Wow. Thanks for the detailed assessment. Gee, one would think that Amtrak could have done a better job planning that trip. 5 Private cars and barely enough power to get over Marias Pass, plus running out of food sounds like someone did a poor job of provisioning. Having been on quite a few late LD trains, once you lose your "slot" things just seem to snowball.......
An announcement one of the conductors made about having just the two engines suggested that the problem was simply that another loco just wasn't available in Seattle. I hope Amtrak was paid sufficiently to haul those private cars for it to help pay current bills. We had seen the same cars on my CS [30] from CA to Seattle:
Mid-America Mohave MRLX 800651
Wisconsin Valley Lounge 800787
The Milwaukee River 800195
MIlwaukee Road Superdome 800862
Lamberts Point 800702
Overheard an employee on board one of these otherwise empty cars that there had been a Levi Strauss private conference that used these cars in California.
Re: provisioning. This is only gossip I overheard, but it seemed that Amtrak is REALLY REALLY trying to be conservative with ANY outgo of money or supplies right now and for the past month or so.
Both the private cars on the end of #28(2) that was so late and #7(4) were Friends of the 261 cars, that had been rented for Levi's
Station to Station tour. Way too hipster for my tastes, but talking to the crew, apparently it was a fun time for them. After the end of the tour, the Friends had to deadhead the cars home, so they split them between two routes and
sold tickets.
I couldn't afford to ride all the way from California, but I did manage to fly down in the morning on Southwest, spend a few hours looking at mosaics on downtown buildings, and then ride back in the
Cedar Rapids and the
Wisconsin Valley. The latter is a former Le Pub car (and apparently a hospital car before that).
I'm not sure how many passengers were in the private cars on
Golden grrrl's train, but there were a dozen on our trip, including four rail enthusiasts from England who flew over to San Francisco to ride the private cars to St. Paul, are returning to Great Britain tonight and then flying back to Minneapolis next weekend for the 261 steam excursion.
The British group with all their flying made my flying down to Chicago to ride the
Cedar Rapids back to St. Paul seem positively sensible.
We were about two hours late into St. Paul. We lost half an hour over a problem with one of the
Cedar Rapids' brake shoes, but the real culprit was an interlocking by the Pig's Eye yard just outside St. Paul. Something screwed up the signalling, so repairs had to be made before the interlocking would allow the dispatcher to switch us on to the proper track. It was maddening to be stopped within sight of downtown St. Paul, and not be able to do anything. Well, as it turned out, there was something I could do. I went back to the
Wisconsin Valley for another Sierra Nevada.
I like how you board a private car. No standing in line, no kindergarten walk, no show of identity or tickets. On Friday I waited in the Great Hall until 1:45 p.m., then walked to the north side of the station. While Amtrak personnel carefully checked coach passengers' tickets, I announced to a conductor, "I'm riding in the private cars," and walked by. The conductor seemed remarkably uninterested in me, and just reminded me that the private cars were on the end of the train.
