Traveling Outside of Time

Joseph, a burly ex-Marine, is munching peanuts and gazing out the big domed windows of the Pacific Parlour Car. We are traveling on the Coast Starlight, the train that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle, a 1,389-mile trek that is arguably the most beautiful stretch of railroad in the country. I met Joseph only a few hours ago, but already I know more about him than I do about some of my closest friends. I know about his dying mother, his sister’s disappearing husbands, the writing contest he once won, the six months he spent living out of his truck and his nonexistent sperm count. This is the odd and completely wonderful dynamic that occurs on long-distance trains. People who would never meet in “real life”--like Joseph and me--form brief but intense connections when they are in limbo, when they relax into that timeless stretch between here and there.

It is after dinner on the second evening of the trip. The train sidles along the Columbia River, passing through the rich river-bottom farmland north of Portland, Ore., and makes its way north to hug Puget Sound. This journey is supposed to take 35 hours, but because of a prolonged delay--typical for this train, which has earned the nickname the Coast Starlate--we have been on board close to 35 hours already and are still several hours from our destination.

Joseph starts laughing.

“You know,” he says, “someone could take off from LAX right now and still beat us to Seattle.” We are both quiet for a moment, munching our peanuts. I smile and shake my head. He looks over at me. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” he says, although I have not said anything. “I feel sorry for them too.”

In an era when every other form of long-distance transportation--by air, car or bus--is fraught with tension and aggravation, Joseph’s remark speaks to a secret that Amtrak rediscovered with the Coast Starlight: It’s not about when you arrive. It’s about how you get there. And what was true in the 1990s, when a visionary Amtrak executive named Brian Rosenwald reinvented the Coast Starlight, is even truer now as security crackdowns are transforming air travel into an often tedious, time-consuming and unpleasant experience.

For passengers on the new Coast Starlight, there were no long lines or cramped seats, no crowded highways or bad road food. Instead, those who rode it found leisurely gourmet meals, roomy armchairs and, for first-class passengers, comfortable beds. They loved it, and they flocked to first-class accommodations in record numbers. In a few years, the Coast Starlight became a model of long-distance train travel.

Or maybe not. As often happens in large organizations, especially those with government oversight, one man’s singular vision has a way of being blurred over time. As rewarding as Rosenwald’s innovations have been for passengers and as financially rewarding as they have been for Amtrak, the Coast Starlight is losing some of its luster these days. It’s still a remarkable journey, but Rosenwald no longer oversees the line. Whether the Starlight continues to flourish is a question that may determine the future of long-distance trains in the U.S.

The Coast Starlight was known in Amtrak circles as “Brian’s Train.” That’s how closely he was associated with this route, how influential his leadership was, how well he knew the train and everyone who worked it, from the coach car attendants to the galley cooks to the engineers to ticket clerks in stations along the way. In the mid-’90s, a period which he now considers the high-water mark of his three-decade Amtrak career, Rosenwald was general manager of the Coast Starlight. During his nearly five years on the job, he traveled the train more than 200 times, and he has almost as many tales to tell.

His favorite begins with a truck full of mushrooms that wrapped around the locomotive of the northbound Coast Starlight on New Year’s Eve 1998. The train--jammed with passengers making their way to celebrations in Portland and Seattle--was stuck between Salinas and San Jose for nine hours while a crane extricated the locomotive from the mess, and then another six hours for repairs.

This doesn’t sound like a story a general manager would want to tell about his train, but Rosenwald delights in it. When he got the distress call at his L.A. office, his first thought was of the hundreds of passengers who were not going to make it to their destinations in time to mark the new year. He dropped everything, jumped on a plane to Sacramento, then caught a turboprop to Klamath Falls, Ore., where he arrived two hours before the now 15-hour-late train was due in the station.

He corralled the Klamath Falls ticket clerk, and together, borrowing cash from the train station till, they headed for the local grocery store, where they bought out the entire stock of champagne and every party hat, party favor and small gift they could find. When the train finally arrived, Rosenwald boarded and, with the charm and verve that are his hallmarks, proceeded to orchestrate an off-the-cuff New Year’s Eve party for 320 guests. It was, he says, an affair to remember.

A voluble and animated man in his early 50s, Rosenwald looks a little like Gene Wilder, with his now-thinning but once-wild curly hair, mischievous grin and boyish high energy. He is a man with a direct gaze, a ready laugh and lots and lots of ideas. Sitting in his L.A. office at Amtrak West in 1995, Rosenwald realized he had a chance to create a train based on childhood memories of riding the great American passenger lines of the late 1950s and early ‘60s--the Santa Fe Chief and El Capitan--from his home in Chicago to visit his extended family in Albuquerque. Train travel, he remembered, was more than a way to get from point A to point B. A train trip should be a wonderful, memorable experience, the kind you told others about, the kind of experience you wanted to repeat.

Rosenwald was in the right place at the right time. He was in charge of a spectacularly beautiful route that served four great cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. And he had a boss, Gil Mallery, then-president of Amtrak West, who said those three little words one rarely hears from bosses, especially those in phlegmatic government agencies: Go for it.

So Rosenwald did. He re-imagined the Coast Starlight and initiated a series of dramatic upgrades, from regional specialties in the dining car to distinguished local wines (uncorked and poured, not the screw-top splits that were standard elsewhere on Amtrak) to live entertainment to fresh flowers and souvenir appreciation gifts in sleeping car bedrooms.

His greatest innovation was the Pacific Parlour Car, a separate upscale, bi-level lounge for first-class passengers. This is where Joseph and I whiled away the hours eating peanuts, watching the scenery and pitying the people who traveled by plane. Rosenwald had found several vintage 1950s Santa Fe Railway lounge cars, possibly the same as he had traveled in as a kid, and had spent more than $3 million refurbishing them. The new Pacific Parlour Cars featured upstairs lounges with mahogany-paneled walls, glass sconces, domed viewing windows, swivel armchairs, couches, banquettes and full bars, and downstairs cinemas with big-screen TVs and classic movie theater seating for 19.

The cars were an immediate success. There was--and is--nothing like them on any other train in the system. When Rosenwald added a complimentary breakfast buffet and a mid-afternoon wine tasting, first-class ridership on the Coast Starlight jumped 77%, and first-class revenue rose from $6.5 million in 1994 to $15.9 million in 2001. Passengers were getting what Rosenwald called a “land cruise experience,” and they were loving it.

But Rosenwald was swimming upstream.

The National Railroad Passenger Corp. (Amtrak’s official name) had been limping along since its inception in 1971 and seemed to face annual insolvency. For three decades no one had wanted to face the truth that, regardless of the success of any one train, the business of moving people requires significant public subsidies. Amtrak has never been self-supporting, let alone profitable. In fact, no national rail passenger system in the world is profitable. All depend on the largess of their governments.

The U.S. government has been particularly stingy. During the past two decades, as federal support for the national highway system doubled and funds for aviation nearly tripled, Amtrak’s appropriations were slashed by one-third. This fiscal year, Amtrak’s new president, David Gunn, was able to squeeze $1.2 billion out of Congress for his budget. Still, the U.S. passenger rail system remains among the least subsidized in the world.

Tension between corporate cost-cutters and what Rosenwald calls the “amenities people” had always been intense, and Rosenwald’s innovations worsened it. He argued that amenities, which more than paid for themselves from higher revenues, made the experience enchanting, and that cutting them, even in tough financial times, was shortsighted. But cost-cutters thought Rosenwald was squandering resources. Managers of other routes, jealous of his success, were grumbling.

Soon Amtrak’s hand-to-mouth existence, with its attendant bare-bones budgeting, undercut Rosenwald’s efforts. Then, in spring 2000, he was offered a chance to supervise passenger services for three of Amtrak’s long-distance trains out of Chicago, now part of the Central Division. Shortly after, it became harder for anyone to innovate anywhere. That’s because, in yet another string of cost-cutting moves meant to inch Amtrak toward self-sufficiency, the corporation reorganized. Its new geographic divisions took away “ownership” of any single train from any single group of people. The Coast Starlight, for example, is now under the supervision of both the Southwest Division (L.A. to San Luis Obispo) and the Pacific Division (north of San Luis Obispo). It’s not “Brian’s train” anymore. It’s not anybody’s train.

My trip to Seattle came last November, beginning on one of those bright, balmy days that makes everyone remember why they live in L.A. I sit in the Pacific Parlour Car of the northbound Coast Starlight sipping a cup of herbal tea as we leave Union Station. I’ve stowed my luggage in compartment C, a deluxe sleeper two cars forward, a private 7-by-6 1/2-foot room with a 5-foot-long picture window.

Along one side of the compartment is a couch that opens into a twin bed. (There’s a pull-down berth above to accommodate a second traveler.) The couch faces a comfortable armchair. Between them is a small table with a bouquet of fresh flowers. An airline would pack six to nine coach passengers in the space that is mine alone for the next day and a half.

Two hours out of L.A., with Santa Barbara up ahead, the scenery is all tall palms and pink stucco houses. Beyond the manicured backyards, each with its own swimming pool, lies the Pacific, smooth and pewter gray under suddenly stormy skies. Inside, lunch is being served from a menu that includes quiche Lorraine, jambalaya, a roast beef and Muenster sandwich, grilled chicken, and a salad of field greens, tomato, hard-boiled egg, olive tapenade and white asparagus spears topped with a piece of dill-seasoned salmon.

Rosenwald understood many things about long-distance train travel, not the least of which was the importance of the meal. His tonier innovations for the Coast Starlight included the Winemaker Lunch and Winemaker Dinner, with California and Oregon vintners invited to talk about their wines, conduct tastings and, with guest chefs, orchestrate special meals. Rosenwald, himself a card-carrying oenophile, arranged more than a dozen of these, meeting with predictably excellent response. But the logistics of scheduling turned out to be too tough and time-consuming.

More successful was his plan to change the dining car menu into a series of regional specialties highlighting California cuisine and Northwest seafood. One of the great moments of Rosenwald’s tenure with the Coast Starlight was when Saveur magazine, in its 100 “favorite things from the world of food and drink,” listed the Coast Starlight. The meal described, Rosenwald fondly remembers, was halibut in a pesto crust.

“Brian was one smart cat,” Willie Bryant tells me. “He had this train smokin’.” Willie is the onboard chef, although he prefers the humbler title of “cook.” An engaging man who could give Denzel a run for his money in the looks department, he has been a cook all of his adult life and an Amtrak cook for more than 10 years. He and his crew prepare some of the food from scratch, such as the salads and breakfast egg dishes. But most of the lunch and dinner entrees come to him flash-frozen and vacuum-packed from Amtrak’s L.A. commissary. The quality is better than you would expect, although nothing like the unique meals on Brian’s train of yore. Rosenwald’s regional menus were discontinued in early 2002, when yet more cost-cutting measures took effect.

The Coast Starlight itself was doing fine. It had the highest ridership of any long-distance train in the system. The costs of operating the entire national railroad enterprise are spread across the system, however, which means that even though Rosenwald had made a success of the Starlight, the train could not reap the rewards.

During the ensuing dark period that followed the 2002 cuts, all Amtrak trains served the same menu, a situation remedied when an Amtrak exec found himself traveling for 12 days on three separate trains and eating from the same limited menu every night. Now the trains operate on four cycles, with four different groups of entrees split across the national system.

Later in the afternoon, as the train snakes inland south of San Luis Obispo through the tawny hills of Paso Robles, Jose, the car attendant, announces the afternoon wine tasting, another of Rosenwald’s brainstorms. Jose is not an expert--he’s reading remarks provided by the wine sales staff who have contracted with Amtrak--but the script is a good one, with knowing phrases such as “hint of blackberry” and “soft finish.” As Jose walks through the car, pouring generous tastes (more like half glasses) he also hawks the wine. Rosenwald’s idea was that the cost of the daily afternoon tastings would be offset by purchases of wine on board. The wine is moderately priced, $12 to $14 a bottle, and there are a number of takers.

This daily event outlived both budget-slashing and Rosenwald’s tenure with the Coast Starlight. In its not-so-distant heyday, the Coast Starlight featured live entertainment with musicians, comics and magicians roaming the train. There were live concerts in the Pacific Parlour Car, jazz as the train pulled into Monterey Bay, classical guitar as the sun set on the Pacific. And, for one brief and shining moment, there were onboard massages.

This afternoon, there’s a lively bunch in the Pacific Parlour Car, a room full of strangers who, at this moment, have nowhere to be but here, nothing to do but sip wine, look out the window and chat. This is the heart of the rail experience.

Across from me, a San Diego insurance salesman is in deep conversation with a burly guy who sports a shaved head, trim goatee and full-arm tattoos. At one of the banquettes, a Danny DeVito look-alike with a thick Russian accent talks with a big bruiser of an Australian who is in the U.S. for the first time, traveling the country by rail--not so much to see the scenery, he says, but to meet people. Sitting next to me is a strapping young woman who appears to be wearing pajamas. She tells me that she is a gofer for a trucking magnate, then confides sotto voce that they are sharing a sleeping compartment. From her I get gossip: Drew Barrymore is on this train, holed up in the next car. I would be more impressed if Willie the cook had not already told me that the Dalai Lama recently took the Coast Starlight, bringing with him a private chef and a cadre of armed bodyguards.

Somewhere outside Salinas, storm clouds part to reveal an almost full milk-white moon. I had been hoping that we would outrun this storm and the skies would clear, because tonight is a lunar eclipse. Now I look out the Parlour Car window as the dark gray shadow of the earth drifts across the face of the moon. I haven’t sat like this, in deep and thoughtless meditation, since, well, since I can’t remember. I hear a passenger say the train is on time. I haven’t looked at my watch for hours.

At dinner, the menu offers lamb shanks, T-bone steak, salmon, a chicken dish made with goat cheese and herbs, and a vegetarian pasta. I am seated across from the Crawfords. David is a 60-ish part-time novelist, part-time designer of pharmaceutical facilities who spent formative years at Berkeley in the early ‘60s. Pamela is a transplanted Canadian with a striking, luminous face that looks as if it were--as Jimmy Stewart said of Katharine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story”--”lit from within.”

They are traveling to Seattle on their way to a three-day stay at a B&B; on Vancouver Island. It’s a trip they had planned for spring, but a few weeks ago an oncologist told Pamela that she had a rare form of lung cancer that had already metastasized to her brain. He gave her possibly eight months to live. So that is exactly what she and her husband are doing: living. I watched them an hour ago in the Parlour Car as they took in the eclipse. They were holding hands, their shoulders touching, their faces serene. The train is perfect for them, a metaphor for how they are choosing to live--a long, timeless moment, no past, no future, all present.

Sleeping on the train is a special joy, partly because the train cradles you with its motion, partly because there are no alarm clocks or phones or kids to drive to school in the morning. I tear myself away from the lounge car, where I sit after dinner talking with my new friend Joseph, the ex-Marine.

“I can’t remember ever having talked so much, especially to a stranger,” he says, an hour into our conversation. “I don’t know what’s come over me.”

“The train has come over you,” I say.

Back in my compartment, I fall asleep almost immediately, awakening just in time to see a pre-dawn indigo sky tinged with lemon and a full moon over Mt. Shasta. As I lie in bed with the curtains pulled back watching the day begin, the train cuts east above Dunsmuir to cross into Oregon, where big purple rain clouds lumber in.

Then I do something that seems deliciously sinful: I lock myself in my private cubicle and take a shower as the train chugs along at 30 mph. The water is hot, the pressure is strong and all the towels are above average. It doesn’t get much better than this.

It’s late morning, and i am talking with Jerry Griffo, an Amtrak operations supervisor who sometimes rides this train. He’s in his mid-50s, with a thatch of silvery-gray hair, a neat mustache and one of those lively, always-in-motion faces that is not a middle-aged man’s face or a supervisor’s face but an aging kid’s face, with its sense of adventure and mischief. Griffo signed on as a car attendant with Amtrak 25 years ago and has been on the tracks ever since. He has spent most of the trip chatting up passengers, making witty announcements on the P.A. and generally spreading good cheer. He doesn’t have Brian Rosenwald’s clout or independence, but Griffo does share his ex-boss’ sensibilities.

We are sitting at the crew table in the back of the now-deserted dining car, where he is telling me about his plan to renovate the Coast Starlight’s Kiddie Cars, another of Rosenwald’s brilliant innovations. The Kiddie Car is a coach-baggage car in which the lower level, where baggage used to be stored, has been converted into a kids’ playroom. There’s carpet, a picnic table, toys and games, a VCR and TV screen (with a stash of cartoon videos) and benches for parents along the sides. Parents love the car almost as much as the kids do. But the real fans are passengers in coach who no longer have to endure children running wild in the aisles.

The original conversion was done for minimal cost more than seven years ago, and the cars have had hard wear in the interim. Amid Amtrak’s austere budget and perennial financial uncertainty, Griffo found money to re-carpet, paint and restock the toy bins. Rosenwald’s torch has made it into the right hands.

As Griffo talks, the train slows and stops. We had been on time as we pulled out of Klamath Falls earlier that morning, 22 hours into the northward journey. But now, about two hours from Eugene, our luck has run out. There’s a freight train a half mile ahead without the horsepower to make it up a hill. An extra engine is going to have to travel from Klamath Falls, connect to the freight and pull it onto a siding so we can pass. This will delay us for maybe an hour and a half.

No one seems particularly upset. It’s not as if we’re stuck in a cramped airplane cabin breathing stale air and staring at the tarmac. The train has stopped in a beautiful spot, the tracks cutting through a thick Douglas fir forest dotted with blazing red vine maple. It also helps that Jose keeps the Bloody Marys coming.

In the cab of the locomotive, the Starlight’s two engineers now have some unwanted free time. I’m a little disappointed to note that they don’t wear overalls, or steel-toed engineer boots, or those nifty blue-and-white-striped cloth hats. But at least they have nicknames: Porkchop and Butterball. Both men are philosophical about the delay. The problem is not simply the disabled freight but that most of this route is single track, meaning two trains can’t pass each other. Whichever train the Union Pacific dispatcher in Omaha says has to yield must back up to the nearest siding (which can be miles away) and wait for the other train to pass. Union Pacific owns these tracks, not Amtrak, so UP’s real moneymakers, the freight trains, often get the go-ahead. Amtrak’s trains sit and wait. This is one of the main reasons the Coast Starlight is, more often than not, the Coast Starlate.

Porkchop thinks this is no way to run a railroad. Like everyone who works this train, he wants to see the Coast Starlight succeed. And it’s not that he needs to protect his job. He’ll be retiring in a few years. It’s that he loves trains. He thinks travel would be more efficient, and the world perhaps kinder and gentler, if we all took trains.

“What we need here is another track, a dedicated track, a track just for us,” he says. Some stretches of the Starlight’s route are double-tracked, but adding another set of tracks through this portion of the Cascades would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which Amtrak doesn’t have and the federal government doesn’t want to spend. But it would mean that passenger trains could run on time, as they do throughout Europe and Japan, which would mean people would be more apt to travel on them, as they do overseas.

Porkchop doesn’t see that day coming. He talks about a multimillion-dollar freeway widening project and shakes his head. “That’s where the money goes, and that’s why it’s always going to be like this for us--just sitting and waiting for some freight.”

That’s just what we do. We wait for the locomotive to come from Klamath Falls, and then we wait for the disabled freight to be pulled off on a siding, and then we wait for a freight behind us to go through. After more than two hours, Porkchop hits the whistle button, releases the brake system and allows the 960 tons of train cars attached behind us to push the Coast Starlight down a 2% grade as we descend into the Willamette Valley and point our nose north to Seattle.

Brian Rosenwald made the coast Starlight into a great train, the best long-distance train in the Amtrak system. The engineers, Jerry Griffo, Willie the cook--they are all True Believers, all followers of the Gospel According to Brian. They want to preserve what he created. If this train is less luxurious than it was in its heyday, if it has fewer of the amenities Rosenwald imagined, it is still an experience worth savoring: a timeless adventure, a short course in conviviality, an important lesson about making connections in a world often experienced by proxy, a Zen tutorial.

I don’t know if Rosenwald will be able to export his vision to Chicago, where he now oversees the California Zephyr, the Texas Eagle and the Midwest corridor fleet. He’s been consumed with budget cuts since arriving in Chicago. Much of the focus has been on survival, he says, his vision for long-distance trains with upgraded service deferred at least for the near future. But Rosenwald has allies, from congressional supporters to citizen lobbyists to train-obsessed rail fans to those of us weary of air travel and congested highways who have begun or renewed our romance with the rails.

I’m betting on Rosenwald. In fact, I’ve already booked passage on my next land cruise: 2,438 miles from Emeryville to Chicago aboard the California Zephyr.