Passengers look for their boarding tracks. Guitars, Pooh bears, bikes, native food in tupperware and suitcases were in abundance at Union Station in Los Angeles. (Cindy Yamanaka/Orange County Register/MCT)
I'm heading east on one of the most storied trains in America. The Sunset Limited, a name more than a century old. Out of Los Angeles and into the desert, toward Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
The sun is low on the western horizon as we rumble and shudder east. We've been on the rails for three hours and are in ... Palm Springs.
"It takes 90 minutes to drive here from my house," grumps a lady in the dining car.
Such is the combination of romance, ineptitude, serendipity and inefficiency that are the hallmarks of Amtrak, the national passenger rail service. You have to really love trains to enjoy them in the U.S. It's a leisurely journey, a bit like this story.
I'm an Amtrak veteran, so I am used to the drill. No one offers to help me with my bags at Union Station in Los Angeles. Though I already have my ticket, I am ordered to stand in a long line to check one bag through to my final destination, San Antonio.
The twisting line is full of backpackers, retirees, vacationers, and families loaded down with toys. Going to the end of the line in New Orleans and all points in between.
It's not unlike a group at the airport, save for a trio of guys -- a high-as-a-kite duo transporting their stuff in tied-up garbage bags and a mangy-looking, slightly deranged guy with a cardboard box under his arm. At the airport, they'd likely be getting the bum's rush to the curb. But here, the Amtrak agents behind thick glass sell them a ticket for my train (though luckily, for me, they'll be partying back in the coach area).
A crackling station announcement calls the Sunset Limited. I huff and puff as I roll my book bag up the long ramp. A mother and two children struggle with a luggage cart. Two Amtrak employees stand at the top of the ramp, but neither budges to help. I have both arms full, but a man with a single trolley piece of luggage offers some muscle to also push the family's huge cart up the ramp.
"Names?" the Amtrak agent says to our sweaty little group. Well, hello and welcome aboard to you, too.
Things change for the better as I approach my sleeping car. "You'd be Mr. Warner," shouts Joseph, the attendant. He helps me get my bags upstairs. The car isn't crowded, so he suggests I switch to "lucky No. 7" as my cabin. It has two seats, which convert into beds at night. There's enough room to stash a minimum of gear and I can spread out my papers, snacks, computer and toiletries. It's small, but compared with a coach seat on an airplane, it is the Taj Mahal on steel wheels. I can close the door and have that greatest of travel rarities -- quiet.
GOODBYE, L.A.
We roll out of Union Station, past the jail and the graffiti-covered concrete walls of the Los Angeles River, sliding along on a track in the middle of I-10. Through Temple City and El Monte. It's a clear day, so Mount Baldy looms overhead, without its usual veil of smog. I learn from a train brochure that Pomona is named after the Roman goddess of fruit. It is a torturous crawl, with long stops to let freights go by -- the rail companies own the rails and have the right of way. We're already a half-hour behind schedule by the time we get to Ontario, and it just gets worse.
"You'll notice that we have stopped again," the conductor says. "There's going to be a lot of that today. I will keep you informed."
A crew member mentions that the westbound Sunset Limited coming into Los Angeles is running six hours behind schedule. The Sunset Limited arrives on time less than 14 percent of the time, and that isn't the worst record in Amtrak. There's an official timetable, but in reality it is a land cruise with a very loosey-goosey schedule.
I count on being late, or worse. Over the years I've been stranded on the Altoona curve east of Pittsburgh when the Broadway Limited seized up one winter night. There was the trip several years ago on the Coast Starlight, crawling up the Pacific Coast -- getting into Seattle more than 10 hours late. Then there was the time the Southwest Chief en route to Chicago broke down altogether in a Kansas farm patch and passengers were roused at dawn for a bus ride to Kansas City, where we were dumped on a curb in a driving rainstorm. I rented a car and drove the rest of the way.
Before you are scared off by Amtrak horror stories, and that would be a multivolume set that could fill a small city library, there's the upside to consider. Why I keep coming back.
The trade-off is you are rolling through "flyover" country. The real world going by outside your window. You see the backside of a great city. The junkyard, concrete block factories, oil drum farms, truck depots, industrial parks and grain elevators, the rail yards full of locomotives in the yellow and red Southern Pacific livery. The apartments with iron bars wrapped around a window air conditioner, places where the poor live who can't afford anything other than a cheap walk-up next to the tracks (no sound wall here). The asphalt mountain with the American flag fluttering in the Santa Anas on top of it. The snow on top of San Jacinto and San Gorgonio. The neon of old bars and restaurants in places like Rosemead and Beaumont.
And that's just in the first 75 miles, before the vast open spaces of the West fill your windows from dawn to dusk.
DINNERTIME
As on a cruise, you have to rely on luck for whom you sit down to break bread with each night. Sometimes you get a table of stiffs or blabbermouths. Sometimes you get fun people like Patti Garcia, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. She had taken the Southwest Chief overnight westbound to Los Angeles, arrived in the morning, went to Olvera Street across the street from Union Station, then came back and got on the eastbound Sunset Limited to Houston. After a day at a conference, she would retrace her route, back west to L.A. and east to home. I point out that is a lot of going the wrong direction to get where she wants to go. She has a simple answer, one I often hear on trains the world over.
The sun is low on the western horizon as we rumble and shudder east. We've been on the rails for three hours and are in ... Palm Springs.
"It takes 90 minutes to drive here from my house," grumps a lady in the dining car.
Such is the combination of romance, ineptitude, serendipity and inefficiency that are the hallmarks of Amtrak, the national passenger rail service. You have to really love trains to enjoy them in the U.S. It's a leisurely journey, a bit like this story.
I'm an Amtrak veteran, so I am used to the drill. No one offers to help me with my bags at Union Station in Los Angeles. Though I already have my ticket, I am ordered to stand in a long line to check one bag through to my final destination, San Antonio.
The twisting line is full of backpackers, retirees, vacationers, and families loaded down with toys. Going to the end of the line in New Orleans and all points in between.
It's not unlike a group at the airport, save for a trio of guys -- a high-as-a-kite duo transporting their stuff in tied-up garbage bags and a mangy-looking, slightly deranged guy with a cardboard box under his arm. At the airport, they'd likely be getting the bum's rush to the curb. But here, the Amtrak agents behind thick glass sell them a ticket for my train (though luckily, for me, they'll be partying back in the coach area).
A crackling station announcement calls the Sunset Limited. I huff and puff as I roll my book bag up the long ramp. A mother and two children struggle with a luggage cart. Two Amtrak employees stand at the top of the ramp, but neither budges to help. I have both arms full, but a man with a single trolley piece of luggage offers some muscle to also push the family's huge cart up the ramp.
"Names?" the Amtrak agent says to our sweaty little group. Well, hello and welcome aboard to you, too.
Things change for the better as I approach my sleeping car. "You'd be Mr. Warner," shouts Joseph, the attendant. He helps me get my bags upstairs. The car isn't crowded, so he suggests I switch to "lucky No. 7" as my cabin. It has two seats, which convert into beds at night. There's enough room to stash a minimum of gear and I can spread out my papers, snacks, computer and toiletries. It's small, but compared with a coach seat on an airplane, it is the Taj Mahal on steel wheels. I can close the door and have that greatest of travel rarities -- quiet.
GOODBYE, L.A.
We roll out of Union Station, past the jail and the graffiti-covered concrete walls of the Los Angeles River, sliding along on a track in the middle of I-10. Through Temple City and El Monte. It's a clear day, so Mount Baldy looms overhead, without its usual veil of smog. I learn from a train brochure that Pomona is named after the Roman goddess of fruit. It is a torturous crawl, with long stops to let freights go by -- the rail companies own the rails and have the right of way. We're already a half-hour behind schedule by the time we get to Ontario, and it just gets worse.
"You'll notice that we have stopped again," the conductor says. "There's going to be a lot of that today. I will keep you informed."
A crew member mentions that the westbound Sunset Limited coming into Los Angeles is running six hours behind schedule. The Sunset Limited arrives on time less than 14 percent of the time, and that isn't the worst record in Amtrak. There's an official timetable, but in reality it is a land cruise with a very loosey-goosey schedule.
I count on being late, or worse. Over the years I've been stranded on the Altoona curve east of Pittsburgh when the Broadway Limited seized up one winter night. There was the trip several years ago on the Coast Starlight, crawling up the Pacific Coast -- getting into Seattle more than 10 hours late. Then there was the time the Southwest Chief en route to Chicago broke down altogether in a Kansas farm patch and passengers were roused at dawn for a bus ride to Kansas City, where we were dumped on a curb in a driving rainstorm. I rented a car and drove the rest of the way.
Before you are scared off by Amtrak horror stories, and that would be a multivolume set that could fill a small city library, there's the upside to consider. Why I keep coming back.
The trade-off is you are rolling through "flyover" country. The real world going by outside your window. You see the backside of a great city. The junkyard, concrete block factories, oil drum farms, truck depots, industrial parks and grain elevators, the rail yards full of locomotives in the yellow and red Southern Pacific livery. The apartments with iron bars wrapped around a window air conditioner, places where the poor live who can't afford anything other than a cheap walk-up next to the tracks (no sound wall here). The asphalt mountain with the American flag fluttering in the Santa Anas on top of it. The snow on top of San Jacinto and San Gorgonio. The neon of old bars and restaurants in places like Rosemead and Beaumont.
And that's just in the first 75 miles, before the vast open spaces of the West fill your windows from dawn to dusk.
DINNERTIME
As on a cruise, you have to rely on luck for whom you sit down to break bread with each night. Sometimes you get a table of stiffs or blabbermouths. Sometimes you get fun people like Patti Garcia, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. She had taken the Southwest Chief overnight westbound to Los Angeles, arrived in the morning, went to Olvera Street across the street from Union Station, then came back and got on the eastbound Sunset Limited to Houston. After a day at a conference, she would retrace her route, back west to L.A. and east to home. I point out that is a lot of going the wrong direction to get where she wants to go. She has a simple answer, one I often hear on trains the world over.
