Truckee (CA) motels/hotels

Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum

Help Support Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

rms492

Service Attendant
Joined
Mar 22, 2009
Messages
214
I seem to be having trouble finding a cheap motel/hotel in Truckee (like a BestWestern, Motel6, Super8, etc.). in downtown Truckee, within walking distance of the Amtrak station.
I'd like to check out the snow, and arrive on the CA Zephyr, and not having a car would be super beneficial to me (not deal with weather, chains, etc.!)
Are there not any? I thought that Truckee was a major tourist/truck stop being that its on the I-80, maybe its just the dates, but I didn't see any just by browsing the maps.
 
Sounds like a great idea, but might not work out in practice. Truckee is a ski resort town with bars and restaurants, downtown just a few blocks long. Def not a truck stop. The lodgings are mostly at the ski resorts or nearby. Look at Google maps, center it on downtown, and you can see the options or lack thereof.
 
The Truckee area has okay Public Transportation on TART, I used it on a couple of car free ski trips to the area, and although their main routes only run hourly it was reliable. In Winter it felt like the main people who used it with a couple of crowded buses only at the times after the slopes closed were the International temporary workers at the ski areas, it was a fun experience being on a bus in the middle of Lake Tahoe with many different languages being spoken on the bus feeling like I was back on the New York City Subway.

On one trip I was with my Dad, we used the bus to head down to Squaw Valley (just named Tahoe Palisades and the Olympic Valley side of the resort) after getting off the Zephyr, and to get an Amtrak Thruway bus from Truckee to leave down to Sacramento, and stayed at the ski area (have no idea of the cost), the second time I was on my own and looking for the cheapest possible accommodation and stayed at the Kings Beach Tahoe Hostel, it looks like it may have closed in 2019 with the owners posting to facebook that they were moving on and no other information on the Internet about it anywhere on the Internet.

On a third Spring Skiing trip to then named Squaw Valley-Alpine Meadows (now Tahoe Palisades) in early May I had rented a car because I was also going down to Mammoth Ski Area (I had a Mountain Collective Ski Pass) and visiting friends in Nevada City, and did manage to get a last minute Hotels Tonight booking on a condo studio room in the Olympic Village at Tahoe Palisades on Hotel Tonight for like $150 including the resort fee but that was definitely an anomaly.
 
okay thanks for all the tips, yes I did look on the maps, and it looks like the "Truckee Hotel", which is like across and to the right of the intersection from the station, should work. And it has a view of the tracks, I think, so I can watch trains come and go all long. I thought that Truckee was some sort of a 'rest' stop type of town, I'm used to traveling the 5, 15, and 40 interstates frequently so I got used to see seeing towns/stops with lots of gas stations, fast food, and motels. I guess Truckee is not like that. I'm not sure when I will go though, maybe later this winter.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Amt...e43c657cc!2m2!1d-120.1840026!2d39.3284711!3e2
https://truckeehotel.com/
 
As was noted, Truckee is a ski town as it's near the Northstar ski resort. There are only a few hotels in town, but the dining and entertainment is primarily there for tourists. The train station is near the freeway and that's kind of an an industrial area of town. Most of the hotels within the Truckee city limits are going to be a decent walk.
 
Back
Top