On this trip, the first crew takes us to San Luis Obispo, and the second crew has just taken us from SLO to San Jose. The new crew at San Jose will apparently go only as far as Sacramento.
We’re in bed before the train leaves Oakland.
Saturday, July 21st, 2001
I haven’t slept much during the night, although I didn’t record the times at either Martinez or Davis. Earlier in the evening, there had been an incident at Dixon, along the Cal-P, in which Capitols in both directions had struck the same pedestrian (who was crossing the track at the place where the trains were about to pass). Those trains were released about 9:45 pm, and train 5, which had been waiting at Davis, followed the westbound into Emeryville. Fortunately, this incident doesn’t delay us much, if at all (which is not to say that we’re on time at this point). Although we’re over 90 minutes late at Dunsmuir, we’re only about 40-45 minutes late at Klamath Falls (we arrive 30 minutes after scheduled departure; the train we have left departs about 40 minutes late). North of Grass Lake, we pass a southbound freight with green BNSF locomotives. We have managed to eat breakfast in the diner prior to our arrival in Klamath Falls, but only just in time. Again, the steward had closed the waiting list before all who wanted breakfast in the diner were on it. I take the opportunity to fill my insulated coffee mug at the coffeepot in the sleeping car, before getting off the train—a wise step, as it transpires.
There’s no bus waiting for us at Klamath Falls, when we arrive at 8:45 am. Barbara calls the bus company and is told it is on the way. When she calls again at 10 am, she is told that something must have happened, and a replacement bus will be sent, but won’t get to us until 11:30 am. While we’re waiting, I have a long chat with Don Winn, who is now fully retired from his teaching job (he’s 80). Meanwhile, the Amtrak staff in the station wants to close up (their normal morning hours end at 10 am), so we can no longer wait inside. Some people go into town to find restaurants, while others of us go to a small grocery store and deli on the far side of the Union Pacific yard, to get something to drink. UP is adamant about us not trespassing on their property, so we go around the long way using a road underpass. We do see a couple of trains, including the BNSF/Swift roadrailers, while we’re waiting.
The replacement bus arrives at 11:30 am, is loaded with luggage (under) and passengers (inside), and departs by 11:45 am. This makes it unlikely we will be in McCloud (80 miles away, back almost to Dunsmuir) in time for our 1:30 pm excursion, but Barbara has been able to arrange for us to take the second iteration of the afternoon’s excursion, at 2:50 pm (albeit, with diesel rather than steam power). Along the way, we cross a 5200-foot summit on US 97. Above 5000 feet, there is fresh snow along the road and in the adjacent woodland. Apparently, it has snowed overnight! We all anxiously watch the time, but at 1:30 pm we’re still five miles away from McCloud. Because of the tight timing of events this afternoon, the railroad is unable to delay the 1:30 pm train even ten minutes for us. In McCloud, we have over an hour to wait for our revised reservations, so we exchange our tickets and look for something to eat.
It’s “Civil War Re-enactment” weekend in McCloud (which is the reason for the tight timing of afternoon trains), so in addition to events taking place in the park alongside the station, there are tents with merchandise booths, and tents with food booths. We patronize one selling hot dogs and iced tea. Then we walk up to the road-rail crossing where we’ve been told our train will load. At the crossing, we see the steam train we should have taken return from its trip (and we get some photos), followed by the diesel-powered train which stops north of the crossing. This train has a chop-nosed Geep (GP-9), McCloud Railroad XX, two former Canadian National lightweight coaches, with original seats, and two ex-SP Harriman heavyweights, which have been stripped of their furnishings, and have only folding chairs for seating. (The steam train has only open-air seating on converted flatcars.) We choose to sit in one of the Harriman cars, next to open windows.
McCloud Railroad Route Description
The diesel train sets off, and goes 2.5 miles to Hooper, where we deboard and take our places on a set of bleachers overlooking an area where a battle re-enactment will take place. Our train pulls forward around the curve, and the steam train arrives (which I manage to photograph from below the supports of the collapsing water tank at this location). The steam train provides its own seating for the battle, on those open-air cars, and its passengers do not have the option of getting off the train. The battle re-enactment includes both some officers on horseback, and several cannon, as well as a large number of infantry. The cannon are loaded (with blanks) using the correct historical techniques, and are very load when fired. After the battle is over (the Union troops won), Chris spends some time petting one of the horses, while we wait for the steam train to leave (the infantry board a couple of otherwise-empty cars in its consist) and our train to return.
Back in McCloud, we patronize the local café
for cold drinks and cool air (it’s quite warm up here, even though the altitude
is over 3000 feet), and then visit the local museum across the street. We then
walk around some more, and have another opportunity for photos of both diesel
(bringing in the stock for the Dinner Train) and steam locomotive (which will
be hauling that train), a 1925 Alco 2-6-2, numbered 25. At 5:30 pm, we board
the rear car of that train, and take seats at the rearmost table on the
left-hand side. Out tablemates are Ray and Shirley Chambers. Across the way are
Bob and Laura Drenk and Bill Smith, along with another member of our party. The
four dining cars on this train have been “recreated” into the style of the
later nineteenth century, and are quite ornate inside. There is also an open
gondola car and a gift-shop car on the train, closer to the locomotive. At 6
pm, we depart and head eastward 19 miles to the location of a wye, where the
train is turned. It then stops to fill the tender from the water tank. By
special arrangement, members of our tour group are allowed off the train to
take photographs of the steam loco. at the water tank. The sun has dipped
behind the trees, by now, but the scene is still worth the effort.
On the way back, we all wonder where Bill Smith has gone, but it turns out that he is sitting in the gondola car, listening to the steamer. Dinner on this train has been excellent. We return to McCloud at 9:27 pm, board our bus, and go to our hotel (the “Tree House”) in Mt. Shasta city. Along the way, Barbara hands out keys brought by the bus driver when he returned from delivering the luggage to the hotel, and on arrival we find our suitcase already in our room. We’re in bed by 11 pm or shortly after, and this time I sleep soundly.
Sunday, July 22nd, 2001
Barbara claims this is “sleeping in”, but we have set the alarm clock for 8 am in order to meet the “bags out” deadline of 8:30 am. The coffee maker in the room doesn’t work, so we use the ‘free breakfast’ ticket provided along with our room keys to get coffee and food in the hotel’s restaurant. At 9:30 am, we’re all on the bus (which needs a bit of rearrangement to allow couples to sit together), which departs for Yreka, 25 miles northwest along Interstate 5. Along the way, we get a good view of the geological feature Black Butte (for which the eponymous railroad siding and junction are named), and some great views of Mount Shasta itself. This mountain is a 14,000-foot volcano (one of the Cascades), which turns out to have three separate peaks, when we can finally see them through their local cloud cover (on this otherwise clear and sunny day). Black Butte is a much smaller (and much younger) volcanic formation, which is the current site of the volcanic hot spot.
We arrive in Yreka at 10:10 am, with 50 minutes to go until the excursion train on the Yreka Western leaves. The railroad advertises its “steam trains” using a couple of heavyweight passenger cars, and some old freight cars, stored on a track that runs alongside the freeway. Today’s excursion, however, will not be steam-hauled because the YW’s steam locomotive is in the shop undergoing a heavy overhaul. Instead, we will have switcher number 21, hauling an open flatcar (with no seats) and a couple of ex-SP Harriman cars, this time with their commuter-style seats still installed, followed by a caboose. These Harriman cars, however, have no glass whatever in the windows.
Barbara purchases the tickets, and distributes them to the members of the group. There are a couple of people from the NRHS Central Coast Chapter who happen to be present, and Barbara thinks that at least one of them is in our group! J There’s not much of interest in the small gift shop (that we don’t already have), but there is a large model railroad in the adjacent freight shed. This, along with some museum-style exhibits, provides quite sufficient interest to keep me occupied until it’s time to board our train. The Yreka Western is the current incarnation of a railroad built in the 1880s to connect Yreka, county-seat of Siskiyou County, to the Central Pacific Railroad’s Siskiyou Line (later SP, and now operated by CORP) at Montague, 7.5 miles away. This line has never been part of a mainline railroad, but was for quite a time a part of the Kyle Railroads empire assembled by Willis Kyle.
Yreka Western Route Description
We take out seats in the rear Harriman car,
and the train leaves. At Montague, there are more loaded wood chip cars and lumber
products cars waiting for the daily way-freight on the CORP to pick them up. In
Montague, which is all of a block and a half long, there are a couple of
museums and (now) just two restaurants that must do a lot of their daily
business feeding the excursion train passengers on the days that the excursion
runs. We eat at the Dutchman, which is filled to capacity while we are there,
and has a lot of pottery items on display and for sale. Chris purchases a small
cat figurine.
After lunch, the train returns the way it came. The train personnel hand out pinwheels to the passengers, which make a merry sight in the breeze blowing through these unglazed cars. After arrival in Yreka, at 2:30 pm, the PRS group is treated to a shop tour. The railroad’s Mikado (2-8-2) number 19, a 1914-built Baldwin once featured in the film ‘Emperor of the North’, is partly disassembled, with most of its suspension unhooked, much of the boiler cladding newly-replaced, and fittings removed from the open smokebox. We are also treated to an inspection of the railroad’s two business cars. We get to walk through the steel-underframed car from the 1920s, entering through the lounge area adjacent to the rear platform, then looking at the office, a couple of bedrooms with covers monogrammed with a large florid ‘K’ (for Kyle), dining room and kitchen area. Our hostess is unable to open the door to the older car, with its wood-steel combination underframe and steel-sheathed body, but we can look into the lounge area from the rear platform coupled adjacent to the more recent car. Bob Drenk estimates that the older car dates from 1902-1909.
Once the shop tour is over, and we’ve all had a chance to use the bathrooms and get cold drinks, our bus leaves at about 3:40 pm, first to drive around some of the older residential streets of Yreka (many houses from the 1890s, some from a couple of decades earlier), then heading back to Klamath Falls where we will board the southbound Coast Starlight in late evening. Because of the arrangement of the roads in the area, we start out heading southeast on Interstate 5, then cross the Shasta Valley on back roads until we intersect US 97, after which we return to Klamath falls using the same route we had traveled on yesterday.
We get to Klamath Falls at 5:40 pm. too early to go to the restaurant at which our group dinner has been arranged, so the bus driver shows us around the town and alongside Upper Klamath Lake north of town. Klamath Falls is built on top of a geothermal area; the town’s high schools, college (Oregon Institute of Technology—OIT), and many of the houses are heated, in the winter time, by steam captured from the many geothermal vents in the area. Upper Klamath Lake is the second largest lake, in terms of surface area, in the western US, about 30 miles long and eight miles wide, but averages only 10 feet in depth. It is the home of copious quantities of green algae that are harvested commercially, as well as a fish population that is the center of an environmental controversy. Local farmers are dependent on irrigation water from the lake (which is why the lake is there in the first place), but the US federal Environment protection Agency has been claiming that if the water level falls any further, it will endanger the fish, and has so far not permitted any water releases in 2001. A few weeks ago, local interests opened the sluices, but the federal government closed them again and has since guarded them day and night. (Two days later, Interior Secretary Gale Norton decided to release irrigation water, claiming that studies had shown the water level was higher than previously thought.)
We turn around by driving through a time-share vacation resort, then return to town and go to the bowling alley at which we will eat. (This is Sunday, and very few restaurants will be open as late as we will want to hang around, since the Amtrak depot doesn’t open until 9 pm, and we may not want to go over there even then, if the train is determined to be very late.) We get there at the advertised time of 6:30 pm. After dinner, but before the sun has quite set, the bus driver takes a portion of the group up to the road bridge crossing the adjacent BNSF yard. There are no trains running at this time, but from the bridge we can see Mt Shasta glowing in the sunset, 75 miles away. Alongside the road bridge is a corral with a horse that is very excited to see so many people, and very disappointed that none of us goes down to pet it. One of the tracks below the bridge is the former Great Northern Inside Gateway line that a number of us had traversed on the AAPRCO Convention train in 1995. A quick mental count says that nine of this group had been on that train, and thus traveled on this very ‘rare’ mileage!
Back at the bowling alley, Chris calls Amtrak and determines that our train had left Eugene, OR, on time. At about 9:15 pm, we all board the bus and go over to the Amtrak station adjacent to the UP (former SP) yard. There, I hear a dispatcher on the radio offer a northbound UP freight the instructions that he will meet a southbound BNSF freight at the first siding up the line, and Amtrak at the second (at Chiloquin). We also hear that our train was 30 minutes late at Chemult, following its crossing of the Cascades, and is expected in Klamath Falls at 10:45 pm (versus its scheduled departure at 10:15 pm). It arrives on the expected, and our car attendant is there to greet us all. (This is the same train consist, less one locomotive, and the same set of car attendants that we had taken north on Friday. It has since been to Seattle and back. Joanne Lindsey has had no customers until just now!) The beds are down, the chocolate is on the pillows, and Lindsey arranges for water bottles. The train leaves at 11:02 pm, and we’re soon asleep.