Word: trained
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...shouts above the wild clatter of the rails: "I've made this run so many times I know every crosstie and humpback. But I'll tell you, there is always something new to see." A red pickup truck whirls out of a dusty side road, races the train for a few miles and then, pulling ahead, suddenly swerves over a crossing just 50 yards ahead. "Come fall," Flaar shouts, "when everybody is going down to the grain elevators, you get lots of guys racing you to a crossing." He tugs on the whistle and sounds a series...
...cities, the tracks are rimmed by hulking warehouses, rusting automobile graveyards and smoking garbage dumps. Then, gradually, such signs as ROYAL KNITTING MILLS and BOECKER COAL & GRAIN, SINCE 1898 give way to BEER 10? SHOT 25? and COOP FEED. Suddenly, after a cluster of mobile homes, the train plunges into a great open expanse of farm lands...
Winding ever higher, the Cal Zephyr disappears into the dank blackness of the 6.2-mile Moffat Tunnel, which crosses the Continental Divide at an elevation of 9,239 ft. After the train emerges, H.C. Livingstone lights an after-dinner cigar and remembers aloud how he worked on the tunnel until its completion in 1928. "There were a lot of bad accidents on that job," he recalls. "In the four years it took to finish it, 81 workers were killed...
Happier Man. The train meets the Colorado River and follows it for 238 miles, wending through myriad multihued gorges. At twilight the Cal Zephyr descends into a red desert and then goes highballing across the salt flats of Utah. "I take this train every chance I get," says George Vogel, 45, a budget analyst. "It's my form of relaxation, a chance to get back to myself. I don't have to worry about telephone calls, cutting the grass or crying kids. And when I get home, I'm a happier...
...were strangers a few hundred miles back are now chummily addressing one another by first names. The Cal Zephyr begins its 118-mile run through California's ruggedly beautiful Feather River Canyon. Rushing by waterfalls, thick stands of ponderosa pines and beds of bright orange poppies, the train passes Rich Bar and Oroville, towns that boomed into use in the days of the great gold rush...