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It's Not Just a Train Trip, It's a
State of Mind
You
haven't really ridden the rails
until you've ridden with the train-iacs
known as "foamers".
“Man, did you see that wigwag back
there? You don’t see many of those
anymore.”
“And before that, three SW8s on a
local….”
“And those EMD switchers…”
“Did UP build that shell or…”
“Gaviota’s at 339.5, right?”
I
catch snippets of this conversation
between four casually dressed early
middle-aged men. The talk is lively,
spirited, friendly – and completely
incomprehensible. That’s because
it’s in the coded language of those
who live and breathe railroads. They
call themselves “railfans,” but just
about everyone else calls them
“foamers” – as in foam at the mouth
– a moniker that some of them
embrace with humor while others
consider an insult. Whatever they’re
called, these railroad enthusiasts
have elevated a staid and somewhat
nerdy hobby to a grand and
all-consuming obsession.
These four men are in foamer heaven
right now, and I’m with them. We are
aboard a special excursion train
wending its way up the California
coast on a lovely late spring
afternoon, traveling in a style long
gone, a style most of us have never
experienced. I am not now nor have I
ever been a foamer, but I do love
trains, and I have always regretted
that I was born too late to enjoy
any part of the long heyday
(1880s-1950s) of long-distance rail
travel. It was on a Los
Angeles-to-Seattle train trip last
year that I encountered my first
foamer, an earnest young man who
bored me silly with railroad trivia
and engineering statistics but also
told me about an upcoming rail
excursion – this one. It sounded
wonderful.
For the next two days, the
eighty-five of us who have signed on
for this L.A. to Oakland round trip
will have the run of three lovingly
restored vintage passenger cars: a
1948 Vistadome, a 1927 lounge
observation car and a 1941 Pony
Express car. The cars, by special
arrangement, are attached to the
Coast Starlight, Amtrak’s daily Los
Angeles to Seattle run.
Our trip is billed as a “rail
cruise,” which, like an ocean
cruise, is designed to be a travel
experience dedicated to the journey
rather than the destination. In the
west, land of extraordinary vistas
and wide-open spaces, rail cruises
and private excursion trains are an
increasingly popular close-to-home
adventure for those looking to both
enjoy the landscape they normally
fly over and experience the romance
of train travel. The trip I am on,
the Pacific Coast Limited, will be
offered, with some variations, twice
this fall, Oct 3-24 and Nov 5-7.
These rail cruises are the
brainchild of Todd Clark, founder
and webmaster of
trainorders.com, one
of the top foamer sites on the
internet, and most of those onboard
are, like Todd, card-carrying (or,
in this case, railroad
insignia-wearing) foamers. Many are
Californians, but others have come
from as far away as Ohio, New
Jersey, Tennessee – and even New
Zealand – for the experience. The
trip is therefore not just an
excursion along what is arguably one
of the most scenic stretches of
railroad tracks in the country, not
just a trip back in time to when
railroad travel was elegant and
refined, but a light romp through
the psyches of those obsessed by
trains.
The trip begins, fittingly, at one
of the most impressive passenger
train stations in the country - Los
Angeles’ Union Station, a quirky
blend of Spanish, Moroccan and Art
Deco architecture noteworthy for its
palatial cork-walled (to muffle
sound) waiting room and lovely
outdoor gardens. First opened to
travelers in 1939, it was the last
of the grand-scale train stations to
be built in America. Today it is the
nation’s sixth busiest, but that’s
because of commuter , not
long-distance, trains. Long-distance
trains still exist, but their
lustrous golden age ended when first
automobiles and then airplanes
usurped their position. This trip
helps recapture those bygone days.
We
depart on time, 10:15 a.m., and as
the train slowly makes its way
through the urban landscape,
skirting the concrete-lined Los
Angeles River, I take a tour of our
three antique cars. At the rear of
the train is the Los Angeles, a
luxury car built by the famous
Pullman Company in 1927. It is
elegant and posh, designed as a
Gilded Age hotel on rails. It has
two first-class bedrooms with
private baths, a secretary’s room (a
necessity for the movie moguls and
business magnates who regularly
booked passage in this car), a crew
room to house the car’s own porter
and chef, a tiny, self-contained
galley, a formal dining room with
built-in breakfront and crystal
chandelier, an elegant salon with
overstuffed armchairs, and a large
observation platform.
Three-quarters of a century ago,
political candidates might have
given speeches from this platform.
Today it is packed with foamers,
including a former physics professor
from Massachusetts who flew
cross-country just make this trip; a
hip, young Berkeley grad who took a
job he didn’t like when he
discovered that his place of work
was only 50 feet from the Southern
Pacific Railroad track (he watches
trains all day) and a man with a
congenital liver disease who spent
months planning this trip and
coordinating his health benefits. He
will need to be dialysized
immediately when we get to our
destination.
The next car is the Silver Lariat, a
stainless steel, bubble-topped glass
Vistadome built in 1948 for the
original California Zephyr, the
Oakland-to-Chicago passenger train.
It took the current owner of this
car, Bert Hermy, five years to
rebuild and refurbish it, from its
understated gray wool carpet and
burgundy upholstery to the
special-order anti-massacars draped
over the backs of the comfortable
coach seats. This is how families
used to travel. The car is quiet.
The seats are wide, the windows
expansive. It is easy to imagine Mr.
and Mrs. Anderson, Bud and Princess
and Kitten -- you know, the “Father
Knows Best” family -- riding along
with big, satisfied 1950s grins on
their faces.
Up
a small flight of stairs is the dome
with seating for twenty-four
passengers and an unobstructed
180-degree vista. Up here I find a
man who tells me he moved to
Tehachapi, some ninety miles north
of L.A., for one reason only: Forty
freight trains go through that town
every day. So far he has taken
25,000 slides of their comings and
goings. Also up in the dome are two
long-time traveling buddies. They
proudly admit to be suffering from “railpox,”
the disease for which they hope
there is no cure. “We all have
one-track minds,” one of them quips.
“Girlfriends come, and girlfriends
go,” the other philosophizes, “but
the railroad remains.”
The third car is the Pony Express,
one of the most unique passenger
cars in service anywhere in North
America. Originally built in 1941 as
a transport car for the Canadian
Mounted Police, it has been
completely refurbished into an
open-air party car. The four big
cargo doors that once allowed entry
to horses now remain open (with
protective railings) to give riders
a wind-whipping-through-the-hair
experience. The interior of the car
has been redone in ash paneling that
replicates a 1872 coach car. Along
one side is a carved oak bar rescued
from some turn-of-the century
establishment. The floor is parquet.
If these three cars never moved an
inch, this would still be an
adventure worth having.
But we are moving, and I know
exactly how fast – 49.3 miles an
hour – because the Pony Express is
equipped with a thoroughly modern
GPS system, and next to me, one of
the foamiest foamers onboard, a
self-described technogeek named
Derek Law, is keeping tabs on
everything. He alternately plots the
exact location (and speed) of our
train on his laptop, leans out the
cargo doors to take 8 megapixel
digital photos, rushes back to the
computer to download them and then,
with a flurry of mouse clicks, posts
the photos he just took on the
trainorders.com website for the
edification of those foamers
unfortunate enough not to be
traveling with us today.
I
stand by the open cargo doors and
watch as the Glendale station, a
pearl pink Spanish Colonial Revival
gem of a building, goes by, then the
burnt hills of Simi Valley, then
Oxnard and finally, at noon, the
Pacific. The sun is glinting off the
ocean; the air is cool and fresh.
The surfers are out. It’s time for
lunch.
Donnalee Clark, a former student of
the culinary arts, a professional
cake decorator and trip organizer
Todd Clark’s wife, is in charge of
the food. This trip she has the
assistance of Shaun Murphy, one of
three fulltime private railcar chefs
in the country. Those who have
sampled train food any time during
the past twenty years know that
onboard cuisine ranges from inedible
to on par with economy class airline
food. This is different. Working
shoulder to shoulder in the
six-by-eight foot galley tucked
beneath the Silver Lariat’s dome,
the women have put together a casual
buffet lunch that could be ordinary
but isn’t. The deli sandwiches are
made with Boarshead meats on artisan
bread. The tomato slices have both
color and, miraculously, taste. The
potato salad is homemade, tangy and
substantial. The fruit just came
onboard at our last stop, fresh
Santa Clara River Valley oranges.
After a full morning of watching the
world go by, everyone is starving.
Lunch is set out on the big oak bar
in the Pony Express. I grab a plate
and take it one of the tables set up
at the rear of the car.
The train is now barreling along the
coast into Santa Barbara, and the
open-air car smells of eucalyptus
and escallonia and sea air. The
jacaranda trees are in bloom, a
brilliant purple. The bougainvilleas
are scarlet red, the poppies bright
orange, the sky a cloudless blue.
The sensory experience is vivid and
immediate, like riding on a
motorcycle or in a convertible with
the top down. Only on the train,
everything is taken care of: no
checking the gas gauge, no wondering
where the next pit stop will be, no
worrying about speeding tickets, no
weird drivers, no bad road food.
This is a safe haven, a
self-contained world, a long moment
outside of time. The track noise is
loud and hypnotic. You could stand
by the open doors all day in a
meditative trance. Even some of the
foamers have stopped taking pictures
and started just enjoying the
moment.
That is, until the train suddenly
comes to a halt. There’s nothing
unusual in this. The Coast
Starlight, the train that’s hauling
our three cars, makes frequent,
unplanned and sometimes lengthy
stops, mostly to let freights go by.
The train has such a sketchy on-time
record that it’s affectionately
known, among foamers and other
knowledgeable travelers, as the
Coast StarLATE.
But no one is watching the clock on
our excursion. In fact, the later
the better. It just means more time
to enjoy the onboard experience. But
there’s no freight this time, and
the two dozen foamers in the Pony
Express want to know exactly why
we’ve stopped. They pull out their
Radioshack scanners – standard
foamer equipment along with mini-DV
cams, high-resolution digital
cameras and California Regional
Timetables, the foamer bible that
details every stretch of track, mile
post by mile post – and listen
intently as the engineers and
conductors talk to each other.
Apparently, one of the infrared
sensors embedded in the track has
detected a defect in one of the
axles. This is exciting stuff. Which
axle? Which car? What kind of
defect? The foamers discuss this
with the labored intensity of a
group of physicians conferring over
a particularly tricky case. Opinions
are proffered; arguments presented.
Two foamers climb over the railing
in front of the cargo door and walk
the line looking for the problem.
The others keep to their scanners.
Long, deliciously tense moments go
by.
Then we hear on the scanner that the
problem has been identified: It
turns out to be an air hose that
somehow got disconnected. Several of
the foamers congratulate each other
for having figured this out before
the Amtrak conductors did.
We
are in motion again, about seventy
miles north of Santa Barbara on a
spectacular 42-mile stretch of track
that hugs the Pacific. This is
coastline you cannot see from a car
because we are traveling through
Vandenberg Air Force Base, and there
is no public road here. I go to the
Lariat and climb to a seat in the
dome where I can have an
unobstructed view. Everyone up here
has a camera pointed out the window.
The ocean, flat and calm, stretches
to the horizon in bands of purple,
aquamarine, cobalt and indigo. The
shore is undeveloped, deserted.
Seabirds float on updrafts. I sit
transfixed for more than an hour. I
cannot remember the last time I have
allowed myself to sit quietly like
this. I think of the root of the
word vacation, from the Latin
vacare, to be empty, to be free.
North of Pismo Beach we turn away
from the coastline, make a quick
stop at San Luis Obispo and then
start climbing. The track ascends
over a hump of the Coast Range,
gaining more than 1000 feet in
eleven miles. We are traveling
between the pleats of deeply
corrugated hills. We are traveling
between pillowy pale green knolls
dotted with live oak and eucalyptus.
“This is my idea of paradise,” the
foamer next to me says. I think he
means the landscape. But he doesn’t.
He means the railroad’s famed Cuesta
Grande, the two sweeping horseshoe
curves we are now snaking around.
Our train doubles back on itself so
we can see the two engines that have
been pulling us – the serial numbers
of which are duly noted by every
foamer onboard. Train trivia aside,
it is an impressive sight.
Through the shank of the afternoon
we follow the Salinas River north
through the valley of the same name,
past endless acres of orderly
vineyards and vast stretches of
geometric farmland planted in
lettuce, cabbage, green onions,
strawberries and artichokes. It’s
enough to make one hungry – that and
the fragrance of sautéed garlic and
onions that has wafted its way up
into the dome.
Directly below in the galley, legs
firmly planted as the train hits 70
mph, Donnalee and Shaun are working
furiously and harmoniously on
dinner. They mandoline zucchini and
summer squash, chop rosemary, toss
fingerling potatoes with roasted
garlic, brush home-made foccacia
with good olive oil. In an even
smaller galley in the Los Angeles, a
significant prime rib has been
roasting for much of the afternoon.
Donnalee, who is Italian, is also
making a meatless entrée, her
home-made ziti with the family
recipe marinara sauce. There’s a
simple salad of organic mesclun
greens and tiny pearl tomatoes.
Back in railroad’s golden age,
uniformed waiters served elegant
repasts like Escallops of Veal
Piquante and Lobster Americain
(think flaming cognac) on fine
china. The tables were covered in
damask cloths. The diners were
dressed in evening clothes. This
experience is quite different, but
it is still an occasion. Shaun and
Donnalee, direct from the galley,
exhausted but still, miraculously,
of good cheer, stand behind the big
oak bar in the Pony Express and dish
out the meal. Eighty-five meals. We
all file by, swaying gently side to
side, our train legs under us, and
get our plates filled – and I mean
filled. Then we find seats at the
small tables set up in the rear of
the car or back in the Lariat or the
Los Angeles.
The meal is simple, fresh, homemade
and wonderful. It’s the kind of food
you get at someone’s house when that
someone really knows how to cook.
The desert is even better, a choice
of a surprisingly light chocolate
raspberry ganache or fresh
strawberries over a rich, sour cream
pound cake. For purely journalistic
purposes, I have helpings of both.
The foamers have turned off their
scanners, closed up their laptops,
stored their cameras and are
seriously chowing down. The table
talk is, of course, all railroad,
and to an interested neophyte like
me – there are perhaps a dozen of us
non-foamers on board – it is
alternately obscure and fascinating.
I
learn railroad slang: a wigwag is an
old swing signal; a hogger is an
engineer, and a piglet is an
engineer in training. We are
traveling on private varnish
(private passenger cars) past a hump
yard (where railroad cars are added
onto trains). None of us are
crumb-jumpers (those who hang around
the station looking for a free
lunch), but I’m betting a few of us
are members of the Clickity-Clack
Club (the Mile High Club on rails).
I
learn that foamers, given their
singular obsession, are, in fact,
quite a diverse group. Some are
interested only in locomotives. Some
specialize in signals, others in
tunnels or trestles. Some love
freights; others are partial to
passenger trains. Some pledge their
allegiance to the Southern Pacific,
others to Burlington Northern. Most
are history buffs, but there are
those who are interested solely in
the mechanics. A significant
sub-group are model railroad
enthusiasts – men who still play
with their Lionel train sets.
Whatever their interests, foamers
are fanatics about recording their
experiences. Those onboard this
train, I learn, have taken a total
of 5000 digital photos during the
past ten hours.
The evening wears on, but the mood
is as buoyant as it was when we
boarded in L.A. It’s the combination
of onboard camaraderie, spectacular
scenery and good food. But it is
also the pleasing ambience of the
excursion, a nice mix of the
professional and the personal. The
trip is well-run, but it’s not
slick. You feel taken care of, but
not handled. That’s because
underneath the expert organization
and the four-color brochures, this
is essentially a family affair. Todd
Clark, the trip’s creator, is a
hands-on guy who oversees,
troubleshoots and schmoozes nonstop.
He also helps serve meals and bus
tables. In the galley is Donnalee.
Mario, Donnalee’s father, is also
onboard and pitches in where needed.
The seven-member crew who work to
keep coffee pots full, snacks
available, garbage collected, and
questions answered, all friends of
Todd, are not so much employees as
they are foamers enjoying a free
trip in exchange for light duties.
When the train pulls into Oakland’s
Jack London Square a few minutes
after 10 p.m. (we are a little more
than an hour late, which, in Coast
Starlight terms, is very much on
time), I am in no hurry to debark. I
don’t want to break the spell woven
by these long lovely hours in limbo,
a day spent traveling 478.5 rail
miles (by foamer account) the way
people used to travel when the
railroad was king.
The crew takes care of the luggage
as Todd hustles us on to waiting
busses for a quick trip to Woodfin
Suites in Emeryville. There we will
stay the night in comfortable,
spacious accommodations, breakfast
included, until, with great
eagerness, as if we were embarking
on an entirely new adventure, we
board the train the next morning for
the journey back to L.A.
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