Delay on the Zephyr

On getting stuck in Grand Junction with the Amish and no Doritos.

Photo by Paul on Unsplash

Background:

Between the beginning of 2008 and the end of 2010, I rode the US cross-country Amtrak train four times.

From Chicago to SanFran, it is poetically (ambitiously?) called the California Zephyr. The New York-Chicago section has the more subdued name of the Lake Shore Limited.

Four days and three nights each way.

$238 in coach class - that’s just a seat, no bed - from SanFran to New York (via Chicago). And I went back again.

And again.

And again.

I took lots of notes, some of them on an empty Saltines box when I ran out of notebook.

Here is a short excerpt around Day Three of an East-West journey, sometime in early spring 2010:

_

Just managed to get hold of a schedule. 

I asked two Amtrak employees, the conductor and a carriage stewardess what time we get into Reno and none of them could tell me. Nor could they direct me to this schedule, a smudged copy of which I found downstairs in the snack car. 

It says we’ll be in Reno tomorrow at 8.36am, after stops in Green River Junction, Utah at 6pm this evening, followed by Salt Lake City at 11.05pm and then Winnemucca, Nevada at the seriously uncivilised hour of 5.40am tomorrow morning.

I suspect it’s always somewhat uncivilised in Winnemucca, Nevada.

Perhaps this is unfair and Winnemucca is a hotbed of cultural expression, deep in the desert of eastern Nevada. Who can say. Not I, because it will be 5.40am in the fucking morning when we go through it.

Oh. God. 

We are being delayed in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Expected delay up to two and a half hours.  Union Pacific rail line maintenance right up ahead.  Holding pattern until at least 6pm.