The Man Across the Table Was Going to Reno

Ten past six in the morning, somewhere in Nebraska, and I was the second man in the dining car.

The first one was already on his coffee. Big fellow in a ball cap. The steward put me across from him, because that’s how it works in there. You get the next open chair, and whoever’s in the other one is who you’re having breakfast with.

His name was Merle. He was on his way to Reno to see a daughter he hadn’t seen in four years.

I’d been on that train about sixteen hours by then.

Somewhere in there I’d decided I wasn’t going to fly out to my brother’s again. Here’s why.

My brother lives outside Sacramento. I’ve made that trip a dozen times and it’s always the same. Three hours in a middle seat with my knees in a tray table, then a rental car, then a hotel by the airport because I got in too late to drive anywhere.

Flying is a way of not being anywhere for three hours.

This spring I looked at it a different way. I wasn’t trying to make the trip shorter. I was trying to get something out of it.

So I took the California Zephyr. Chicago to Emeryville, which sits across the bay from San Francisco, and a short hop from there to my brother’s.

Fifty-one hours and twenty minutes on the schedule. Two nights in a bed on a moving train.

Amtrak lays the route out better than I could. Out of Chicago you cross the plains of Nebraska to Denver, over the Rockies to Salt Lake City, then Reno, then Sacramento, then down into Emeryville.

The list of names is the reason to go. The Moffat Tunnel. Gore Canyon, Byers Canyon, Glenwood Canyon. Winter Park. The Truckee River. Donner Lake.

I’ve driven I-70 through Colorado four or five times.

You can’t look at Glenwood Canyon while you’re driving through Glenwood Canyon.

That’s the argument for the train in one sentence. Later that same morning I sat in the lounge car with a cup of coffee for two hours climbing out of Denver and didn’t say a word to anybody.

I had a roomette. Here’s what one actually is.

Two seats facing each other in what amounts to a phone booth laid on its side. At night the attendant folds the seats flat into a lower berth and pulls an upper berth down out of the wall. Amtrak says it sleeps two. It sleeps two the way a canoe seats two.

There’s no toilet in a roomette. That’s the thing to know before you book one. The restroom and the shower are shared, down the car and down the stairs.

If you want your own sink, toilet and shower in the room, that’s a Bedroom, and it costs a good deal more.

What comes with the room is worth more than people expect. Meals are included, and I don’t mean a voucher. Real meals in the dining car, which is how I ended up across from Merle. An attendant makes your bed at night and puts it away in the morning.

And you get a chair you can walk away from. That’s the thing an airline can’t sell you at any price.

Here’s how to think about the price, because it threw me at first. You aren’t paying for a bed.

You’re paying for two nights of lodging and all your meals, moving west while you sleep.

Price out two hotel nights and a couple of days of restaurant meals and the roomette stops looking like a splurge. It doesn’t turn cheap. It turns into a number you can defend.

Now the part I’d rather you hear from me than find out in Utah.

These trains run late. Not occasionally.

The Federal Railroad Administration publishes the numbers every quarter. For the quarter that ended last December, Amtrak’s whole long-distance network came in at 66% on time. The California Zephyr specifically ran 71%.

The federal standard is 80%.

And it’s mostly not Amtrak’s doing. These trains mostly run on track that freight railroads own, not Amtrak’s. The federal statisticians keep a whole category for it, called host railroad delays, which covers freight interference, signal trouble and routing. When there’s a mile of coal cars ahead of you, you sit.

So the train I’m recommending misses the government’s own benchmark, and it’s one of the better performers in the long-distance fleet. I’m not going to talk you around that. It’s true, and you should book with it in mind.

Mine pulled into Emeryville about two hours down. I didn’t much care, because I hadn’t planned anything. If I’d booked a flight out of Oakland that evening I’d have been sick over it from Reno on.

Leave the arrival day empty. That isn’t a tip. It’s the price of admission.

Six things, in the order I’d do them.

▸ Book early, and I mean early. Amtrak sells up to eleven months out. There are only so many roomettes on a train, and Amtrak’s own booking advice is that reserving early gives you the better shot at a lower fare.
▸ Roomette, not Bedroom, unless the private bathroom settles it. Same upper-and-lower setup, same included meals, considerably less money.
▸ Leave the arrival day empty. No flights, no dinner reservations, no appointments. See above.
▸ Check a bag and keep a small one with you. A roomette has no room for a week of luggage, and you’ll be climbing over whatever you bring in for two days.
▸ Spend Colorado in the lounge car. Your room has one window on one side. In the lounge I could see out both, and nobody’s saving a seat.
▸ Take the earliest dinner they’ll give you. You eat while there’s still light in the windows, which is most of the point.

My numbers, one man, westbound, booked about seven months out.

A plane ticket both ways would have run me a few hundred dollars. So no, this wasn’t the cheap way. It was the way where the two days in the middle were worth something instead of costing me something.

Amtrak prices these by the day and by what’s left, so I won’t hand you a number to plan on. Look up your dates and you’ll see the shape of it inside a minute.

Over eggs, he told me he and his daughter had gone through a bad stretch, and he’d been putting the trip off two years running.

He said he took the train because it gave him two days to work out what he was going to say.

I’ve thought about that more than anything else from those fifty-one hours. He didn’t take the train because he couldn’t manage an airport. He took it because he wanted the two days.

He got off at Reno. I watched the platform from my window. Somebody in a green coat had come to meet him, and he held onto her a good long while.

Then we pulled out toward Donner and I went and got another cup of coffee.

— Walter