Go US:The California Zephyr isn't the fastest way to cross the US, but this 60-year-old, 4,000km service is one of the most inspiring, as QUENTIN FOTTRELLfound after climbing aboard in Chicago
THE LOUD grizzly bear of a man wore a “Jesus Saves” T-shirt, of course, and spoke non-stop for nearly 3,923km. “My mother says I talk too much,” he said. His conversation was like our rail trip across the US on the California Zephyr: all one way.
“You see the eyes of Jesus Christ up in those mountains,” he mused to no one and everyone. “Makes you realise there is a God.” He was gazing out at the Rocky Mountains. We were by now well on our way from a very chilly Chicago to sunny San Francisco Bay.
Our double-decker train was Grizzly’s soap box. Each day he took a seat in the glass-domed observation car, with floor-to-ceiling windows, and treated it like his stage, choosing a newcomer who didn’t know to look the other way when he started talking.
The Zephyr itself is a great hulking piece of machinery. Even when it’s resting on the tracks at Chicago’s Union Station, its nose almost looks as if it’s snorting fumes, taking a breather, impatient to get going. It would be our home for almost two and a half days.
It began in 1949 after the actress Eleanor Parker, who played the baroness in The Sound of Music, swung a bottle of champagne against its shiny stainless-steel shell at San Francisco’s Pier 3 Ferry building. It was cancelled in 1970, then reinstated by Amtrak in 1983.
Air travel and rising labour costs may have caused the break in service nearly 40 years ago, but heightened security at US airports, higher petrol prices and the need for cheaper long-distance travel may keep it choo-chooing through the recession.
The view from the train gives a timely reminder of the agricultural and industrial backbone of this great land. Travelling on the Zephyr is also about being part of this country’s engineering and cultural history. It remains an iconic piece of Americana.
Also known as the Silver Lady, the train takes a dramatic path across the US, even if it clocks up an average speed of just 75km/h; its route is one of the longest and most scenic operated by Amtrak, which upgraded the route to a daily service in 2000.
Our roomette was spectacularly, epically small. (That would be the “ette” in roomette.) It was the tiniest place to spend 53 hours and 10 minutes. Two facing seats, one window and bunks that were folded out at night. Still, coach would have been a hell of a lot worse.
There were no velvet drapes or elegant table lamps. The roomette was all blue curtains – and that’s it. We were too late to book an end-of-carriage family room, which stretched the width of the train, but you can always stretch out in the viewing car and bathe in sky.
If the furnishings are basic, and our roomette cramped, the old-fashioned romantic idea of train travel was wholly preserved in the professional service and warm attitude of the staff, the same kind of attention and familiarity you get on a cruise ship.
Henry, our sleeper attendant, dropped in copies of USA Today – the one paper that was available at stops – and kept us informed when we had a few minutes to stretch our legs at stations along the way. He was a gentleman, and we felt safe in his hands.
As we whiled away the hours in the dining and observation cars, Henry maintained a constant presence in our sleeper. When we returned in the evening after dinner, our bunks were flipped down and dressed neatly with blankets and starched white sheets.
From this tiny private space, between contentious games of Travel Scrabble, we watched the majestic landscape roll by, putting our tiny, short lives in perspective, as remote farms on the horizon and small rural dwellings showcased the hard graft of those in the Midwest.
Just after Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Grizzly spotted a group of Amish friends, three girls and three guys, and fired a long list of questions at them. The girls wore white bonnets and pinafores, the guys had pageboy haircuts. They texted on mobile phones.
“Have you ever heard of Bono?” he asked. They shook their heads and said they hadn’t. The loudest male pointed out that, contrary to popular belief, he was drinking whisky. The girls giggled. They clearly found their inquisitor a far more amusing curiosity.
I went to sleep with powerful images of green fields and mountains imprinted on my mind, like all those classic canvases by dead artists, and awoke to the scorched red earth of the Sierra Nevada desert, glowing and throbbing away in the early-morning sun.
At breakfast, lunch and dinner, two new faces were always seated opposite. This did away with any coyness or shy pretence of privacy. Whether we liked it or not – and we did like it – we shared our four-seater table with two new people every mealtime.
In 2009, train travel is about taking the time to enjoy this shared experience, swap stories and talk to folk you might otherwise never meet. As we crossed through Democratic to Republican states, cities and backwaters, it was all about finding common ground.
That said, we didn’t meet one open Republican on the train. Those who did not support Barack Obama must have been keeping it to themselves. Even allowing for Grizzly, I didn’t meet one American I didn’t like.
Most of the time we ate with couples, but sometimes we got some real crackerjacks, like the beer-swilling Wild Bill Hiccup, who had a grey ponytail and showed us photographs of his grand-daughter Angel and his marijuana plot in a forest near his house.
A smiling young artist with long hair and beads sat opposite us one dinner time with her older, sterner, silent Native American boyfriend. I thought he was bored by our small talk, but he perked up when he heard we were Irish, as they’d just returned from Dublin.
A former hippy, now divorced from her husband, was going to Rock Jam, in Grand Junction, Colorado, which she called “the banana belt of the Rockies”. She was instantly familiar, funny and direct as an arrow, like we’d known each other all our lives.
She sat next to a man originally from Kentucky who was en route to Reno, Nevada, to gamble. He had big “hello” eyes, grey hair, chinos, a blue shirt and what I suspected was a facelift. I wondered why a clean-cut guy like him was going to Reno to gamble alone.
Earlier in our trip, he and an elderly woman were mooned by four fishermen while they ate dinner. She asked Mr Kentucky what she was looking at. “Four derrieres, ma’am,” he replied, dignifying her question with the truth while not forgetting his southern charm.
Many passengers were in their 50s or older, including a genteel husband and wife we met from Battle Creek, Michigan, the world headquarters of Kellogg’s. They were going hiking in Colorado. They were lifelong Democrats, and spoke of hope and change.
You can learn a lot from meeting two different people at three mealtimes every day. Sometimes, when I was tired, especially towards the end of the trip, my companion would pick up the slack. But there was an awful lot to appreciate of others just by listening.
An elderly couple from Australia, who had got on in Chicago to visit their son in San Francisco, were enjoying the slow pace of the Zephyr, which by now was stretching and bending its way around the Rockies as the lives we left behind momentarily disappeared. He was a craggy, tanned Aussie with rolled-up sleeves and arms like tree trunks. His wife was a delicate bird-like creature who spoke with a clipped accent and dressed formally for dinner, with a lace blouse, jacket and gold necklace.
She spoke about her son’s promotion and how he was offered a job at an IT company in Silicon Valley, but she soon went off on tangents about her idyllic childhood in a modest suburb of 1950s Sydney. She then lost her way in her myriad of memories.
Her husband grew quietly more impatient as his wife reminisced, until even I realised we were so far from the point of departure that she appeared to be locked in the past. It slowly became clear she was likely in the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s.
Her stories were soaked in nostalgia and colour. Her husband’s gruff exterior and hint of impatience with them were matched only by the firmness and gentleness of his quiet intervention, when he took her hand, squeezed it and whispered: “Let’s move on.”
When I saw them again in the dining car, eating with other passengers, they went through this same difficult routine. Eating lunch with them for an hour was a valuable lesson in love, marriage, companionship, adversity and a fierce, admirable kind of dignity.
The stars of the railroad show were the staff, particularly Evelyn, who served us most of our meals. The team of attendants was up at the crack of dawn, preparing the tables for breakfast, while the laziest of us travellers slept in. They were a delightful bunch.
I bonded with Evelyn over Scrabble. She was a Zephyr veteran who would sometimes play Scrabble with some of her regular passengers late at night. I admired her military organisational skills and her fondness for even the grouchiest commuters.
The food is served on plastic replicas of old Amtrak china. There are no carpets or silver service, but there are white table cloths, which served as a Pavlovian sign of how hungry we got doing nothing except daydreaming, reading and playing Scrabble.
The latter caused a few ructions and, on my part, inappropriately loud protestations, such as “Unfattened is not a word!” Evelyn had a stash of Scrabble dictionaries, including a hefty tome that she offered up like a Bible. I ever so carefully flicked through its pages.
On my last lunchtime Evelyn persuaded me to try some Depression-era cooking. At least that’s what it seemed like. But grits, a kind of corn-based porridge made with butter and salt and pepper, is actually a Native American staple most popular in the southern states. “It’s like polenta,” she said, “or baby food. Try it.” I did. And pushed the plate away on my first bite like a big child. Yuck! I’ve never been a big fan of polenta, either. Grits aside, breakfast, lunch and dinner were consistently good.
Back in the observation car, as we watched fields and ranch houses roll by, a college student from coach read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Freed from his carriage, which did not have the freshest of air, he was itching to talk to someone. He too had earlier fled Grizzly.
He was moving from Boston to Berkeley; he took the train because it was cheap and he had all his worldly belongings in the luggage car. And he didn’t think the three Amish girls and three guys were all that naive. “They’re just goofin’ around,” he said.
We had come a long way. Crossing the Continental Divide through the Moffat Tunnel, shuttling across farmland and desert, passing mountain peaks and snaking along the Colorado river. It’s all meticulously designed so that you visit the most heart-stopping landscapes in daylight hours.
In the Sierra Nevada, thousands of metres above sea level, as bald eagles swept menacingly overhead, we passed the infamous Donner Pass. The Donner Party was snowed in during the freezing winter of 1846. They resorted to eating human flesh to try to stay alive.
I could have taken more time and got off in Omaha, Denver, Glenwood Springs, Salt Lake City, Winnemucca – oddly familiar as the town with the run-down brothel in Tales of the City – or Reno, where you could play blackjack on a lost weekend.
But I tipped my hat to them instead, only dashing out of the station to get the Denver Post on one stop. Mostly the stops are just long enough for passengers to get on and off, and for cigarette breaks. If I did it again, I’d spend the night in a few places along the way.
By the time we got off the train in Emeryville, at the end of the line, I was slowly decompressing. It was an intense experience: the geographical kaleidoscope of climates and landscapes and the revolving supply of people with lives far removed from my own.
Amtrak puts on a bus from Emeryville, a suburb of Oakland, to San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. As I watched the tightly knit crew get into their own bus, I got the sense that my vacation was probably their vocation.
It felt like 10 minutes and 10 days. There was no internet, no need to be anywhere except San Francisco by the weekend for a friend’s 40th birthday. It was a most peculiar time warp. The clock didn’t stand still, speed up or slow down: it became irrelevant.
Fun as it was to share the ride with Grizzly, Wild Bill Hiccup, Mr Kentucky, the Rock Jam chick, the inspiring married couple from Oz, the Amish kids and all the rest, it was the women of the dining car, that family of Zephyrettes, whom I would miss most of all.
** California Zephyr fares start at $145 (€110; www.amtrak.com) for the full route, with sleepers costing from $462 (€350), based on two sharing, which includes meals. You can also buy 15-, 30- and 45-day rail passes if you want to hop on and off at stations along the way
Go there
Aer Lingus (www.aerlingus. com) flies from Dublin and Shannon to Chicago. American Airlines (www.american airlines.ie) also flies from Dublin.