Listen Intently

Greetings from somewhere in the middle of Texas!  (Actually, by the time I was able to get online to post this, I’m in LA.  I tried at a few station stops to get WiFi working long enough to post, but wasn’t successful).  In case you didn’t already know, this is one damn big state.  The Amtrak Sunset Limited is scheduled to eat up over 22 hours crossing the state of Texas.  And some of you think driving down I-75 through Georgia and Florida is bad.

It’s late afternoon on the Sunset Line, the Union Pacific single track main line from Lake Charles, LA, through to California.  We’re running just a few hours behind.  Four and a half, to be precise.  Now this is the Amtrak that we know and love.

We left New Orleans right on time, at 11:55 AM, Central Time.  Got right up and over the Huey P. Long Bridge (over the Mississippi), and then entered an area of BNSF track that is “dark territory.”  Use the force, Luke.  No, no, sorry, it’s an area of mainline that is not wired back to the dispatcher, so the dispatcher has to “fly blind”-using the reports of the conductors to mark where all of the trains are.  I don’t know about you, but I envision a scale model sitting on a table in the dispatcher’s office with little Monopoly train engines pushed around by a long stick.  Seriously.  Well, not about the Monopoly part.

Then it was into Texas and our meet up with the Texas Eagle in San Antonio.  The Sunset Limited picks up two cars from the Chicago-San Antonio Eagle and takes them through to LA.  We arrived at 4:00 AM, picked up two cars, and parked in the station, awaiting our departure time of 5:40 AM.  “Cool,” I remember thinking, laying there half-asleep, “two hours of sleep in a non-moving train; by the time I wake up, we’ll be well on our way.”

I guess that I am wrong from time to time.  I awoke and looked out the window to see exactly the same scene I saw when I last went to sleep.  Hmm, must be about 5:30.  Nope.  Try 6:30.  Perhaps we miraculously shifted time zones without moving?  Wrong again.  Turns out, the Texas Eagle was running so far behind, they turned it around in Fort Worth.  The poor through passengers were “bustituted” (an Amtrak slang term) to San Antonio.  We had to wait for them, and finally made it out of town at 8:15 AM.

Wow, these posts are longer when I am writing from my little moving cubicle.  I’ve got the GPS connected to the computer – it’s kinda’ fun to watch the real world go by alongside the virtual one.  By far, the real world is better, by the way.

Speaking of by the way, for those of you who think I’m crazy, how about a 27-day round-the-USA train vacation?  There are 19 Kiwi’s on board, nearly finished with their tour.  They flew into San Francisco and have traveled Amtrak through Denver, Chicago, New York City, Washington, New Orleans, and now into LA for their flight to New Zealand.  It’s been fun chatting with them and getting their take on American rail travel.  For the most part, they’ve been impressed.  I was glad to hear that they made it through Iowa before the flooding shut down the California Zephyr, and, as one said, after twenty-some odd days, they’re all still talking with each other.  Not bad.  I guess my 16-day journey isn’t quite so off the wall after all.

Tags: Amtrak, Sunset Limited, train