Portland, OR Trip report, by Tom Coughlin
(All photos and text copyright 2005 Tom Coughlin)
For this year’s NRHS annual Convention, Meg and I rode the DCNRHS private car Dover Harbor heavyweight six-bedroom buffet lounge one way from Washington, DC to Portland OR. The trip involved three Amtrak trains, a three-night stay-over in Chicago, and took over a week to complete.
Sun 6-26
We left early Sunday morning on the second SEPTA R-5 local train of the day out of Doylestown. Arriving at 30th Street Station before 9:00 am, we cooled our heels for about an hour before Amtrak train 51, The Cardinal, arrived. As we waited, the rest of our Philly-based traveling gang arrived– fellow passengers Ray Cooney, MaryJude Symansky, and Frank and Mary Tatnall. Bound for Chicago, The Cardinal originates in New York, and the Dover Harbor will be added to the consist in Washington, DC. As Amtrak does not sell tickets to Washington, DC for this train, we needed to purchase Amtrak tickets to Alexandria, VA. On the ride, down, we sat together in one of the first cars on the crowded train, and as we approached Washington, we came clean to the conductor regarding our connection plans in DC.
Waiting for us trackside in Washington, DC, the Dover Harbor staff is out in force–Mike Crockett, Bernie Gallagher, Mark Piotrowski, and Barbara O’Rourke of the Washington, DC chapter came down to the platform to meet us and send us off. We watched together as the Dover Harbor was attached to the head end of train 51, along with a pair of Amtrak diesels. As the car was being attached, the final two cross-country passengers, Paul Barnes and Carl Olsen amble down the platform and greeted us. This is Carl’s first trip on the Dover and he is literally glowing and wearing a big grin as he puts his bags on the vestibule. Within minutes we were on our way, gliding over the Potomac River Bridge in Pullman car safety and comfort.
The car looked beautiful and clean, and it was a pleasure to see Jim Lilly and Jerry Tompkins serving on the trip as mechanical officer and steward. At the Alexandria, VA stop, Jean and Skip Sheetz joined us and rode as far as Charlottesville, VA. Dinner consisted of glazed chicken breasts. Greg White, a Minnesotan of great distinction and a veteran chef of many long-distance train trips was once again in the kitchen, employing the car’s old coal stove and grill as the Pullman Company intended. It was a pleasure to hear Greg singing and whistling as he worked.
That night in the lounge after sunset, we perused the car’s library and spotted some new additions. Bill Hakkarinen’s thoughtful donation of a few select copies of the “Official Guide to the Railroads” from the 1940s through 1960s provided an interesting overview of the histories of the hodgepodge of lines of various provenance that the Cardinal travels over as it rolls toward Chicago. We watched a videotape of some railroad-produced films from the 1950s. As interesting and enjoyable as these old films may be, they never fail to put me into a deep slumber. Meg and I headed to our bedroom around 11 p.m. and hoped for a successful night’s sleep in our rocking bedrooms.
As any sleeping car veteran knows, the first night out sleeping on the car is usually the most fitful. Being directly behind the engine for our trip to Chicago worsened the situation. Two days before our trip, The Federal Railroad Administration instituted a rule change regarding the use of train horns at grade crossings, and our engineer was being particularly diligent to sound the horn at every grade crossing. You had to admire his striving desire to follow the letter of the law–he blew his horn at dirt roads, driveways, deer trails, and places where powerlines crossed the ROW. He blew for rivers and creeks. Once, I caught him just blowing for fun.
Monday 6-27
Most of the passengers were up early, and having coffee before Indianapolis. We enjoyed breakfast as the train did the fast sprint through Indiana for our late-morning Chicago arrival. One of the most pleasant aspects of traveling with Chef Greg is his approach to serving breakfast– For about three hours every morning starting around 7:30 am, he offers a short-order breakfast, cooked to order. Passengers can sleep-in or get up early as they wish, hang out on the platform or take a shower when the please.
Our arrival at Chicago was an engines-first run into the station, which put the car relatively close to the bumperpost as well as the ice-maker in the basement of the station. A few passengers assisted Jerry Tompkins with an ice run into the lower level, and fully iced the car in about 3 minutes. Meg and I left the car quickly, walked a few blocks to the CTA headquarters at 567 Lake Street, purchased 2-day El and bus passes for $9, and took off on the el for sightseeing. Chicago was in the middle of a searing heat wave, so it seemed like a good opportunity to sightsee the city from the comfort of the air-conditioned cars of the Chicago CTA elevated railway. We rode north up to Evanston for some pulled pork barbecue at Hecky’s, and then rode back into town and went to Sam’s for fancy beer and fancy food, and carried our purchases back to the car quickly because of the heat.
Back at the Amtrak yard, an icy cold car was waiting for us, and it felt good–Jim Lilly, concerned that the Chicago heat wave would follow us westward, had persuaded an Amtrak serviceperson to top off the Freon in the Dover’s air conditioner and power wash the condenser, and the system was now running at top capacity. In the evening as Carl, Paul, Jerry and I sat in the yard admiring our frosty haven, we were joined for a beer by Joe Maloney, who was also traveling to the Portland NRHS convention on a different private car. Like Joe, I’m a fan of microbrew and home-brew beer and I brought a special beer along to share with him– a large bottle of four-year-old English old ale that was a sendoff present from a brewer friend, which we shared with fellow passengers.
Tuesday 6-28
This was our one full free day in Chicago. Meg and I walked to the loop to purchase tickets for the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s boat tour, and then quickly walked up several blocks up to the corner of Wacker and Michigan Avenues to catch the boat at 1 p.m.. Afterward we rode the Brown line (the Ravenswood Line) up to the Kedzie stop to have lunch at a Lebanese restaurant that Meg found in a restaurant guide. The restaurant, Semiramis, had recently opened, and it had unique attributes of interest to both Lebanese food fans and rail fans. From the tables inside the front window of the restaurant, we were in plain view of the CTA Brown Lines street-level grade crossing at Kedzie Street. Where else could you find an excellent restaurant that was inexpensive, and also offered the entertainment of the grade crossing gates going down on a busy street every three-and-a-half minutes?
We did some shopping in the early afternoon, and returned to the car a little early, because of the intense heat. Back at the yard, the switching crew was arranging two trainsets and five private cars–there were many private cars in Chicago on their way to Portland via the Builder and the Zephyr. Once on the car, we relaxed in the lounge while we watched the action in the yard. That night Carl, Meg and I went over to Dominick’s market to assist Greg and Jerry in bringing food back to the car. While we were crossing the Roosevelt Road viaduct on the way back, we saw an eleven-car train made up entirely of Amtrak P-42 engines being moved from Union Station south to the Amtrak yard.
Wednesday 6-29
I got up early and walked around the yard to take some twilight pictures of the Dover Harbor. Four superliners involved in a recent derailment in Washington State had arrived overnight in the yard, and while operable on rails, they sported large gashes on one side. At around 8:30 am, Meg and I walked up to Blommer’s Chocolates to purchase some chocolate for the trip. As it was getting hot already, we rode the CTA bus back to the yard, and deposited our purchases back on the
car before walking to Dominick’s for some food items.
We left in the early afternoon, on time, on Amtrak train 5, the California Zephyr. Dinner was an elaborate endeavor of preparation, and unfortunately the heat put out by our wood stove, along with 95 degrees and high humidity overtook the air conditioner. We had a freeze-up, but it went away after a spell. Our dinner was an excellent roast marinated pork loin with green beans and noodles. After about an hour of running without AC, Jim started the compressor again and things worked fine.
That night, we ran into an electrical storm east of Omaha, and the sky around us flashed feverishly with bolts of lightning. Hailstones pounded the roof and windows of the car. Meg and I watched in wonder from the vestibule–there is nothing like the awesome beauty of a Midwestern warm front. The temperature in the car was going down, but we were all still in need of a lift, so I started up a DVD of the 2003 Grand Canyon NRHS trip (the last trip for the Dover Harbor to the West Coast) and Paul, Ray and Frank watched with me until our eyes were heavy from the monotony of video run-bys shot from four different angles. We were all in bed by Omaha.
Thursday 6-30
I got up early– first one in the lounge that morning. We hadn’t passed through Akron yet. Greg got up early as he always does, and made coffee. Slowly, the passengers started assembling in the lounge. We were pretty much showered and dressed by the time we made Denver. It was still early in the day, but the train was more than a hour late, and the Amtrak passengers waiting in the station looked tired from getting up early and bored from waiting for the train to show up. Jim Lilly watered the car along with a trackside assistant in a blue hard hat who couldn’t have been more than 16, while Jerry and Greg flew off the car in search of ice.
This was the best day of sightseeing on the trip. As Ray explained to us over lunch, “the trip starts here”. Most of us spent at least an hour on the vestibule that day counting the tunnels leading up to the long Moffat Tunnel, and admiring the rugged natural beauty of Glenwood and Gore Canyon. Lunch was a combination salad containing meats and cheeses, with a side of cornbread, and dinner featured roast Cornish game hen with apricot glaze, and a heavenly dessert of chocolate cake and chocolate sauce both made in the kitchen. Carl Olsen explained the experience succinctly– “it doesn’t get any better than this.”
In the afternoon, as we passed Bond and the junction for the Craig branch, we saw workers with cutting torches on the side of the right-of-way cutting up brand new aluminum coal gondola cars that had been wrecked in a derailment last week that shut down the line between Denver and Salt Lake City. Over the weekend, Amtrak had had to bus passengers between Salt Lake City and Denver and short turn their trains at those cities due to the line being closed. Our train had no problem getting through, thank goodness. At Glenwood Springs, Chuck Hakkarinen (Bill’s brother) along with a group of railfans came over to meet Dover Harbor and took pictures of us while the Amtrak passengers boarded.
That night as we slept, we passed Soldier Summit, and at around 3:00 am local time, the train stopped for water and ice in Salt Lake City. Jim Lilly, stayed up to see the summit and perform the late-night water and ice runs. Nice fellow that he is, he even watered the second private car behind us. After Salt Lake City, the Zephyr leaves the Denver and Rio Grande right of way and continues westward for a time over the former main line of the Western Pacific. At Wells, Nevada, the WP line meets up with the SP line from Ogden and closely parallels it to Winnemucca. For many years, the two railroads jointly operated this trackage, and today both owned by the Union Pacific. From here, Amtrak’s Zephyr deviates from the route of the original Burlington Zephyr of 1948 and takes the SP line across the Sierra Nevada mountains west of Winnemucca. Portola, the Keddie Wye, and the Feather River Canyon are no longer on the route, but the former SP route (route of the Overland Limited) west of Winnemucca, has its own charms. The SP is famous for it’s picturesque crossing of the Sierra Nevada mountains, with lots of curvy trackage that clings to sides of steep mountains, and the long wooden snowsheds that help keep the line open in the winter.
Friday 7-1
I woke up very early and wandered out to the lounge, and in the dim light of the dawn, I could see that we were passing through some alkali flats. I realized that we’re not doing very well in the timekeeping department, so I went back to bed, and as it happened I was the last person to get out of bed that morning. We had lunch as the train passed through Sparks, and at Reno, I stepped down onto the platform for a few minutes as the train stopped. After Reno, the train passes into
the Sierra Nevada mountains over the winding route of the Southern Pacific, which is particularly beautiful this time of year.
I had a patch of clear cell phone signal in the afternoon, and was able to use the cell-modem for a few minutes to catch up on e-mail. I noticed that there was some discussion among the DCNRHS people on-line about a suitable memorial to Martin O’Rourke–one suggestion was to leave a light burning on the Dover Harbor as it tours at night. At lunch, a few of the passengers and crew discussed some ideas. We generally reached the consensus that replacing the four
current table lamps (which are not original to the car) would be a fitting tribute to Martin–this was a project he had looked into over the last couple of years, and much progress had been completed as original table lamps are very difficult to find on the railroad memorabilia market, and reproductions are expensive.
As the day wore on, the scenery got nicer and the train lost more and more time. Much of the line between Truckee and Roseville had been slow-ordered due to the report of a sun kink (we ran over the mileage and didn’t feel a thing). We crawled into the Capitol Corridor commuter district, at a speed of less than 15 mph, but once we passed Sacramento, the pace picked up. Due to the lateness of the train, and a family commitment at home in Minnesota, Greg decided to leave us at Sacramento and try to catch a flight from there. There was no way he could make his evening flight from Oakland at that point. He and Jerry cooked an “extra” meal of roast turkey for us (not on the menu plan for the trip, but a nice addition considering the lateness of the train). Still wearing his white jacket and clutching his grip, he wished us a nice visit and left us.
It was dusk as we approached the Emeryville station, the end of the westward segment of our trip. We wished Jim and Jerry goodnight at the platform, and headed to our hotel rooms at the Oakland Waterfront Plaza, as they waited for their switch engine ride to the Oakland yard.
Saturday 7-2
Meg and I awoke in a very large bed in Oakland, and went on an early morning walking tour of Oakland and Emeryville. Heading westward from the hotel down Fourth street, we walked past the Amtrak service center and quickly spotted the Dover Harbor in the yard. From there we walked north through Oakland past the beautiful and now completely derelict 16th Street Southern Pacific Station. We walked up to the Emeryville train station, and being we were there, decided to check on the Woodfin Suites hotel, where the DCNRHS had reserved a room for passengers to wait for the Coast Starlight, in case the train was late. The hotel was on the side of the tracks opposite the station, and the only close-by passage across the tracks was an pedestrian overpass, but unfortunately, it was more than three stories high, and elevators were out of service. Handling passenger bags over it was going to be difficult.
After the Emeryville walk, Meg and I rode the BART into San Francisco and purchased three-day passes. Passes in hand, we went for a great public transit joy ride around San Francisco–first, out on the J line to see the Caltrain station, and from there we walked up to market, and rode the historic F line down to Van Ness. On the trolley, we made the acquantance of a fellow who volunteers at the the Muni Streecar Restoration center next to the trolley portal there, and got a quick tour from him of two cars they were working on. Next, back on the M line which we rode to the end, and changed for N line to ride back. At Van Ness, we changed back to the F line, and rode a former Philadelphia PCC all the way to
the other end at Fisherman’s wharf.
At the end of our day of trolley riding, we took BART back to the Lake Merit station and walked back to our hotel in Jack London Square.
Sunday 7-3
We got up early and met up with Paul and Carl to transport our luggage from the hotel to the Amtrak service facility so Jim and Jerry could load it up on the car early, and put it out of mind for the day. Jerry needed to do some food shopping, so he took off in the cab that he had rode down in. The four of us walked a few blocks to a West Oakland BART station and rode to San Francisco for a visit to the Golden Gate Railroad Museum.
The MUNI #19 bus offered us a winding trip up and down a couple of very steep hills on it’s way down to the Hunter’s Point Navy Base. It’s amazing that San Francisco could contain section of town so vast and so desolate within the city limits. The place looked like a movie set–there were massive abandoned buildings for several blocks. Down by the pier, a two-block row of large derelict industrial buildings sat across from the police training center, and a couple of scraggly auto body shops. Walking past the ghost town, at the southern side of this industrial wasteland was the Golden Gate Railway Museum–what a strange place to put a railroad museum!
At this point I must say that Carl, Meg, Paul and I completely enjoyed our visit and the hospitality the that staff offered us. Inside the museum gate was the SP 2472, a Baldwin Pacific locomotive, that had recently passed it’s boiler inspection, and was in the museum’s tidy engine shop being quickly reassembled. On yard tracks, there were more than 2 dozen cars in various stages of preservation. We were given tours of about 10 cars in all, and were given permission to roam the yard and check out the sights. While wandering the rows of cars parked in the tall grass, Carl suddenly realized that something terrible had happened–he had left a pair of pants in his closet in the hotel room, and without immediate action, he would never see them again. Frantically, he called MaryJude’s cellphone and left a desperate message in the hope that she’d still be near the hotel. She could try to recover the trousers from the hotel housekeeping department.
After a few hours at the museum, the four of us walked two blocks down the deserted streets to the painted patch of asphalt that marked the bus stop. About 30 minutes passed as we stood at the end of a decrepit pier surrounded by acres of deserted buildings, and we were more than slightly concerned that that the MUNI bus was never going to come and get us–but eventually it did. After a bus and trolley ride back to the Embarcadero, we all had lunch at the Ferry building, and headed our separate ways. Carl and Paul to do some PCC trolley car riding on the historic F line, and Meg and I planned on going to Berkeley for a visit. I called MaryJude to check on the status of Carl’s pants, and was surprised to learn that Ray, MaryJude and Frank were about a block away at the other side of the Ferry Building taking pictures of historic PCC cars and waiting for a ferry to take them back to Oakland for dinner. Meg and I opted to meet up with them, and ride the ferry boat back to Oakland with them.
As we waited for the ferry, we had some additional good luck–I got a cell phone call from Jim Lilly with some bad news and some great news. First the bad news: the Coast Starlight was now over 5 hours late, and we would be getting on the train around 4 a.m. And now the great news: the passengers had been granted permission to board the Dover at the Amtrak Yard in the evening in advance of the switch move, and would be spared from having to board the train in the middle of the night. While on the ferryboat, the six of us, Ray, MaryJude, (Mary who rode the boat from Oakland to San Francisco to meet Frank) and Frank quickly revised our plans, and arranged for two cabs to carry the six of us, along with our luggage (and Carl’s pants) to Oakland Yard after a late dinner. Meg and I went to Everett & Jones for some beef barbecue and did some shopping before heading back to the hotel to meet our cabs.
Jim Lilly met us at the gate, and escorted the party back to the car. Carl and Paul who were in Berkeley for dinner, rode BART to the Oakland West station, and walked a few blocks down to the yard to meet up with us. By 10:00 pm, we were all aboard waiting for the switch engine to move us south to Jack London Square where we’d be added to the Coast Starlight. The Coast Starlight was still nowhere to be seen. Nothing to do but go to bed, and look forward to several extra hours of daylight railfanning on one of the most picturesque lines on the Amtrak route map.
Monday 7-4
At 4:30 am as the passengers slept, the car was moved eastward from the Oakland Amtrak yard, and when Amtrak’s train 14, the Coast Starlight finally arrived, more than 5 hours late, the car was attached. When I awoke that morning, we had just passed Chico, CA, and the lounge was full of passengers enjoying their morning coffee, and their cooked-to-order breakfasts. Ray Cooney explained it best, “we’re on the Shasta Daylight.” In the old days when the Southern Pacific ran passenger service on this line, the Coast Starlight ran only as far as San Francisco. North of San Francisco, passengers were handled principally by the SP’s crack day train, the Shasta Daylight, which was a favorite with tourists because of the beautiful scenery that the line passes through. For more than a hundred miles, Mount Shasta looms in the distance as the train passes through mountain passes, gorges, over high trestles, and finally through rich agricultural flatlands before arriving in Portland. When the Amtrak Cost Starlight operates on time, a large portion of the mountainous segment of the trip is covered before dawn.
In front of us on the train was a new private car neighbor, the Vista Canyon, a 3 drawing room lounge car built in the late 1940s for the Santa Fe, and now owned by the Arizona Railway Museum, in Chandler, AZ. The hosts on the Vista Canyon, Bart and Jane Barton, are old private car friends, so after dinner, we wandered up to the front car to take a tour, and some of their passengers came back to visit with us. Built by Pullman in 1947, the Vista Canyon originally was a round-ended tail car for use on the Santa Fe Super Chief train which ran between Los Angeles, and Chicago. In 1956, the Santa Fe Railroad rebuilt the Vista Canyon into a flat-ended car that could be used mid train on combined trains. In order to run this car on contemporary trains, the owners of the Vista Canyon added a small kitchen next to the vestibule, in the location of the bedroom. (Pullman and the Santa Fe had an unusual arrangement where Pullman was prohibited from selling food on the their trains, so the car was intentionally built without a buffet kitchen.)
As the day wore on, the schedule got increasingly later, but the sights along the route (some of the nicest to be seen from an Amtrak Train) made the trip enjoyable. With Greg back in Minnesota for a few days, Jerry served as both Chef d’ train, and porter for the day. Lunch was paninni with proscutto and Brie, and dinner, which was one of those extra meals that railroad chefs have to roll out sometimes, featured turkey chili. We finally arrived in Portland shortly after Midnight. The Starlight occupied the track in the station across from the Trains Unlimited special train, and more than a dozen private cars. Unfortunately, Meg and I were too tired to get out and walk the train. Getting a ride from Washington, DC chapter member Mike Crockett in his rental car, we quickly transferred to the hotel and were in bed in a matter of minutes. There was lots more train riding in the plans for tomorrow.
Tuesday 7-5
We tore out of bed at 6:30 am to catch the bus to Astoria so we could ride the RDC back. Astoria is a small, gray village at the mouth of the Columbia River about three hours downstream from Portland. While there, we rode the local form of transportation, a former San Antonio trolley car that runs along the waterfront for a few miles on the former railroad mainline. The line doesn’t use overhead trolley wire–the trolley draws it’s electrical power from a generator mounted on a
trailer, which gets towed behind. For the afternoon trip back to Portland, we rode on the Lewis and Clark Explorer RDC Budd cars, a set of three self-propelled diesel cars of late 1950s vintage, that the Oregon Department of Transportation purchased used from the government of British Columbia. This made for a fun trip. Meg and I rode much of the way in the rear vestibule taking pictures and chatting with fellow railfans. In the evening, we rode the Portland TriMet light rail
into the downtown Portland area (the “fareless zone” as they call it because it’s a free ride) and had dinner at Jake’s Famous Crawfish. We strongly recommend Jake’s.
Wednesday 7-6
We picked up a rental car in the morning a nearby Hertz rental and did some touring around. We did laundry, and did some provisions shopping for the Dover Harbor. Later we drove down to the Sellwood district to visit a cluster of antique stores. In the evening, we met up with Jim Lilly, and went back to Jake’s.
Thursday 7-7
We got out of the hotel late–the news about the bombings in London was playing on all the television stations in the morning, and we stayed in our room to see some of the story. We travel extensively by train, and naturally, stories about attacks on trains interests both of us a lot. Sometimes we think about how difficult it is to make any public system completely safe from bombs and biological attacks. We don’t believe that any public place can be made risk free, and we are content to take our chances in a free nation. In the height of WWII, when London was being bombed by Nazis nightly, Churchill asked Londoners to “go to the theaters”, and show defiance in the face of an adversary that sought to diminish their way of life. The railwaymen and women did there best back then to keep the train and trolley lines running, so the Londoners could ride them. Today, the railwaymen and women of London must face this new challenge with the same spirit.
Took off in the rental car for Hillsboro and North Plains and did some serious antique shopping. In Hillsboro, we purchased a baggage rack that may have come out of a Pullman bedroom. Now to figure out how to get it home. In North Plains, we visited a pub run by the Rogue Brewery–it was surprisingly reminiscent of various biker-oriented, blues-and-barbecue honky-tonks of my youth, and Meg didn’t care for it, but it had a great assortment of beers on draft. I should comment here about the auto traffic around Portland–very few roads have speed limits over 40 mph, and that’s pretty much the speed that people drive, even on the highways. Taking the LRV to Hillsboro would have been much quicker. Later on that day, we parked the car back at the hotel and took the light rail back into town. We rode the system as far west as Beverton, and rode back and caught the city streetcar to ride out to Jake’s Seafood again for dinner. After a light dinner, we finished riding the entire downtown streetcar system.
The City Streetcar system is a separate system from the Tri-Met light rail, and uses lightweight, and relatively inexpensive trolleys built in Czechoslovakia by Skoda. As their cars are light, the city was able to install tracks in the streets using a new cast-in-place track installation system. The system is truly a streetcar operation–most of the cars run slowly mixed in automobile traffic. After an evening of trolley-riding, Meg and I rode back to the hotel around 10:00 pm, and met Philadelphia Chapter NRHS member Les Dean as we walked back to the hotel (Les had been on our LRV car from downtown, but we had missed seeing him).
Friday 7-8
We had breakfast in our hotel room, met up with Jim Lilly and got a Dover Harbor door key from him, and drove our treasures to the car. We also packed our boxes of clothing and antique finds, and took them to the post office. We had lunch at Jakes (again), and went for our final car trip to Gresham to see the other end of the light rail line by car. Afterward we returned the rental car, chatted with Courtney Shenkle and his wife, and Paul Barnes in the hotel lobby for a while, and then took one final ride and walk around Downtown Portland. This was our only rainy day of the entire trip.
In the evening, we rode out the airport to catch our JetBlue overnight flight back east. JetBlue is a great source of one-way tickets for railfans with limited vacation time, and their “seat pitch” (the distance between the seats) is fairly generous. Meg and I did a little sleeping on the plane, but overall the flight is less than 5 hours. We arrived tired at JFK in New York City, where my parents met us and drove us home to Pennsylvania. Meg and I napped as my Dad drove. It was great to be going home.