It was a short trip. Just like last year's train trip on the California Zephyr, only more so. I walked out my front door at 6 a.m. Monday, and returned by Uber from the airport at about midnight Wednesday. And in that short interval, I had traveled to Los Angeles, by train to Chicago, and returned to Seattle.
It's like those dreams we sometimes have, where we find ourselves having complex adventures that require a great deal of effort to complete, and then wake up to discover, to our surprise, that we'd been asleep for less than an hour. Will we wake up someday, and discover that our 80 or 90 years of life on earth had been a dream that occupied but an instant in some different system of time measurement?
How did the Southwest Chief compare with the California Zephyr? As I've noted in past posts, the trip from the West Coast to Chicago is nine hours shorter on the Chief. And the scenery is fascinating, but less breath-taking than the mountain ranges you pass over on the Zephyr. The short answer to my question is that, if you've taken neither train, you will probably enjoy the Zephyr more.
But what the Chief lacks in mountains, it offers instead in scenic deserts. Or if not always scenic, at least impressively untouched by signs of human civilization, except when one encounters an occasional interstate highway, a highway whose traffic is almost 90 percent commercial trucks.
Travel in February or March has certain advantages, including the lower Amtrak fares, but winter's primary disadvantage is the far fewer hours of daylight than you will have for sightseeing than you'd have in summer. We left Los Angeles just before darkness fell, and thereby slept through virtually the entire state of Arizona. We entered New Mexico just as I was getting dressed and ready for breakfast. But most of New Mexico was delightfully empty, aside from a stop for a half hour in Albuquerque at about noon.
The meals were quite good, although, subjectively, I felt they had been somewhat better prepared on the Zephyr. But maybe I'd simply been less jaded on that earlier trip. Interesting seat companions, including three meals with Amish tourists, many of whom seemed to occupy sleeper accommodations on this train. I'd never seen anyone before who I identified as Amish, let alone talked to one. I guess I thought they all traveled using horse and buggies! The groups I talked with were well-traveled, especially fond of train travel, and sophisticated. They were excellent dinner companions.
The train leaves New Mexico in the northeast corner of the state when it passes through the Sangre de Cristo mountains, following the old Santa Fe Trail, over Raton Pass (7,834 feet), and into Colorado. Coming down to the plains once again, the train continues to follow the Santa Fe Trail as darkness once more encroached. While sleeping peacefully in my roomette, the train hurdled across Kansas, and I didn't awake until we were approaching Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City still seemed a long distance from Chicago, but as with the Zephyr last year after leaving Denver, the mountains were all behind us, and the train hurdled across the prairie at maximum speed to Chicago.
We headed northwest from Kansas City, crossed the Missouri river, and cut across a tiny corner of Iowa, stopping at Fort Madison on the Mississippi at about 10:45 a.m. We then crossed into Illinois, and spent the last three hours crossing that state to the skyscrapers of Chicago.
By the time I awoke in eastern Kansas, approaching Missouri, we had definitely left the dry plains behind, and were in the world of agriculture -- wheat, corn -- for the remainder of the trip. Less wildly spectacular scenery, but more interesting human scenery, studying the small towns and residences as we passed by. At some point in Illinois, the municipalities became less small towns centered on agriculture, and more outer suburbs, often officially named "Villages." And then, while still admiring the Chicago skyline -- much changed from when I'd visited as a teenager, when the Board of Trade Building had dominated the skies -- we found ourselves plunging into a tunnel leading into Union Station.
And yes, we arrived exactly on time. In fact, by my watch, two minutes early at 2:48 p.m.
I'd been concerned that I might miss my 6:55 flight back to Seattle; the weather of the past week or so had caused many Southwest Chiefs to arrive late at their destination. But I had plenty of time to walk two blocks south to the Clinton Street CTA station, take the hour-long transit train ride to O'Hare, and still find myself sitting around for some time waiting for my Alaska Airlines flight to take off.
In science fiction, we often read of people traveling in space ships near the speed of light, and returning a year later only to find all their family and friends to be 20 years older. Relativity, and all that. A trip on Amtrak is just the opposite. I arrived home after what had seemed a long and eventful trip, and found my cats hardly aware that I'd even been gone.
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