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the other half working the overnight shift.
The line between Seattle and Portland, Oregon, specifically is the busiest rail corridor in the Pacific Northwest.
At times on Thursday, those passengers got an up-close look at the US Open without paying for a ticket. Playing No 17, a par 3, Jamie Donaldson hit his first putt too hard and watched it roll into a bunker. After blasting out to 6 feet, he faced an important putt to save bogey.
As he looked over a tricky putt, a southbound Amtrak train slowed to a crawl, brakes squealing. Inside, passengers pushed their faces against the glass to get a look at the course. Donaldson could have waited another 30 seconds for the train to pass entirely, but went ahead and dropped the putt.
Of course, Donaldson couldn’t escape the trains completely. Moments later, he had to step away from his tee shot on No 18 as a northbound Amtrak zoomed by.
“We play with a lot of distractions week in and week out with a lot of people. That’s just stuff you do, and you deal with it,” Ryan Moore said.
The only element missing is the signature whistles. When the public is playing Chambers Bay, engineers regularly lay on the horn. BNSF instructed their engineers for this week to keep the whistles silent unless it’s an emergency.
Melonas said the feedback his staff has received on the trains is “overwhelmingly cool”.
USGA championship director Danny Sink said they have people near the fence between the course and tracks as a safety precaution. “It was slow, it was quiet, it was not a problem,” Phil Mickelson said. LIZZIE Armitstead has revealed that some of her team-mates feared she might never race again following her crash at the Aviva Women’s Tour.
The English rider won Wednesday’s first stage in Suffolk but collided with a group of photographers as she celebrated while crossing the line and had to be airlifted to hospital.
She later withdrew from the stage race having suffered a sprained wrist and a dead leg.
“I think they thought my career was over after I was carted off,” the Boels Dolman rider said of her team-mates in an interview with BBC Radio 5 live.
“They were all worried about me. I was in that much agony I believed there was a bone sticking out of my leg. It was fairly dramatic.”
Remarkably, Armitstead is hoping to be fit enough to ride in the National Road Championships in Lincolnshire a week on Sunday.
Christine Majerus of Luxembourg, one of Armitstead’s Boels Dolmans colleagues, won yesterday’s third stage of the Aviva Women’s Tour from Oundle to Kettering.
Belgium’s Jolien D’hoore of