June 13, 2006
To Winnemucca and beyond
Our return trip began today. The first part was a rerun of yesterdays trip between Sacramento and Emeryville. There was alot to see before we got to Winnemucca.
Day Five. It felt good to get a good nights sleep in a bed, but we had a train to catch this morning. We all got our batteries charged during the night, in more ways than one. Cell phone, camera, scanner, and GPS batteries were all fresh also. We had had pretty good success on the trains so far with finding outlets in the coach or the observation car for charging these devices but we didn’t know if we would be as lucky on the return trip. We took turns shaving while the others were packing up. Kirk doesn’t have any of those chin whiskers yet. He had a few extra minutes to pack.
We had spotted a Denny’s about a half block down the street from the hotel. That seemed like the best place in the neighborhood for breakfast. We all got a pretty big breakfast, anticipating the next few days. The only thing that would have been better would have been a place with a breakfast bar where we could have really “loaded up” for the road.
Back to the hotel, pick up our bags and off to the station. Our train was pulling into the station just as we arrived. Emeryville is the western terminus and origin for the California Zephyr. The platform was full of people waiting to board the train and an Amtrak Thruway bus was arriving. We positioned ourselves so that we could board fairly quickly. We wanted to get four seats together and we wanted to be near one of the electrical outlets. We had discovered that there were four outlets on each coach, two on each side and roughly half way between the stairway and the ends of the coach. I suspect they are available for medical devices. It’s a shame that there are not more outlets available since so many people travel with electronic devices these days.
About ten minutes after we boarded we were under way. Next stop for us, Naperville, Il. Our route would take us back to Sacramento over the same route we had been on yesterday. At Sacramento we would branch off to the east.
Shortly after departing Sacramento, I made my way to the observation car. DJ followed a few minutes later. At Sacramento, two guides boarded the train. One was a retired police officer and the other had been a school teacher. They were volunteers from the California State Railway Museum and they would be making announcements along the route pointing out historic or other interesting locations we would be passing. I met a family in the observation car that was traveling from Sacramento to their home in Truckee. They said they take the train once or twice a year to visit the parents and grandparents. The kids were six of seven years old and they enjoyed the trip. The mother told me that I needed to be sitting on a particular side of the train as it went through one area because the view was spectacular there. She was right, but the view was really nice on either side of the train. We passed through Donner Pass and some really winding tracks. Even though it was the first of June we still saw some snow on the ground in some of the higher areas. We stopped or went through some small towns and many of them resembled old western town. The buildings were wooden structures that had the flat fronts that were squared off on the top. The buildings and were built right on the walkway. Some of them really reminded me of the old westerns but the dirt streets and the horses had been replaced with asphalt and cars. Our stop in Truckee was only a few minutes but it gave me time to gander at the place a little. It’s pretty obvious that they get a good share of snow. The fire hydrants, some driveways and corner curbs had small white poles with red or orange tips on them to mark them so they could be found in the snow. The family I was talking to told me that many of the homes have second floor doors so that they can get in and out of the house when they get a really big snow.
As the afternoon stretched out, so did the slopes we were going through. By the time we got to Reno Nevada, things were becoming pretty flat. There were some large hills that sort of stood there alone. Often, if they were near a town, they would have some contrasting stones on the hill side with the first letter of the town facing the town and the railroad. I can’t imagine the work that it took someone to do that work. These hills might be a mile away and I would estimate that some of the letters would be three to five hundred feet from top to bottom.
As the sun started to sink towards the horizon we arrived in Winnemucca Nevada. The station was one of the most unique we had seen. It wasn’t glamorous or a unique design. It was simply a three sided shelter, the kind you would expect to see at a bus stop, complete with Plexiglas all around and some stick on letters that said “Amtrak Station” and “Winnemucca, Nevada.” I sort of wondered why Amtrak stops here and speeds through some larger towns.
Things really got flat after Winnemucca. There was a highway just north of us part of the time. You could look in any directions and not see anything other than an occasional road or fence line. “Probably not a good place to try to make a call home,” I thought. Looked at the cell phone and five bars were showing. Then you look around again and wonder, “Where in the world is the signal coming from?” We had better service here than we did in some small towns in Montana. I use Cingular for my carrier and their coverage maps show coverage over most of the country but there are several bare spots in the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada, but there is a corridor through Nevada that does have continuous service. That corridor is along I-80 and that’s the highway I could see to our north.
The sun was setting and it wouldn’t be too long until my eyelids would be doing the same. It had been a scenic day. Could tomorrow compare?