I remember my Dad telling me about crossing Texas on a troop train in WWII. He said it took him 2 days to cross it. Click below for the details.
Texas is too big for itself. It don’t have enough stuff in it to use all the area. We left San Antonio at 5:56 this morning and have been on the move for about 11 hours, covered nearly 600 miles and we’ve only seen one McDonalds and no Wal*Marts. I’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands of trailers, junk cars, cacti, and cemeteries with no grass or trees. I don’t know where these people out here go for gas because I’ve only seen three or four locations that had gas stations. When they call this area a desert, it's for good reason.
I woke up this morning around 3:00AM. Don’t know why, but I was wide awake. We arrived in San Antonio over an hour late. Our train meets Amtrak's "Texas Eagle" there and they join to become one train. The Texas Eagle had arrived before us and was waiting for us to couple up to it. We departed the station about 3 minutes late but had to stop about 200 yards down the track for another 3 minutes. I went back to sleep around 6:00AM and slept for a few hours. We woke up just before 9:00AM, just in time to hear the breakfast call in the diner. We both had the “Railroad French Toast” and some juice.
Not a lot to say that I didn’t say in the first paragraph. We arrived in El Paso 25 minutes late and left 5 minutes late. So far we have been pretty close to schedule and when we were late we were able to make up most of it. This train has a pretty bad on time record, so, I hope our string continues.
We just entered New Mexico. We were about 100 feet from the Mexican border. Close enough to read the signs on the fence. The railroad used to have a serious problem in this area. There was no fence at all. Mexicans would do something to slow the trains down, stand on the track, or anything that would make the engineer slow the train. Then they would pull the uncoupling handle and break the train and thus, break the brake line and it would cause the train to stop. They would then break into box cars and hope they had found a car with high value items, like TV’s, auto parts, etc… They would then carry the items 100 feet into Mexico and avoid the U.S. authorities.
It’s been pretty quiet on the train since the kids got off last night. The boy sitting across the aisle from us apparently got wiped out the night before he boarded the train. I gathered that from a conversation he had on his cellphone the first afternoon. He hasn’t been a bother. He’s been cruising the train for chicks, I think. A few people have tried playing DVD’s or CD’s without headphones and the train crews have reminded them that they have to use headphones.
There apparently was a problem in one of the other coaches with a very large man in a wheelchair. I overheard the conductor talking to the car attendants and later to the complaining passenger. From what I gathered, he was too big or had too much junk on his wheelchair to get into the restroom. There was talk about hot water, rubber gloves, and some plastic bags to put on the seat to keep anyone else from using that seat for the rest of the trip. The conductor was going to remove the passenger from the train at El Paso but the complaining customer wouldn’t cooperate. The conductor said that if the passenger could not use the restroom on the train he would have to detrain and find other modes of transportation. I guess they got everything worked out because I didn’t see anyone in a wheelchair at El Paso.
This route really carries a lot of freight. It seems that we are passing a freight train about every 30 minutes. The dispatchers have done a great job of keeping us moving. Most of the route is single track with passing tracks every 10 to 20 miles. My North American Railroad Atlas shows that it ranks in the top 10% of rail lines in traffic density. An awful lot of it is bi-modal, shipping containers. There's a bunch of it coming in from China in those containers and going to Wal*marts and other places in the east and mid-west.
Our on-time record is running into trouble. Overall, we’ve been pretty close to schedule. We arrived a bit late at a few spots that had scheduled layover but were able to leave pretty close to on-time. Shortly after pulling out of El Paso we sat for nearly two hours due to “freight train congestion” further up the route. We finally got going again for about 30 minutes and stopped again. There had been a derailment during the night. Fortunately, it was along the main line going past a rail yard and there were ways to get around it. It required the railroad to clear a route through that yard that they normally use for switching and storage. Three east bound freights passed us while we were waiting. When we finally got to the yard they held us there for another two hours. I heard the dispatcher talking to other trains. He told our engineer that “There’s quite a mess up the hill.” He was talking about the road before us. There was a train up there with mechanical trouble. After listening for awhile I figured that one of the locomotives had a problem and they didn’t have enough power with the remaining locomotives to pull the train up the hill. They were going to send another locomotive but I think the engineer on that train was able to pull part of the train to a passing track, park it there and go back to get the rest of the train.
Bottom line, we got to LA at 2:43, only 4 hours and 33 minutes late. By the time we got to the hotel there was no question about arriving before normal check-in time.
Posted by john at July 12, 2006 02:26 AM