Last Days of the Zephyr

When she first streaked across the plains 21 years ago, the California Zephyr was a gleaming wonder-on-wheels. The first luxury Vista-Dome streamliner to run between Chicago and San Francisco, the stainless-steel train topped 90 m.p.h. on the straightaway, dazzling onlookers at every wayside crossing. Last week the Cal Zephyr, rattling from disrepair and more than 6,000,000 miles of wear, made its through-run for the last time. Latest victim of rising costs, declining patronage and the reluctance of railroads to promote passenger service, the train was, as one member of the Interstate Commerce Commission termed it, "a unique national asset." Rolling for 2,525 miles through some of the U.S.'s most scenic and historic terrain, the Cal Zephyr afforded a view of America which new generations, hurtling along billboarded freeways or locked inside pressurized plane cabins, may never see. With that in mind, Associate Editor Ray Kennedy and Correspondent Mark Sullivan recently rode the Cal Zephyr for one last look. Their report:

Her coaches are shabby now. The mattresses in her sleeping cars sag and the sheets are threadbare. Resting there in Chicago's ancient, crumbling Union Station, she seems already part of the past. Yet once the California Zephyr lurches to life, hissing and huffing blue smoke, there is a sense of elegance remembered, a time when, as one porter put it, "they built trains for travel and not just transportation."

The Pullman beds and wash basins, folding out of the walls like part of a Chinese puzzle, still fascinate the children on board. In the dining car, the tuxedoed steward still seats passengers at tables with vases of fresh Colorado carnations resting on the white linen. There are Rocky Mountain trout, California champagne served in silver ice buckets, and afterward a selection of cigars and cordials. Sitting in the glassed-in Vista-Dome cars, passengers gaze out at the fleeting landscape like transients in time.

In the Cal Zephyr's cab, Engineer Ray Flaar, 61, shouts above the wild clatter of the rails: "I've made this run so many times I know every crosstie and humpback. But I'll tell you, there is always something new to see." A red pickup truck whirls out of a dusty side road, races the train for a few miles and then, pulling ahead, suddenly swerves over a crossing just 50 yards ahead. "Come fall," Flaar shouts, "when everybody is going down to the grain elevators, you get lots of guys racing you to a crossing." He tugs on the whistle and sounds a series of short toots and long wails. "That's my hello to an old gentleman in his 80s who lives back there. His relatives say it gives his morale a big boost."

Rumbling through Illinois, over the old steel-truss bridge spanning the Mississippi River, the Cal Zephyr crosses trails once plied by the Pony Express. Onward it races through Iowa and Nebraska. In the cities, the tracks are rimmed by hulking warehouses, rusting automobile graveyards and smoking garbage dumps. Then, gradually, such signs as ROYAL KNITTING MILLS and BOECKER COAL & GRAIN, SINCE 1898 give way to BEER 10-c- SHOT 25-c- and COOP FEED. Suddenly, after a cluster of mobile homes, the train plunges into a great open expanse of farm lands.

Domed silos stand like sentinels on the horizon. Black Angus cattle amble toward lopsided gray barns. Giant TV antennas, strung with a maze of guy wires, soar 30 ft. above tiny farmhouses. Irrigation ditches run to nowhere. And standing forlornly in fields of stubble corn, boys in blue denim coveralls stare back, but they do not wave.

Next morning, after being run through an automatic washing machine in Denver's Union Station,* the Cal Zephyr climbs 4,000 ft. into the Rockies, passing into the first of 46 tunnels cut through the granite walls. In the crystalline mountain air, passengers in the Vista-Dome can see more than 100 miles, from the snow-veined summit of Pikes Peak in the south, to the rugged profile of Longs Peak in the north. Lying far below now, Denver looks like a toy town.

Winding ever higher, the Cal Zephyr disappears into the dank blackness of the 6.2-mile Moffat Tunnel, which crosses the Continental Divide at an elevation of 9,239 ft. After the train emerges, H.C. Livingstone lights an after-dinner cigar and remembers aloud how he worked on the tunnel until its completion in 1928. "There were a lot of bad accidents on that job," he recalls. "In the four years it took to finish it, 81 workers were killed."

Happier Man. The train meets the Colorado River and follows it for 238 miles, wending through myriad multihued gorges. At twilight the Cal Zephyr descends into a red desert and then goes highballing across the salt flats of Utah. "I take this train every chance I get," says George Vogel, 45, a budget analyst. "It's my form of relaxation, a chance to get back to myself. I don't have to worry about telephone calls, cutting the grass or crying kids. And when I get home, I'm a happier man."

Next morning, over steak and eggs and fresh copies of the Rocky Mountain News, passengers who were strangers a few hundred miles back are now chummily addressing one another by first names. The Cal Zephyr begins its 118-mile run through California's ruggedly beautiful Feather River Canyon. Rushing by waterfalls, thick stands of ponderosa pines and beds of bright orange poppies, the train passes Rich Bar and Oroville, towns that boomed into use in the days of the great gold rush.

The last leg of the 50-hour journey runs a straight course toward San Francisco along the rice fields, olive groves and vineyards of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valley. Gradually slowing, the Cal Zephyr chugs under an increasing number of highway bridges and then, at the outskirts of the metropolis, finally fades into the smog of civilization.

* For a while, the Zephyr will continue to run from Chicago to Denver. But there its through service will be interrupted by a 22-hour layover. The rest of the route West will be changed.

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