2010 Western Rail TripMy 2010 journey began on a snowy morning in Urbana, IL where I was pursuing a PhD at the University of Illinois. I lived in the Orchard Downs family housing complex, a dreary but functional facility of foreign students and their cacophonous progeny just to the southeast of the campus. The university subsidizes the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District, which makes it a surprisingly good small-town bus system that has won awards from the American Public Transportation Association. There was a stop 50 feet from my front door with a route that went directly to an intermodal facility in downtown Champaign.
Champaign had its start as West Urbana in 1855 when the Illinois Central Railroad ran a line two miles west of downtown Urbana. Although Urbana had been settled by whites since the 1820s, reputedly the town didn't want the noise and chaos of the train, banishing it to the hinterlands and fostering the development of a separate municipality. The University arrived in 1868, at a site that ended up straddling the boundary between the two cities. Amtrak provided three daily trains each direction to Union Station in Chicago. My journey began on the 10:14 Saluki, named for the mascot of Southern Illinois University, which is three hours to the south in Carbondale at the route's southern terminus. The train was delayed by ice and snow, which was playing havoc with the switches and signaling systems. Although it was scheduled to get to Chicago at 1pm, I arrived around 2:10, just as my train to LA was boarding.
As we were arriving in Chicago, a private rail car attached to another Amtrack train was pulling out of the station on the next platform. The Tioga Pass was built in 1959 for the Mountain Region Vice President of the Canadian National railroad. After a winding journey through dereliction, it ended up as one of a group of vintage cars that can be chartered from LARail.com
Amtrak's Southwest Chief is a 2,256-mile route from Chicago to Los Angeles. The route is the successor to the Super Chief, which ran from 1936 until 1971 as the flagship passenger route of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. MORE...
I arrived on a Saturday and the instructions to my hostel in Santa Monica indicated that I should take the #33 bus. However, the #33 bus wasn't running on Saturdays and the help desk in the plaza was closed. I figured I should take the express #733 bus, but the drivers for two of those buses that passed said they didn't stop at the intersection I needed. I later found out that the express stop was only a couple of blocks away and a easy walk to my destination. So the moral of the story is not to expect any meaningful system assistance from a Los Angeles bus driver.
Given the time on my hands and the confusion about how to get to my lodgings for the night, I decided to proceed with my plan of exploring the city's rail transit systems - albeit while dragging my wheeled duffel around with me. The Red Line serves Union Station and was the closest option. MORE...
With daylight drawing to a close I caught the #733 bus out to Santa Monica to the HI Hostel Santa Monica. It's in the heart of Santa Monica and at $29 per night, the price is right. Of course, you have to share a room with a lot of foreign college students - but that's half the fun.
In the morning I got up to take a jog in the mist and explore the area. Wealthy Santa Monica was a start contrast to the working class neighborhoods of the Blue Line. And while it was all very clean and pleasant, it was also a reminder of the gentrification and increasing economic inaccessibility that engulfed New York City during my time there and ultimate lead to my departure.
The other purpose of my trip was to visit a friend from my days in New York. Our afternoon was highlighted by a trip to the Getty Museum. I also got to experience my first In-N-Out Burger, which, while not undesirable, did not live up to the hype.
After a restful night on the couch, Pam dropped me off on Hollywood Boulevard on her way to work. This gave me a chance to check out the walk of fame, the El Capitan (1926) and Grauman's Chinese Theatre (1927) before catching the Red Line back to Union Station.
To get to the California Zephyr headed back East, I needed to take the Coast Starlight up to Emeryville. MORE...
In one of the few significant snafus of my trip, I misplanned my overnight stay in San Francisco. Emeryville and Oakland are the only SFO area stops on the Coast Starlight, with bus service provided to get across the bay into San Francisco proper. I had booked a bunk at the HI Downtown San Francisco Hostel on the assumption that I could catch the bus from Emeryville into downtown, spend a cheap night in town and be back for the 9:10am California Zephyr to Denver. Problem was, the Amtrak bus had to be booked when you made your reservation, and when I tried to book it before I left Los Angeles, I was told that the bus was sold out. And the bus for the northbound train left from Oakland, not Emeryville. On the Coast Starlight, I discovered that the advertised Wi-Fi availability was only for first-class passengers in the parlor car, making it difficult to explore other options. The conductor suggested a some options: staying at a hotel in Emeryville, taking a cab into San Francisco or travelling on to Richmond, CA to catch the BART train into Downtown. As the weather pushed the train further and further behind schedule (we ended up running around two hours late), the BART option was less viable since the trains stop just after midnight. The cab continued to be an consideration, although two $50 cab rides in and out of downtown to spend five hours at a $30 hostel began to seem silly. The hotels around the station were rather pricey (which is why I'd booked the Hostel) and I did walk around upon disembarking to see if, per chance, there were a Motel 6 or Super 8 that Google Maps didn't know about. However, I finally settled on the conductor's suggestion of the Woodfin Suites, which at $95.20 for the night wasn't unbearable. And with a nice view of the train station and a Denny's next door, it was a surprisingly refreshing respite from the sleeping arrangements of the previous five days.
My next leg was a trip to Denver on the California Zephyr. The section through the Rockies West of Denver is supposed to be especially attractive. A rock slide forced a diversion through the Union Pacific's Overland Route through Wyoming - which roughly covers the same ROW as the original 1869 transcontinental line and, at the time, did not feature regular Amtrak service. MORE...
I left the California Zephyr in Denver. I needed to get a rental car to visit a friend in Colorado Springs, but since I arrived so late and had plans to fly out in a couple of days, I had to get a rental car from the airport, a good 20 miles to the east. There was a skyRide bus (AF) operated by the Denver Regional Transit District (RTD) from downtown to DIA, but I had to walk a couple of blocks down 17th street to the subterranean Market Street Station to catch it.
I spent the night at a Super 8 Motel in Aurora, CO and went for a jog the next morning. On my run I ran across a pair of curiosities. First, on Sable Boulevard in a suburban neighborhood I noticed a barren, empty field covered with holes. And popping their heads out of the holes was a colony of prairie dogs. I couldn't find anything on the web about this particular batch, although they do seem to be controversial critters that attract a great deal of love and hate in their continued survival against the odds.
Further up the hill I stumbled across the High Line Canal, a 66-mile irrigation canal which opened in 1883 to bring water from a diversion dam on the South Platte River to agricultural land in areas south and east of Denver. MORE...
On my way around Denver on I-70, I noticed a control tower where there was no airport. Upon further investigation, I discovered that it was a residual artifact of the former Stapleton International Airport, which was in operation from 1929 to 1995. After it was replaced by Denver International Airport, the area was redeveloped as the New Urbanist development Stapleton. MORE...
A place with a bit more integrity in its embrace of the past is the Colorad Railroad Museum in Golden, CO, just west of Denver. The museum houses an extensive collection of rolling stock, most of it with a connection to the unique history of railroading in rugged Colorado. The museum has an active restoration program and a circular track for rides on the weekends. MORE...
Following an afternoon at the museum, I headed south for dinner with a friend from my days in Dallas.
Some quirks of scheduling required that I fly from DIA to DFW in order to be at my mom's place by Christmas. I got a double screening - the body scan as well as a groping pat down of my left leg and testicle. The TSA agent actually seemed a bit embarrassed to have to do it, so, whatever. Denver International Airport opened in 1995, replacing the undersized Stapleton Airport (described above). The 53-square-mile facility cost $4.8 billion and opened 16 months late, primarily due to problems with a novel automated baggage handling system that never really worked. The main terminal design by Fentress Bradburn Architects features a tensile fiberglass roof meant to evoke the Rocky Mountains.
My flight, American #1264, pretty much kept to its scheduled departure of 7:20am and arrival in Dallas at 10:25am. At a driving distance of around 640 miles, that gave an average speed of 320 mph. The 100-seat MD Super 80 (built in 1987) was filled to capacity. At the conclusion of the flight I spoke to the pilot and he indicated that the flight had used between 12,000 and 13,000 lbs of fuel. Using a thermal conversion factor of 18,500 BTU/lb, the flight required 231 million BTU or around 3,600 BTU per passenger-mile. Converting back for comparison to auto travel using a thermal conversion factor of 125,000 BTU/gallon for gasoline, the trip used the equivalent of 18 gallons of gasoline for each passenger, with an efficiency of around 35 passenger-miles per gallon. Newer jets achieve even higher efficiencies, although differences in load factors and other operational considerations reduce that number when considered on a system-wide basis. By contrast, in 2007 Amtrak claimed a system-wide average of 2,709 BTU/passenger-mile, compared to 3,264 BTU/passenger-mile for airlines and 3,445 BTU/passenger-mile for automobiles, which is consistent with the calculations above. However, all these modes pale compared to intercity bus efficiency of around 950 BTU/passenger-mile (410 BTU/passenger-mile with a fully-loaded 55-passenger bus getting 6 miles per gallon of Diesel at 135,000 BTU/gallon). Given all that, it seems fair to predict that in a future of more expensive energy that neither the airlines or Amtrak of today represent the most efficient transportation of tomorrow. But there are, of course, cultural, economic and resource issues that call into question the sustainability of the current air/road transportation system and, therefore, the future of buses as well. Since the rolling friction of rubber on concrete is 6 to 10 times greater than steel wheels on rail, there would seem to be the potential for significantly higher passenger rail efficiency - perhaps with vehicles more like the small Galloping Geese that the Rio Grand Southern ran in Colorado in the early 20th century. Trains with legacy consists of lounge cars, dining cars, sleeper cars and crew cars may be comfortable, but smaller trains running more frequently over shorter distances may be more practical for satisfying the intercity travel needs of the future.
I took the 5-hour drive from my mother's house back to Dallas, stopping at Waffle House for breakfast before returning my Thrifty rental car at DFW airport. I decided to explore D/FW's then-growing rail transit infrastructure before catching the Texas Eagle back to Illinois. MORE...
My trip back north to Chicago was on the Texas Eagle. MORE..
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