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kevin_standleeIt's been a long three days on board the California Zephyr from Chicago to Emeryville via Denver and Salt Lake City, but we still have to consider ourselves lucky to have had a roomette of our own for the entire trip after the loss of our bedroom on the Sunset Limited. The Zephyr, train 5 westbound, was completely sold out. Thanks to other travel disruptions including cancelled flights and cancelled trains, people were trying to get where they were going however they could. For example, one person on our train was in one roomette for part of the trip, then moved to a family bedroom for a while, then to coach, then moved back to a different roomette. (This multi-room trip was not only dreadfully inconvenient, but significantly more expensive than our roomette.) So it was relatively luxurious to have a room of our own without changes. However, when you've been used to the larger bedrooms, you still feel cramped in a roomette.
I'm not going to do a long report on this trip. I'm too tired. I did take several hundred photos, many of which I posted to Twitter over the past three days when bandwidth allowed.
We did get snowed on, at times quite heavily. In particular, there was more than 10 cm of snow on the platform at Glenwood Springs, where the station agent told the conductor she couldn't keep the platform cleared due to how fast the snow was falling. However, the railroad stayed open. But there were issues. While we fell behind for various reasons, recovery time in the schedule meant we left Salt Lake City on time at 11:30 PM.
After leaving SLC, I woke up while we were going through the ex-Western Pacific near-complete loop at Silver Zone Pass, but there's not much to see at night and I went back to sleep. When I woke up again, I thought when I checked the time that we must be at Elko, but not only was it an hour earlier than I originally thought (my phone hadn't yet figured out it was in the Pacific Time Zone and thus was still on Mountain time, so I cheated myself out of an hour of sleep), but we weren't in Elko. Instead, we were at a siding called Deeth, and we had apparently been there for a long time facing signal issues. We would continue to face these problems throughout the day, and we started falling farther and farther behind.
Annoyingly, neither Lisa nor I were able to get a usable picture of our house from on board the westbound Zephyr when we passed Fernley around 3 1/2 hours late.
When we got to Reno, where about 90 people boarded and brought the train load up to around 300 people overall, we were more than four hours late. Thanks to roughly 20 miles of signal problems, which required the train to creep along at restricted speed (not much more than a brisk walk), by the time we were at Truckee, it was more like five hours. Not only were we not going to make our train connection from Emeryville to San Jose, but the fallback connection to the last train of the night to San Jose was starting to look dicey. And for once, the good weather was not a blessing: had conditions been so bad that they had to annul (cancel) the train at Reno, we could have gotten home with a $100 taxi ride to Fernley (that I might have asked Amtrak to pay for, or at least pay for the trip later to San Jose to get my van) and we would have been asleep eight hours ago. But the weather was great, so all we got was a lot of very pretty snowy mountain scenery.
As I'd been writing about this growing problem on Twitter, friends of ours had seen it. One of them, Fred Moulton, emailed me with a plan: he would collect my van fromauntie_m in San Jose, drive to Emeryville to meet our train whenever it arrived, then we'd go back to San Jose, drop him off at his car, and Lisa and I would go to our hotel. We had a non-refundable hotel reservation at the Holiday Inn San Jose that made sense on the original New Orleans-Los Angeles-San Jose routing. If it were not for that, we probably would have spent the night at the Hilton Garden Inn Emeryville again.
Around Truckee, I concluded that we needed Fred's Plan B or else we might find ourselves entirely stuck at Emeryville. Before I lost connectivity (much of the Zephyr's route is in the land of Nosignal), I emailed Fred with the details necessary to make it happen. While Lisa and I watched the snowy scenery, Fred worked out how to make this work, and when we returned to places where mobile phones worked (around Colfax, although not really firmly until closer to Roseville), I got a call from Fred that said he would meet us at Emeryville.
The Zephyr does have some recovery time built in between Sacramento and Emeryville, so it arrived only four hours late, rather than more than five. We probably would have made the connection to the back-up train. But we were really glad to see Fred. As soon as I claimed my checked bags, we took them to the van and loaded up. I drove us back to San Jose, dropped him at his car, thanked him profusely, and went to our hotel. We checked in, got the latest checkout they said they could give us (Noon), grabbed some microwave meals from the 7-Eleven across the street, and settled in. We were in here at least an hour earlier than we would have been had Plan A been in force and that's one extra hour of sleep we definitely need.
We're both very tired. We'll see if we can get home tomorrow. The weather should be clear. But if we find ourselves too tired to drive the full 300 miles home, we'll bail out halfway there. Better that I should take another day off than we fall asleep at the wheel.
I'm not going to do a long report on this trip. I'm too tired. I did take several hundred photos, many of which I posted to Twitter over the past three days when bandwidth allowed.
We did get snowed on, at times quite heavily. In particular, there was more than 10 cm of snow on the platform at Glenwood Springs, where the station agent told the conductor she couldn't keep the platform cleared due to how fast the snow was falling. However, the railroad stayed open. But there were issues. While we fell behind for various reasons, recovery time in the schedule meant we left Salt Lake City on time at 11:30 PM.
After leaving SLC, I woke up while we were going through the ex-Western Pacific near-complete loop at Silver Zone Pass, but there's not much to see at night and I went back to sleep. When I woke up again, I thought when I checked the time that we must be at Elko, but not only was it an hour earlier than I originally thought (my phone hadn't yet figured out it was in the Pacific Time Zone and thus was still on Mountain time, so I cheated myself out of an hour of sleep), but we weren't in Elko. Instead, we were at a siding called Deeth, and we had apparently been there for a long time facing signal issues. We would continue to face these problems throughout the day, and we started falling farther and farther behind.
Annoyingly, neither Lisa nor I were able to get a usable picture of our house from on board the westbound Zephyr when we passed Fernley around 3 1/2 hours late.
When we got to Reno, where about 90 people boarded and brought the train load up to around 300 people overall, we were more than four hours late. Thanks to roughly 20 miles of signal problems, which required the train to creep along at restricted speed (not much more than a brisk walk), by the time we were at Truckee, it was more like five hours. Not only were we not going to make our train connection from Emeryville to San Jose, but the fallback connection to the last train of the night to San Jose was starting to look dicey. And for once, the good weather was not a blessing: had conditions been so bad that they had to annul (cancel) the train at Reno, we could have gotten home with a $100 taxi ride to Fernley (that I might have asked Amtrak to pay for, or at least pay for the trip later to San Jose to get my van) and we would have been asleep eight hours ago. But the weather was great, so all we got was a lot of very pretty snowy mountain scenery.
As I'd been writing about this growing problem on Twitter, friends of ours had seen it. One of them, Fred Moulton, emailed me with a plan: he would collect my van from
auntie_m in San Jose, drive to Emeryville to meet our train whenever it arrived, then we'd go back to San Jose, drop him off at his car, and Lisa and I would go to our hotel. We had a non-refundable hotel reservation at the Holiday Inn San Jose that made sense on the original New Orleans-Los Angeles-San Jose routing. If it were not for that, we probably would have spent the night at the Hilton Garden Inn Emeryville again.Around Truckee, I concluded that we needed Fred's Plan B or else we might find ourselves entirely stuck at Emeryville. Before I lost connectivity (much of the Zephyr's route is in the land of Nosignal), I emailed Fred with the details necessary to make it happen. While Lisa and I watched the snowy scenery, Fred worked out how to make this work, and when we returned to places where mobile phones worked (around Colfax, although not really firmly until closer to Roseville), I got a call from Fred that said he would meet us at Emeryville.
The Zephyr does have some recovery time built in between Sacramento and Emeryville, so it arrived only four hours late, rather than more than five. We probably would have made the connection to the back-up train. But we were really glad to see Fred. As soon as I claimed my checked bags, we took them to the van and loaded up. I drove us back to San Jose, dropped him at his car, thanked him profusely, and went to our hotel. We checked in, got the latest checkout they said they could give us (Noon), grabbed some microwave meals from the 7-Eleven across the street, and settled in. We were in here at least an hour earlier than we would have been had Plan A been in force and that's one extra hour of sleep we definitely need.
We're both very tired. We'll see if we can get home tomorrow. The weather should be clear. But if we find ourselves too tired to drive the full 300 miles home, we'll bail out halfway there. Better that I should take another day off than we fall asleep at the wheel.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-02 08:33 am (UTC)I am Auntie_M over here at Dreamwidth. The advantage of signing up early, I got my favorite user name.
Glad you got to San Jose safely. I hope you have a safe drive back to Fernley. Wish we could have spent some time together, but I understand travel exhaustion and wanting to sleep in your own bed. Hopefully we can get together soon. If nothing else, Lisa and I need to start talking about the Westercon con suite.
Lisa
no subject
Date: 2022-01-02 05:25 pm (UTC)Westercon 74 has been on our minds a lot and you can expect planning for it to ramp up soon.
Thanks again for your help.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-02 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-02 11:31 pm (UTC)