Modernized Zephyr travels historic route
EMERYVILLE, Calif. — The journey east on Amtrak’s California Zephyr train is as good as the destination. Riding the rails from the San Francisco Bay area to Reno, Nev., offers beautiful views and a tangible sense of history on the route over the Sierra Nevada mountain range that helped bring America together after the Civil War.
Marking 30 years of service this year, the Amtrak train leaves Emeryville, Calif., every morning. The Zephyr’s ultimate destination, 51 hours later, is Chicago. Between Sacramento and Reno, a five-hour trip, it follows the same course as the historic Transcontinental Railroad, according to the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. The rail path through the mountains was a 19th-century engineering feat that bolstered the nation’s western expansion.
A hundred and forty-four years after the Transcontinental Railroad’s completion, train-loving children and picture-happy tourists pack the train’s observation car to take in the Sierra Nevada and the mountain passage known as Donner Pass, which was once thought impossible to cross by locomotive.
Prior to federally subsidized Amtrak taking over the route in 1983, the California Zephyr was privately run by three train corporations. From 1949 to 1970, the so-called “Silver Lady” boasted five sightseeing cars topped by semi-circular glass domes, with fine china and real silver in the dining cars.
The original train traveled a different eastward route through California and Nevada on its way to Salt Lake City called the Feather River Route, which did not offer views of the bays north of San Francisco. From Salt Lake City to Chicago, the routes of the original Zephyr and the modern Amtrak trains remain the same.
I recently rode the Amtrak train for the first time. My husband and I were enthusiastically led onto the platform by our four-year-old son, a train fanatic. We boarded the train just after 9 a.m. in the small city of Emeryville, 11 miles east of San Francisco. It’s the Zephyr’s departure point on the 236-mile journey to Reno. The train wasn’t packed, which meant we could occupy a few extra seats, spread out and relax. The first leg of the seven-hour journey to Reno took us along the water northeast of San Francisco. We witnessed the morning light dancing off San Pab- lo Bay, a tidal estuary that extends north from the San Francisco Bay. Roughly an hour into the journey, while crossing the Benicia-Martinez bridge, we saw the so-called “mothball fleet” in Suisun Bay. There, dozens of World War II-era decommissioned warships are still afloat. By mid-morning, we were rolling across flat farmland and or- chards. We arrived in Sacramento, the state capital, just after 11 a.m.
Riding through the tunnels toward Reno, it was hard not to imagine the backbreaking labor that went into creating them.
“Tunnels were pushed forward using hand drills to create the holes in which to load black powder (and later, nitroglycerine),” said Paul Hammond, director of the California State Railroad Museum. “Working in very hard granite still meant that progress was often measured in inches per day.”
Lucky for us, in the 21st century, all we have to do is hop onboard and enjoy.