Word: zephyr
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...coaches are shabby now. The mattresses in her sleeping cars sag and the sheets are threadbare. Resting there in Chicago's ancient, crumbling Union Station, she seems already part of the past. Yet once the California Zephyr lurches to life, hissing and huffing blue smoke, there is a sense of elegance remembered, a time when, as one porter put it, "they built trains for travel and not just transportation...
...Zephyr's cab, Engineer Ray Flaar, 61, 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...
Rumbling through Illinois, over the old steel-truss bridge spanning the Mississippi River, the Cal Zephyr crosses trails once plied by the Pony Express. Onward it races through Iowa and Nebraska. In the 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...
Next morning, after being run through an automatic washing machine in Denver's Union Station,* the Cal Zephyr climbs 4,000 ft. into the Rockies, passing into the first of 46 tunnels cut through the granite walls. In the crystalline mountain air, passengers in the Vista-Dome can see more than 100 miles, from the snow-veined summit of Pikes Peak in the south, to the rugged profile of Longs Peak in the north. Lying far below now, Denver looks like a toy town...
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...