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From
the New York Times Book Review, March 20, 1994
Hear
That Lonesome Whistle
Blow
A train lover's nostalgic trip across
half a
continent
aboard
the California Zephyr
ZEPHYR
Tracking a Dream Across America
By Henry Kisor.
Illustrated. 338 pp. New York:
Times Books/Random House. $24.
By David Haward
Bain
For nearly half a century, Henry Kisor, the book editor and literary
columnist at The Chicago Sun-Times, has felt, along with innumerable
others, "the tug of the train." As a boy in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., he would
stand waiting for the Erie Railroad to bring his father home from
Manhattan in a cloud of steam and cinders; as a young man in Evanston,
Ill., he would watch the diesel commuter trains of
An advertisement
for the
original California Zephyr of 1949.
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the
Chicago
&
North Western pull into the station.
Even into middle age, when stalled at a grade crossing by a long
freight, Mr. Kisor writes that his spirits would rise, though he also
wished he could go along -- as an engineer, of course, though he would
have settled for conductor or brakeman. For Mr. Kisor this was an
impossibility -- he has been deaf since childhood. The newspaper
business welcomed him, fortunately for his many readers, but railroads
have always been in his blood. In "Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across
America," he follows his dream across half the continent on his
favorite train, generously taking other dreamers and imaginers along
with him. It's a wonderful ride.
In the late 1930s, executives of three giant railroads -- the Chicago,
Burlington & Quincy, the Denver & Rio
Grande Western, and the
Western Pacific -- conceived of cooperatively running a daily
streamliner between Chicago and Oakland through some of the most
spectacular scenery in North America. The
A Zephyr highballs
through western Colorado in 1949.
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Depression,
World War II and
postwar produc tion
backlogs
delayed the plan until March 1949, Mr.
Kisor notes, when the California Zephyr rolled out of Chicago's Union
Station, aimed straight at the heart of the American imagination.
The California Zephyr quickly became one of the most popular
long-distance passenger trains, despite running some 10 hours longer
than its chief competitor, the Overland Limited, whose route between
Chicago and Oakland bypassed the Rocky Mountains on the tracks of the
Chicago & North Western, Union Pacific and Southern Pacific
through
southern Wyoming. The Zephyr maintained its edge by the plenitude of
its amenities -- attentive service in lounge and dining cars and a
marvelous fleet of glass-domed observation cars -- and its innovative
schedule: the Zephyr threaded through mountain scenery in daylight
hours, saving passengers' sleep time for the dreary stretches across
the Great Plains and the Utah-Nevada Great Basin.
By the 1960s, however, labor costs and competition from the automobile
and airline industries drove
Today's
Amtrak Zephyr at the Truckee River in California.
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the
Zephyr and
other long-distance trains
into a steep decline. On its 21st birthday, in 1970, the California
Zephyr was quietly killed off.
Amtrak revived the Zephyr in 1982. It runs from Chicago through Denver,
Salt Lake City and Reno, halting at the San Francisco Bay. Although the
gleaming stainless steel cars with their murals and figured carpets and
china tableware are a thing of the past, Mr. Kisor found during a
number of recent forays that the observation cars still afford
breathtaking views of peaks, cliffs, canyons and wildlife, that
accommodations are comfortable and that pleasant, efficient crews make
the trip all the more enjoyable.
Mr. Kisor's journal of one trip westward from Chicago to
Oakland
opens in the 14th Street railroad yards and closes as the author
gratefully climbs down from the cramped bus that has conveyed him
across the Bay Bridge from Oakland to San Francisco's financial
district. He begins his odyssey as an insider
with the crew,
watching
their preparations inside the engine cab, the galley, the lounge and
the
Today's
Zephyr in Glenwood Canyon, Colorado.
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sleeping
cars.
After the train is backed into Union Station to
accept passengers and the journey begins, he glides between amateur
crew member and passenger, seeing both sides of the experience and
pausing frequently to digress into rail lore, history and travel tips.
Mr. Kisor's stream of stories, character sketches, philosophical
musings and technical explanations makes him an ideal and entertaining
travel companion, whether one is ensconced in an armchair at home or in
a berth rattling over a grade crossing west of Omaha. One learns how
modern-day stewards and chefs cope with computers, microwaves, plastic
cutlery and company regulations, and how engineers answer the call of
nature, deal with stones thrown at the windshield and handle the
emotions that are churned up when animals, people and vehicles, despite
the engineers' best efforts, are occasionally hit by trains. The reader
gets acquainted with the fascinating array of safety gear installed
both in the trains and alongside the tracks, and even with the real
reason -- not the obvious one -- why one should never stick one's head
out the window of a moving train.
There are the passengers, too -- one must be gregarious to
succeed on a long train ride -- and Mr.
The
author
aboard
a preserved E5 Zephyr locomotive.
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Kisor
introduces
them all: the
book lovers, trysters, gourmands, college skiers, poseurs and punkers,
the Reno-bound retirees, the women and men of mystery and the
mouth-breathing, socially dysfunctional rail buffs (who can drive train
crews crazy).
As the California Zephyr chugs up through the Rockies and across the
high deserts, the author regales us with stories of train wrecks,
robberies and adventures of the pioneers and fortune hunters whose
wanderings took them even remotely near the present right-of-way. Then,
treat of all treats, Mr. Kisor is ushered into the locomotive for the
most exciting and historic stretch of the route, over the original
Central Pacific grades across the Sierra Nevada to the Pacific slope.
As always during his journey, he provides lush and lively descriptions
of all he sees out the window. Whether he's up front with the engineer
or in the rear with the third cook, his view is the best on the line.
For every grown-up kid who once hankered to drive a train or swing
aboard to punch tickets, and for any adult whose heart still responds
to a far-off train whistle, "Zephyr" is an indispensable traveler's aid.
David Haward Bain is the author of
the
forthcoming Empire
Express: Building the First
Transcontinental Railroad.
Copyright 1994 The New York Times
Company
(Photographs from the author's archives.) |
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