Trip Report: November 8 - December 10, 2006
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
31 Day Grand Tour on Amtrak and the Mississippi Queen
Saturday, Sunday, Monday, November 11-13, 2006
The "Empire Builder" leaves Portland on time at 445pm. We are in Bedroom E of the 2830 car, the Portland Sleeper. The usual consist of the Portland section of the "Empire Builder" is one Genesis locomotive, the Lounge Café car, one coach, one baggage coach, and at the very end, the Portland sleeper.
The usual consist of the Seattle section of the "Empire Builder" is one Genesis locomotive, one baggage car, one crew dormitory car, two sleepers, a dining car, and two coaches. When these two sections meet in Spokane in the midnight hours, the Portland section is coupled on to the rear of the Seattle section.
Guess where that leaves the Portland sleeper passengers. You got it, the last car of a an eleven car train. The walk from there to the dining car, when the train is moving, through four coaches and the Lounge Café car, is guaranteed to build up an appetite and develop your sense of balance.
Breakfast Sunday morning is in the diner that we coupled onto last night. The "Empire Builder" is the only long distance train that has not been switched to Diner Lite. The car has a full crew, the entire car is utilized for seating, and the meals are prepared fresh on board. Breakfast and lunch is first come, first served, but reservations are offered for dinner.
If asked to compare the dining experience on the Diner Lite trains we have ridden recently, the "California Zephyr" and the "Coast Starlight", I would have to admit that so far, Diner Lite is working. The Diner Lite entrees are delicious even though not prepared on board. The service is faster due to the smaller groups of eight being seated at 15 minute intervals, and some of the entrees are actually tastier than the freshly prepared entrees on the "Empire Builder", especially the breakfast omelet and the dinner salmon. One amenity on the "Builder" is ice cream, the last train on the system to still have it on the dessert menu.
Lunch is the weakest meal on all trains, including the "Builder". The limited choices are a hamburger sandwich, a chicken sandwich, a pizza, a cold ham and cheese sandwich, and a vegetarian dish. The "Builder" menu did not include the chicken Caesar salad, from which a sly, starving fox would have a difficult time in finding the tiny chicken pieces.
But all in all the food is very adequate and very tasty. The portions are such that I can rarely finish everything, so I skip the salads, rolls, and dessert. (Well, sometimes I sneak in a scoop of ice cream, which is my weakness.) The service has been pleasant and fast, it has been a long time since we have found a slow or unhappy server in an Amtrak dining car. Perhaps they have all been retired by now.
During and after breakfast, we enjoy the climb over Marias Pass, the Continental Divide. As we climb higher and higher the accumulated snow is deeper and deeper, and adjoining US Highway 2 is slicker and slicker. We are all glad to be on the train.
We pass the Izaak Walton Inn, where the staff is out on the porch waving, as they always faithfully do. Descending the eastern scarp of the Divide, we pass the closed Glacier Park Lodge, and suddenly we are out on the Great Plains, flying past mile after mile of flat and fallow fields. The station stops are at small towns, with few, if any, other options for public transportation.
Havre, Montana, is the first good sized town where the "Builder" makes a smoking stop, that is, passengers have time to step down to the platform to enjoy their smoking habit. I walk over to inspect the Great Northern 4-8-4 steam passenger locomotive which has been on display since 1964. A picture of brute elemental power, even in its cold, shut down state. On this trip I am actually able to connect with the Internet, as for the first time ever, Sprint PCS has arrived in town.
The old and the new in Havre
One of my favorite aspects of riding the "Builder" is that you don't have to worry about missing any spectacular scenery if you bury your nose in a book. So I brought a couple of books along and take it easy in our Bedroom. Sylvia is busy tapping out her next article for Passenger Train Journal, and I have given up attempting to restart my sick IBM Think Pad. I am going to send it back to the dealer in Klamath Falls, and just hope that my Dell holds out for the remainder of the trip. The Dell Latitude is the only laptop that I have owned which has never failed me. I think I will buy another one.
Most of the track on the old Great Northern Railway, (now the BNSF), has been very smooth. Much of it is double track. Where it is single track, the sidings are long, permitted rolling meets with freight trains. There are many freight trains on this route, and they are all handled skillfully by the BNSF dispatcher. We arrive at every station ahead of schedule, and have to wait for the scheduled departure time.
On the second night out, in the Fargo, NC, vicinity, there is a very rough stretch of track, a stretch which has been rough for as long as I have been riding Amtrak on this route. I have no explanation for this, and it is mentioned by other passengers at breakfast the next morning.
Monday morning we arrive in St. Paul ahead of schedule and we have over an hour to stroll along the platform and inspect the private restored railcars spotted on an adjacent track, including a Milwaukee Road Super Dome and a Milwaukee Road Sky Top Observation Parlor Car.
Milwaukee Road Super Dome, L, and Sky Top Observation Parlor Car, R.
We left St. Paul on time and soon were rocketing down the main line to Chicago. Well, not exactly rocketing. Amtrak schedules 8 hours and 5 minutes to cover the 417 route miles to Chicago, for an average speed of 52 mph. In the 1930's three railroads competed for passengers on this city pair, the Burlington with their Zephyrs, the Milwaukee Road with their Hiawathas, and the Chicago & North Western with their 400s, so named for their ability to cover 400 miles in 400 minutes. When I do the math, it comes up to a blistering average speed of 62.5 mph, with steam locomotives!
Our schedule keeping today is maintained until we get within 30 miles of Chicago, where we are held in sidings for the passage of Metra Commuter Trains on this single track main line, and arrive into Union Station 45 minutes behind schedule.
We are a long way from the terminal building when we disembark our sleeping car on the very rear of the train, but there are plenty of Redcaps in Chicago Union Station. One of them loads our luggage on his cart, but there are not enough seats for the both of us, so we walk to the station to meet him outside the Metropolitan. Now there are two seats available and he drives us to baggage claim where we pick up our checked bags, then out to the taxi entrance. This enclosed taxi entrance was closed after the attacks on New York in 2001, so he drives us up the entrance way to the street and actually flags a taxi for us and unloads our luggage onto the street for the taxi drive to load in his trunk while blocking one lane of rush hour traffic. The threat of "terror" has made our lives a little more complicated.
We taxi to the Hotel Blake, which has been transformed from the century old Morton Building, on the Register of Historic Places, into the newest luxury hotel in Chicago. We have a super comfortable room with a view of the Sears Tower, whose upper floors disappear into the clouds.
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