Down to the Pacific shore - train trip from Nevada to San Francisco, California - America by Rail

Sierra, May-June, 1995 by William Poole

I DREAMT THE TRAIN HAD slipped onto the smoothes track of the trip. So smooth was this track that the Zephyr had ceased all rocking, all clicketyclark; even the hum of the sleeper's climate-control system had stopped. After two days of train noise and Motion, the stillness was profound, although I could feel my body flying forward, forward, at 80 miles an hour. But how did they ever make it so smooth?

Gradually I came awake. Outside the window was a darkened train yard, and in the corridor was a kitchen worker headed for the dining car to prepare breakfast.

"Were are we?" I whispered.

"Elko." His voice blended resignation with disgust.

An hour late and counting, the California Zephyr sat dead on the tracks in eastern Nevada, its umbilical to the engine severed and undergoing repair. Cold leaked through the metal skin of the sleeper. An hour and ten minutes late ... an hour and twenty minutes late . . . the train jolted to life and pulled out past the carnival glow of Elko's casinos. Waiting for breakfast outside the dining car, some passengers computed how tardy they would be at Sacramento. But I secretly thanked the locomotive gremlins for an extra hour of daylight in a favorite part of the world.

We picked up the skimpy Humboldt River then. Mark Twain once wrote of this stream that a man could leap and releap its thin flow until thirst consumed him--and could then proceed to drink it dry. Another moody morning, the sagebrush brown, bedraggled, with muddy puddles beside the track; and with even the abrupt mountain ranges--sometimes two or three visible at once in as many directions--blanched by snow and smothered in cloud. "Go back to sleep" was the message most of the Zephyr's passengers discovered in this brooding transit. For much of the morning the observation car held only a man with a book, me, and a pair of lovers, for whom even this privacy seemed not private enough.

We dawdled along on rock-and-roll track, following the route of 19th-century wagons, while trucks and busses on Interstate 80 passed us by. Through Winnemucca (named for a Paiute chief, the route guide said) and into Lovelock, exactly an hour and forty minutes late. Near here the Humboldt disappears, exhausted from the simple effort of being a river in such country, and the Zephyr inclined southwest for a last bolt across scabrous volcanic rock and all-but-unvegetated saline flats to the California mountains.

"Very little of note save dust and brightness of the glittering sand, now and then a grave," wrote pioneer John Clark in his diary, crossing this desert in 1852. Even today the Zephyr's passengers seemed to heave a collective sigh when we picked up the Sierra Nevada-born Truckee River and followed its oasis canyon into Reno. As if on cue, the clouds thinned, and with another mountain range ahead, the observation car filled with camera-toting tourists. For several miles the train courted the river, first from one bank, then the other, chunky hawks decorating the fall-bronzed cottonwoods along its banks and ducks dotting its placid surface.

At Reno we picked up a party of gamblers headed back over the mountains to California, and an interpreter from the California State Railway Museum in Sacramento. We were now ascending Truckee Canyon, the interpreter announced over the train's public address system, and it was near here that in 1846 the Donner party of California-bound emigrants--20 wagons, 87 suffering men, women, and children--were trapped and ultimately reduced to cannibalism by another early November snowstorm.

For there was snow again for this mountain passage--not as much as doomed the Donner Party, but enough to fly up off the wheels of the engine during the long horseshoe ascent of Coldstream Valley, as Donner Lake appeared below us in a wintry bowl. As in Colorado, here also were snow-encumbered firs and pines and half a horizon of assertive peaks.

We broke out of the summit tunnel into sparkling sun. Down the Pacific Slope now, almost home, feeling our way above the American River Canyon, a 2,000-foot-deep absence of mountain on our left. Chinese laborers blasted this right-of-way and laid these tracks, the man from the railroad museum said. He pointed out the old hydraulic-mining scars along the route, still festering after more than a century. The snow was softening now, sloughing from the trees, the sun pushing back the season where aspens glowed like candles beside the tracks.

We crept downhill through the heart of California's Gold Country, through Dutch Flat to Gold Run, where we found ourselves once more idling on a siding. Five minutes .. ten ... before the conductor made his announcement: We were stopped for an important train to pass. Soon we heard the whistle, and the massive silver nose slipped into view, striped blue and white and red. Here was our sister train, today's eastbound Zephyr, and I wondered who might be aboard, off to see the country from its rocking vantage.

Ahead on our own route lay the Sacramento Valley, its rice paddies burnished in the setting sun, and further yet (the Zephyr two hours late by now), a littoral of lights around San Francisco Bay. And while I would have been sorry to miss these glories, part of me would just as soon have made a great leap at Gold Run, have traded one Zephyr for another and my exhausted stack of tickets for a fresh one. Let's see, from Denver I could catch the Pioneer, and then the Empire Builder from Seattle ... and from Chicago?