Tag: Amtrak

Casmalia, a healing beauty

Just off of the Vandenberg Air Force Base reservation we turned inland and rode through this hidden valley of oaks and sycamores surrounded by rolling green hills. I’d never been through Casmalia, and it looked like a hidden gem.

But this beautiful place has a rough past. It had been a railroad boomtown when the Southern Pacific first came through, then an oil boomtown when the oilfields nearby were still producing. Finally, just over the hill in the background somebody opened a toxic waste dump in 1973 that wound up polluting the groundwater. The EPA shut the dump down and took it over in 1992 as a Superfund site, and the effort to remove some 4.6 billion pounds of toxic waste is still underway.

The town is starting to return to normal, but I can see a time in the future when, the ground water once again clean, more life will come to this beautiful little valley.

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Southern Pacific Caboose

Superseded by advances in technology and railroad management, the noble caboose no longer rides the rails in the United States. Southern Pacific #1886, shown here, has not only been saved from the scrappers by the San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum, who have spruced her up to like-new condition inside and out from the wheels to the chimney.

Riding past this, I added the museum to my bucket list.

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Back to My Happy Place

Car 33, Room A, aboard the Southwest Chief, boarding at Chicago Union Station. Welcome to my favorite vacation spot.

You can have your beaches. You can have your spas. My idea of total relaxation and rejuvenation is a weekend – or a week – in a private sleeper aboard a long-distance train across America.

Amtrak is my happy place.

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Train Dinner

The first time I had dinner on Amtrak, I asked Dan, the car attendant, to bring dinner to my room. I am not normally so precious, but I was traveling alone, feeling a bit like Shreck, and was not yet comfortable with the idea of dining with three strangers (note: I was over it by breakfast.)

I wolfed it, no pun intended. Train travel is hungry work, especially when you go REAL SLOW through the picturesque beach and farm towns filled with tempting diners and taquerias. But, as I have said here before, the food on long-distance Amtrak trains compares favorably to the best airline business- and first-class fare, and even when I wasn’t terribly hungry, I could not resist the temptation at mealtimes.

Note to self: always bring plenty of (healthy, protein-laden) foods on the train to supplement the meals. I did okay this time, but it never hurts to have a little extra boost, even on a trip as short as four hours.

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Box Dinner

Was it a box dinner? Yes – we didn’t have a dining car on the Empire Builder out of Portland until we hooked up with the #8 in Spokane at midnight.

Was it awful? NO! It was phenomenal!

Another score for Amtrak: consistently better food onboard than in any business class menu on any airline I have ever flown.

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Hong Kong Cuisine in Shelby, Montana

In the frigid reaches of northern Montana four years ago I looked out my train window in Northern Montana to behold…a Chinese restaurant! I could not help but smile.

Update: I hear this one has now closed. But don’t fret: Kowloon Restaurant on Main Street in Shelby is open every day but Monday.

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