The train was much less crowded without the Scouts. I'm not sure if anyone boarded here, and while we would gain some people at Albuquerque and Flagstaff, from Raton on to Los Angeles the train seemed empty by comparison.
The country immediately south of Raton was extremely dry. Then, after awhile we got into some pleasant, tree-filled mountains. Then it became dry again and very flat. .......
The houses here are noticeably smaller than they are in the Midwest, and everything is a lot junkier. Most of the homes in Las Vegas (New Mexico) seemed to be mobile homes that were set up permanently on normal street lots. Everybody seemed to have junk all over their yards, too. I don't know what it is with the West and South about throwing things away. Nobody ever seems to get rid of anything; instead they just set old broken appliances and furniture out on their lawn forever.
The one pleasant feature of Las Vegas was the old Harvey House, the La Castenada. This is one of only three surviving buildings in what was once a chain of hotels and restaurants that went the length of the Santa Fe railroad. The Southwest Chief is Amtrak's version of the old Super Chief, which was the main passenger train on the Santa Fe. When the trains first came west, there were no places for respectable people to stay, so Fred Harvey built these hotels to cater to the tourists. Today passengers who get off in the West stay at the same chain hotels they would stay at anywhere else, so the Harvey houses are mostly of historic interest.
At 2:40 we stopped for 5 minutes at a red signal in a lovely wooded area. Then we crawled up a hill at a very severe angle-one where I wondered if the train would stay on the tracks, we were leaning so much to the side. The land leveled out, and we picked up speed a bit. Again we went through a series of S-curves on relatively level land, while I-25 beside us went absolutely straight.
Around 3:25 we passed a modern version of a traditional Indian pueblo, complete with brand new but traditionally styled ovens outside each house. Next we crossed the Pecos River, and shortly thereafter the power started flickering on and off again-this time while we were moving. Then at 3:35 the train just stopped dead in the middle of nowhere.
An announcement came on that we had to stop because the engines were severely overheating. I remembered one time when we crawled from exit to exit in Colorado, because the motorhome was overheating. I had visions of the train getting later and later and later-or, alternatively, being stranded in the desert until someone could come to rescue us. With the electricity off, there was no air conditioning, and the train rapidly heated up. We closed the curtains to keep the sun from shining, but even so it barely a minute before it became uncomfortably warm.
I have no clue what they did, but they got things working quickly. After just five minutes the power came back on and the air conditioning started up again. The train was moving slowly at 3:45, and we gradually picked speed as we descended the beautiful Glorieta Pass. In what might be a clue to the mystery, we heard an announcement that said dinner could not be served until after we had passed Albuquerque, because there was no water in the diner. Margaret and I both wondered aloud if they hadn't diverted the diner's water to the engines so we could proceed.
The diner announcement was one of many we heard from time to time on the train. The strangest were from one crew member to another. Most often they said something like, "Debbie, can you pick up on IC". "IC" stands for "internal communication". It would seem logical to me that the crew members would have their IC radios on all the time, but apparently they don't. They have to make a public announcement to page someone to turn on their radio so they can communicate privately. Other announcements have the form of "John, can you hear this in the diner" or "Cindy, can you hear this in the #9 sleeper". They seem to have a lot of troubles getting the sound system to work (usually you can't hear anything in the diner, for instance), and they spend a lot of time checking to see if they're being heard.
We passed through the Apache Canyon and then at 4:35 got to our next stop at Lamy, which is not much more than a platform in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere. Lamy, however, is a rather important stop. It's interesting that the old "Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe" never actually made it to Santa Fe. (As a side note, it never made it to Atchison either.) The terrain was too rugged near New Mexico's capital, so they never finished the railroad to there. Instead they built a stop at Lamy, which is about 20 miles south of Santa Fe. From there the old Santa Fe railroad ran a stagecoach shuttle; today Amtrak accomplishes the same thing by bus.
During the stop at Lamy someone discovered a pair of sunglasses that had been left in one of the restrooms downstairs. The man who found them was showing them all around the coach to see who had left them. The glasses were quite distinctive (blue round lenses with gold wire rims), and I knew immediately that they belonged to one of the Scouts who had been sitting just a few rows ahead of us. I doubt that he ever got them back, but fortunately they didn't look like terribly expensive shades-nor do I think they had prescription lenses.
The dining steward came through the cars to take dinner reservations. Unfortunately, by the time he got to the end of the train, there was only one time slot left-9:30. That wasn't really a problem, and we quickly made our reservations.
As we neared Albuquerque, we overheard the Puerto Rican girls chatting with Colleen, the woman from Long Island. It's fascinating how stupid some people can be. Colleen asked the girls what language they spoke, and they responded (in English), Spanish. She went on then to say that she had thought they were Chinese. The women certainly didn't look Asian (they were Hispanic with bleached blonde hair), and while they spoke Spanish extremely rapidly, it certainly didn't sound like Chinese. When she had deduced that the girls were from Puerto Rico, she asked if they had any trouble getting visas to come to the U.S. Puerto Rico, of course, is part of the United States, and Puerto Ricans are American citizens. ....... All you need to get from San Juan to Miami or New York is a plane ticket-no passport, no visa, no customs inspection. It's really no different than going from Chicago to Atlanta. It surprises me, especially given the enormous Puerto Rican population in New York, that Colleen didn't know that.
We arrived at Albuquerque at 5:45, exactly 46 minutes behind schedule. Albuquerque is a service stop, where they get rid of trash, re-stock the lounge and diner, and give a quick once-over swipe to the windows on the train. The stop is scheduled to take about half an hour, and we were allowed to get off the train and wander around the platform. I found a mailbox and sent off the last of my bills and also picked up a newspaper. They had a little marketplace set up at the end of the platform where Indians were selling trinkets, but I didn't bother checking that out. It was extremely hot outside (a nearby bank said 95o), so I quickly retreated to the air-conditioned coach.
The stop in Albuquerque seemed to take forever; in fact, it took nearly an hour. I filled most of the time reading. Before the trip I had bought a biography of William Mulholland, the engineer who built the great aqueducts that brought water across the desert to Los Angeles. It honestly was a rather dull book (the biography of Mayor Daley I read on the train last year was much more interesting), but it seemed appropriate, given our destination.
Many Amtrak trains provide some form of entertainment. Most overnight trains show feature movies in the lounge cars, and often there is something else to give a bit of a taste of the local culture. On the Southwest Chief the local entertainment consists of a Navajo guide-Gerald Pinto-who rides the train back and forth between Albuquerque and Gallup. Apparently eastbound he gives an in-depth presentation about the geography of the area and the history of the various Indians. Unfortunately, while traveling west, it rapidly gets dark west of Albuquerque, so it's difficult for him to point out that many things. Instead he showed us videos. The first was a boring, encyclopedic history of the Anasazi, the "first people" who were the ancestors of all the various Indians in the Four Corners region. After that he showed a fascinating film about Acoma pottery. Acoma is the ancient settlement at the top of a mesa that I visited with Steve several years ago. This film traced every step of the pottery-making process and told the symbolism behind everything they do.
After the pottery film, Mr. Pinto passed out a quiz and announced that there would be a prize to however got the top score. I had only vaguely been paying attention during the video and I certainly knew nothing about Acoma pottery beforehand, but I easily knew the answers to all the questions, as did Margaret. The first three questions were multiple choice; the final one had a blank to fill in.
1. Where do the Acoma find minerals for the paint for their pottery?
(ANSWER: Mt. Taylor)
2. What do they use for a paint brush?
(ANSWER: the stem of the yucca plant)
3. What do they make fire out of?
(ANSWER: cow dung)
4. Want do they use as binder for their paint?
(This was supposed to be an "extra credit" question that would decide ties.)
(ANSWER: Rocky Mountain bee plant)
You were basically allowed one entry per group, and we turned ours in in Margaret's name. Mr. Pinto seemed surprised that anyone would have all the questions correct, which made me wonder if anyone else had ever actually watched the film. He graciously awarded Margaret first prize, a lovely hematite necklace. ........
At 8:15 we came to Grants, the town where Steve and Terry often went shopping when they lived here. Grants is a long, narrow city, and while the train didn't actually stop here, it still seemed to take forever to get through. I gather Steve rather liked Grants, but I can't say the place does much for me. It's looks dirty and run-down, and the most striking thing you see from the train is an enormous metal smelter.
....... At 8:35 we made it to Steve's old hometown of Thoreau. I was impressed again at how spread out everything is here. The Navajo traditionally live in extended family units, with lots of space between them and the next family. That makes even small towns take up a lot of space. We went right past the south edge of Thoreau, and I think I even caught a glimpse of the school where Terry used to work as we zoomed through town.
We went to the lounge to wait for dinner, and this time I paid careful attention to the pedometer I was wearing. Most of the summer I keep track of miles I walk as part of a wellness program we have at Garrigan. I had thought it was a long train, and the pedometer confirmed that. From our seat to the lounge was exactly .25 miles, meaning we had a half-mile round trip every time we went to get something to eat.
There was a lovely sunset this evening, one of those panoramic sunsets that wraps around the whole sky. It was most pretty just east of Gallup, where we saw the intense red sun behind a stairstep mesa.
We got to Gallup at 8:55, and it was while we were stopped for a freight train there that we started dinner-roughly half an hour before our scheduled time. Our dinner companions were a black woman from Evanston, Illinois, who worked as a "make-up artist" and a nearly retired woman from North Carolina who was the office manager for her county's clerk of court. I had exquisite pork chops, topped off by a delicious berry tart. Both Margaret and I commented that the food on the Southwest Chief was noticeably better than anything we had eaten last year. The service was better, too. I had more of the feeling of dining in an elegant restaurant than in-well-a "diner".
We changed our watches just past Gallup. I'm not sure whether Arizona is officially on Mountain Standard Time or Pacific Daylight Time, but either way they're an hour behind New Mexico. They called the "night stops" at 9:10pm, which would have been after 10pm on the time we were used to.
Night stops, by the way, are kind of an interesting topic. During the day, as you near each stop, the conductor calls out the stop repeatedly over the intercom, and it's your responsibility to get off when you're supposed to. At night, they don't want to disturb those who are sleeping. For this reason, they ask those who are getting off at the night stops to remain in their seats. When you approach each stop, the car attendant comes around and wakes up the appropriate people and sees to it that they get off where they're supposed to. "Night" begins and ends at varying times, depending on the schedule of the train-and it often has more to do with the nature of the stops than exactly what time they are scheduled. With few exceptions the night stops are for small towns where not many people get on or off. They call the night stops after you pass a major city. The first day on this train "night" started at Kansas City (even though it was already midnight), with the night stops being at Lawrence, Topeka, Newton, Hutchinson, and Dodge City. It became "day" past Dodge City (though the sun had already been up for quite some time), and continued to be "day" through Gallup. Tonight's night stops were at Winslow, Flagstaff, Williams Junction (the stop for the Grand Canyon), Needles, and Barstow. Victorville and San Bernardino were also supposed to be night stops, but by the time we would get there tomorrow the train would be far enough behind schedule that everyone would be awake anyhow.
Typically when they announce the night stops, they also turn off the overhead lighting in the coaches-leaving just the security lights. That, of course, makes it easier to sleep. For some reason, though, tonight they didn't turn off the lights until we were past Flagstaff. I got to sleep fairly quickly, but Margaret had trouble sleeping with the lights on. The last thing I remember tonight was a Hispanic family in the back of our coach discussing their vacation plans in L.A. They would speak rapidly in Spanish, but then inject untranslatable English phrases like "Six Flags Magic Mountain" or "roller coaster" at appropriate places.
I slept in fits and starts all the way across Arizona. I woke up around 3am, just east of Needles. I noticed that Margaret had moved to another seat. With the Scouts gone there were lots of empty places on the train, and she had found a place where she could stretch across two seats instead of being cramped in beside me. I also took advantage of this and stretched out a bit more.
I distinctly remember Needles because I looked out the window there and saw it as an island of light in a sea of darkness. There is absolutely no light in the desert at night-none. Here in Iowa you'll see farm lights or lights on passing cars at night, but across Arizona and California there's nothing but black. Then as we neared Needles I saw a series of lighted billboards directed at the nearby interstate. Then there was the city itself, and by the station was an odd light sculpture that reminded me of the United terminal at O'Hare. Then we left the station, and again it was utterly black.
I woke up for good around 5am Pacific time. I changed quickly and then passed the time just staring out the window. We were somewhere in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a barren stretch of below sea-level land that is the southern extension of Death Valley. We were now well away from the interstate, instead paralleling old Route 66 past some of the dumpiest little towns I've ever seen. Aside from the towns the landscape is really rather striking, in a stark sort of way-especially at sunrise. Much of it is absolutely barren, just hills of rock and dust. In other places short, scrubby plants cast weird shadows all over the ground. The train and the old highway wind through the area, following the contour of the hills. I saw a documentary once that mentioned that in building I-40 nearby they used nuclear weapons to blast a pass through the Bristol Mountains. No one would do that today, of course, but it's not surprising-given the utter wasteland around here-that they felt that was an appropriate use of "atoms for peace" in the '50s or '60s.
Margaret was up before too long, and we made our way to the lounge car where we sipped coffee, munched on bagels, and continued to stare out the window. As we crawled toward Barstow, Margaret related a story from her childhood when she lived there. Apparently she and another little girl went out in the afternoon looking for horny toads and desert holly. They got lost in the middle of the desert and couldn't find their way back. I could easily believe you could get lost here, everything looks exactly the same as everything else. Apparently they eventually found the housing development where they lived, but it was one of those developments where every street looks like every other-at least to a little girl-so they still couldn't find their way home. They solved their problem when they found the ice cream man. They followed him all through the neighborhood, until they finally got to their own homes. .......
We crossed I-40 at 5:45am. The interstate was quite busy, with mostly truck traffic. I quickly recognized-from another documentary I had seen-that the overpass had been retrofitted with earthquake supports. It used to be that they built highway bridges as strong and stiff as they possibly could in California. The big freeway collapses in earthquakes about a decade ago, though, made them re-think construction methods. Now they're retrofitting mechanisms that allow the bridges to move with the motion of the quake. That's what they've had for years in California skyscrapers, all of which made it through the quakes unscathed.
Next we saw POWER LINES--not just any power lines, but some of the biggest, nastiest power lines I've ever seen. This was almost certainly part of the infamous California grid that has been in the news this spring because of power shortages and rolling blackouts. One good thing about our trip was that we'd be starting off in the city of Los Angeles-the one place in the state that had not experienced rolling blackouts. That's because when William Mulholland built the aqueducts, he also created a municipal power company for the city--mostly drawing on hydroelectricity from those same water projects. Today L.A. remains the one place in California with municipal utilities, and thus the one place that is not at the mercy of the grid. Power supplies and prices in L.A. have been stable in 2001, and the city has made a lot of money selling their surplus electricity to the rest of the state. Having lived all my life in towns that have municipal utilities, to me that seems the most sensible way to go. I can't imagine that a for-profit company could possibly provide cheaper or better service than a publicly owned cooperative. So through all the California power mess, I've been quietly cheering, "Go L.A.!"
We got to Barstow around 6:45am. For a town that I've never heard anyone speak well of, it really didn't look too bad. Beyond Barstow, though, we had more of those nasty little towns with junk piled high in the yards. .......
Before long we got into a new form of vegetation-Joshua trees. These are scraggly, low-slung trees that are apparently native to this region of the desert. There's a whole national park built to preserve them just south of here. I found them frankly ugly, but then I think I'd find most desert vegetation ugly.
Between Barstow and Victorville there's a lot of agriculture. Mostly it's livestock, especially cattle, but they also irrigate to grow a lot of crops. Margaret got upset, though, when she saw them irrigating the desert to grow hay. While I'm not going to tell the farmer what he can or can't do with his water, that does seem rather silly to me, also. I can't imagine that it would make good business sense. Given the scarcity of water out here, I would think it would have to be cheaper to import hay from the Great Plains than to pay for water to irrigate it-even at subsidized rates.
We reached Victorville at 7:25am. Victorville is essentially the start of metro Los Angeles--even though we wouldn't be arriving downtown for three and a half more hours. Our arrival in L.A. would be too late for some people to make their connections, so at Victorville they announced that special connections would be made out of San Bernardino for passengers going to Oxnard or points north and to Las Vegas. .......
Victorville, Apple Valley, and Hesperia (which are all essentially the same place) are where we saw our first suburban housing tracts. This is still well over 100 miles from the ocean, and I can't imagine that anyone from here commutes all the way into the city. There are a lot of local factories, though, and many people probably work in San Bernardino and Riverside, which are 25 - 40 miles away.
We noticed that the homes were packed remarkably closely together, given the vast land available in the area. Almost no one had a real lawn, but everyone had a small amount of fenced-in empty space. This area of suburbia is really quite low density, especially compared to what we were yet to see, but it is steadily filling in.
At 7:45 we reached the Cajon Canyon, a steep narrow gorge that provided a temporary break in the development. The strangest feature of the canyon was that all through it the railroad right-of-way was boarded by a razor wire fence. I can't imagine that someone would go to the trouble of coming way out here to vandalize things, but apparently they have had problems or they wouldn't have bothered erecting that fence. Also throughout the canyon we saw pipelines. California is one of the world's largest oil producers, and I suppose they have to get their oil out somehow.
Cajon Pass was really quite pretty. We noticed snowcapped mountains in the distance (not something you think of in southern California), and the nearby mountains looked like those hills the helicopters fly over in the opening sequence of M*A*S*H. (Those hills were apparently the Agoura Canyon west of L.A., and I understand neither place looks the slightest bit like anything in Korea.) The whole area was lined with pretty white wildflowers, and as we neared the crest of the pass, the landscape rapidly became less dry. Eventually we started seeing actual trees--including flowering trees like jacarandas and bougainvilleas.
Building both the railroad and the parallel stretch of Interstate 15 had to be major engineering feats. This is the only place outside of Colorado I've ever seen a full hairpin turn on an interstate, and the grade on I-15 is severe. It was now nearing 8am, and that interstate was packed with traffic. The railroad had less of a grade than the road, which in many ways made it the bigger engineering accomplishment. What we had instead was one of the most massive cuts I have ever seen-virtually an artificial canyon leading into the main canyon.
We reached the south side of the canyon at 8:15 and emerged in San Bernardino. The mountains were now totally covered with vegetation, but that bonus was more than negated by our official welcome to southern California-SMOG. The San Bernardino/Riverside area had by far the worst smog we encountered anywhere on this trip, noticeably worse than central Los Angeles. The smog almost completely obscured all but the nearest mountains, and at times I could smell it coming into the train through the ventilation system.
It's wetter in San Bernardino. Everyone has a lawn-sort of. It would be more accurate to say that everyone has a tiny patch of grass. The lots here are about as small as I've seen anywhere. The houses look like those tiny bungalows you see in Moline, but they're set on even smaller lots. Nobody has any side yard to speak of; typically there's just a fence with inches between that and the walls of two homes. The front yards are also nothing to brag about; they're invariably fenced, and there's maybe 8 or 10 feet from the fence to the doorway--tops.
We paused for several freight trains in San Bernardino. The group from New York continued to complain and complain about the delays. As it turned out, their actual destination was a suburb close to San Bernardino. Unfortunately, they had checked their luggage to L.A. That meant they would have to go all the way into the city and then take a commuter train back to their final destination. If they hadn't checked their bags, they could have left Amtrak and gotten on the commuter train here-probably saving themselves four hours of travel time.
While waiting for the freight trains we had a beautiful view of the San Bernardino container transfer depot. That hardly sounds thrilling, but it was a rather interesting sight. Cargo containers come here by train where they are piled up in stacks as many as 5 high. They have an enormous machine called "The Boss" that looks like big red claws-sort of an oversized version of those arcade games where you try to grab a prize. A truck driver wheels a semi trailer into place, and "the Boss" grabs a container and places it on top of the truck. There were several "bosses" in San Bernardino, and they must load thousands of trucks a day here. It was really fascinating to see.
One of the freight trains we waited for was a string of ADM tankers, most likely loaded with ethanol. Looking through the papers during our trip gave me a very different perspective on ethanol than what you see in the Midwest. Ethanol has two main purposes as a fuel. The first is to save petroleum-which is why it was originally introduced back in the '70s. In a state where you see oil wells in the middle of housing developments, saving oil is hardly the first thing on most people's minds.
The other purpose of ethanol is to reduce air pollution, and that's a touchier subject in California. While many find it hard to believe, the Land of Smog has by far the toughest air pollution standards in the country. Those ate state standards, though. Like most of the West, California has very little time for the federal government-at least not unless they have money to hand out. When the government ruled that most of California (like most other urban areas in the country) had to use oxygenated fuel, they complained.
There are actually two oxygenated fuels that would meet federal standards: ethanol and a petroleum-based additive called MBTE. California had been using the latter, but they found that it was leaching into drinking water all over the state. That left ethanol as the only viable alternative. That's great news for Iowa; all those tankers are marketing Midwestern corn. Californians, though, think it will mean higher fuel prices for them. I'm not sure why-it's not like ethanol blends are much more expensive than regular fuel, even in states where they are not subsidized. Here, though, the papers were predicting that the ethanol requirement would raise gas prices by 50¢ a gallon.
Actually, if the Californians were smart, they'd make their own ethanol, rather than importing it from places like Iowa. California is one of the most intensive agricultural states in the country, and there has to be a substantial amount of agricultural waste (vines, leaves, stalks, and the like). That's precisely the stuff that ethanol is made of. There's no reason at all they couldn't make it locally, benefit their own farmers, and save on transportation costs.
From San Bernardino on we passed factory after factory and warehouse after warehouse. The backside of every building and the bottom of every overpass was covered with graffiti. "San Bur-doo" and Riverside are old, old suburbs, and they look a lot like Joliet or Gary--bleak industrial landscapes and sterile housing tracts. The one saving grace of these suburbs is the vegetation. Unlike the stark desert east of here, the suburbs themselves are lush with trees and flowers.
The landscape changed a bit as we passed from Riverside into Corona. (It was easy to tell where we were from the signs on the platforms of the commuter train stations we passed.) For a brief time we had modern office parks instead of factories, an area that looked more like Aurora or Naperville than Joliet. The difference from Illinois, though was in how densely developed the area was. The Chicago suburbs look-well-suburban, full of spacious lawns and enormous parking lots. Here everything was just one or two floors, but things were packed so closely that everything was right on top of everything else. We passed mimimall after minimall, but most had just a few parking spaces in front. We passed a K-Mart that was built up to the street, with parking on the roof. The homes were enormous and extremely pretentious, but they were crammed into almost impossibly tiny lots.
One result of those tiny lots was tons of storage facilities. In addition to the mini-storage places like the ones that are proliferating here, they also had RV storage. Here in the Midwest, most people who own trailers, boats, or motorhomes store them on their own property. Almost everyone has enough space that they can park an RV in the driveway or on the lawn with no problem. Here in Corona we were likely looking at million-dollar homes (a fact that real estate ads confirmed), but you'd be hard-pressed to park a car on the lawn, let alone a motorhome.
That denseness of development was something that struck me the whole time we were in L.A. The city has such a reputation for being spread out that it's really quite a shock that everything is packed so close together. There is a lot of land area in greater L.A., but much of it cannot be developed because it is either rugged mountains or protected federal land. I read that pretty much everything that was available for development had been developed by 1970. Since then it has just filled in more and more. Today the area occupied by metro Los Angeles--including the settled areas of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino, and Ventura Counties--covers about the same land area as Chicagoland, though it's slightly longer and narrower than its Midwestern counterpart. In Illinois, though, people who live close-in are packed close together, while the farther out you go, the more space the homes have. In Los Angeles, there's a general dense development all over the area. So an area that holds about 12 million people in Illinois holds 20 million in California (that's 7 Iowas in a place the size of an AEA region). The strange fact (which I confirmed after I came home) is that metro Los Angeles is actually the most densely populated metropolitan area in the country. It is "80 suburbs in search of a city", but those suburbs are all crammed full of people.
The train was not moving particularly fast through the suburbs--noticeably slower than we had sped across Kansas yesterday. Even so, we were going faster than car traffic. We paralleled California highway 91 (known locally as "the 91 freeway" or "the Riverside freeway"), which was eight lanes at this point. It was jammed with traffic at 9:30, though, and the cars just crawled along.
We crossed another pass from Corona into Yorba Linda, the start of wealthy, Republican Orange County. Yorba Linda was Richard Nixon's birthplace, and they're still proud of him here. The expensive homes crawl up the hills in Yorba Linda, and each block of them has its own cement drainage channel that runs down the mountain like a big scar. The homes are built out of all types of materials-wood clapboards, stucco, cement blocks, etc.-without much rhyme or reason to what goes where. Here and there amid the housing developments we saw oil rigs, pumping away beside their suburban neighbors.
....... At 9:55 we stopped in Fullerton, our last stop before Los Angeles. The station is in the middle of a pleasant downtown area. I got the feeling that Fullerton was almost a city in its own right before it became a suburb, and it still looks like it would be a nice place to live. Behind the station was an enormous park-and-ride, with a small lot and a huge ramp. The ramp was disguised with mission-style ornamentation.
We had to make two stops at Fullerton, because the platform was not long enough to accommodate the entire train. Since our coach was the end of the train, the passengers who were getting off here got increasingly testy as they waited to disembark. We finally pulled forward at 10:15, and by 10:17 we had set off again.
As we left Fullerton the car attendant had a lengthy discussion with one of the passengers in our car. The passenger was a Hispanic boy with a dark complexion who had spent most of the trip flirting with the Puerto Rican girls. Like all of us in "Coach 14", he was curious about the sleeper in front of our car. Unlike the rest of us, he poked his nose into places he shouldn't have gone. Apparently the boy had used the restroom on the lower level of the sleeper. When one of the sleeping car passengers caught him there, an incident ensued. As best I understood things, when the female passenger told the Hispanic boy to leave, he swore at her. The woman said she "feared for her life" (which seemed a bit of an over-reaction to this lanky young man) and complained to the crew. The car attendant made it very clear that she was being overly nice to the Hispanic boy. The biggest part of his crime was not trespassing, but swearing. Swearing is absolutely forbidden on Amtrak, and the rules clearly state that blue language can get you immediately thrown off the train. Given that we were so close to the terminal anyway, it was probably just as well not to blow things out of proportion.
After Fullerton we entered Los Angeles County, which with 12 million people is by far the largest local government jurisdiction in America. Many of the government duties in Los Angeles are actually carried out at the county level, rather than by the city. In addition to its namesake city, Los Angeles County includes places like Long Beach, Pasadena, and Glendale-all of which are major cities in their own right-as well as all those suburbs that people on game shows come from. It also includes vast areas of desert, and in fact more than half of the county (which is the size of Rhode Island) is uninhabited.
What we saw was definitely not uninhabited, although we really didn't see much in the way of homes. What we saw was FACTORIES!!!!!!! Eastern Los Angeles County-places like Buena Park, La Mirada, Norwalk, Santa Fe Springs, Pico Rivera, Commerce, and East L.A.--has to be one of the most heavily industrialized areas on earth. I have never seen so many active factories in my life. You see huge industrial stretches in Chicagoland, but many of those factories have been closed for decades. Here everything was open. I got the feeling that if something is "MADE IN USA", it is probably made in Los Angeles.
In East L.A. we passed another container facility. Then at 10:45 we got our first view of the downtown Los Angeles skyline-lovely modern skyscrapers cloaked in grim brown smog. We followed the Los Angeles River northward along the edge of downtown. The "river" here is a deep concrete flood control channel that had a trickle of water at its bottom (which I understand is more than is usually there in June). You've almost certainly seen car chases through it on TV shows. For those chase scenes, though, they paint over the most prominent feature of the Los Angeles River, its graffiti. The locals seem to treat it like a ten-mile-long canvas, and they scrawl works of "art" all over its entire length.
Shortly before we pulled into the station one of the Hispanic men on the train pointed out the Los Angeles County Women's Jail to the left of the train. It looked like a smaller version of the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in Chicago-with no bars, but rather tiny windows that are too small to escape through. When someone asked the man how he knew this was the jail, he responded that he drove a limo, so he knew where everything was. That brought to my mind pictures of arriving at the jail in a limo. I'm sure it's been done; this is L.A., after all.
We came to one more dead stop in the middle of the L.A. yards. Then, promptly at 11am, they announced our arrival in Los Angeles. We descended the steps and then made our way down an enormously long platform and into the bowels of Union Station. I managed to find a small sign that directed us to "red line trains" and "Gateway Center", and I followed that to the adjoining subway station.
CONTINUED IN PART 3
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The background music on this page is the Judy Garland classic "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe" from The Harvey Girls.