In the Rockies: Farewell to the Zephyr

By Gregory Jaynes

"The train depot, please."

"You mean the train station?" the taxi driver asked.

"Yes," said the passenger. It was dawn in Denver, outside the Brown Palace, a 19th century hotel that is, in good weather, within strolling distance of Union Station, a 19th century train depot. Rain fell from a dirty-ashtray sky, however; hence the cab. Ten minutes later, the woman at the wheel seemed not to have a clue. "I've seen it," she said. "I know it's right around here somewhere." In time she found the place, a building the size of Notre Dame. As for the passenger: ah, how patly explicable it seemed all of a sudden. If a 26--or so--year-old cabbie could not find the station, no wonder the train was bound for the end of the line.

The Rio Grande Zephyr, the last privately operated long-haul passenger service in the Lower 48 states, was about to be shut down. Its operator, the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, said the train was losing $3 million a year. The new operator would be the National Railroad Passenger Corp., the Government-subsidized organization known as Amtrak. The old cars with their rump-sprung seats would be replaced with Amtrak's firm-chaired, bullet ride to modernity. The cuisine of the dining car, a draw for serious trenchermen, would be replaced with Amtrak food, no adjective necessary.

The deal was attractive to both sides.

The Denver and Rio Grande would get out of the unprofitable passenger business and make some money on its tracks from Denver to Salt Lake City by leasing Amtrak the right of way. In turn, Amtrak would hope to gain more passengers on its Chicago-Oakland route by changing the train's path so that it crossed more spectacular terrain. The former route traversed southern Wyoming; the new route, and the new train, will cut through the Colorado Rockies.

The losers are the people of southern Wyoming, whose representatives are suing to keep train service there, and the nostalgic, who recently thronged at the gate for one last westward roll. The smell of bacon lay heavy on the morning air, spreading from a car with the name "Silver Banquet" flung back along its flank. "It is truly the last one," said Steve Patterson, a locomotive engineer with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and a man who rides the Zephyr mostly just to eat. "All the other passenger trains anywhere you go in this country all look alike. I call them generic trains. The little old Zephyr was all we had left. They had the last dining car. I tell you, the rest is airline food. They cook it somewhere else. On the Zephyr, you actually see real food. They crack eggs on the Zephyr. They actually peel potatoes on board."

Soon there came the call to board, the slithery sound of raincoats pressing toward the train, and the familiar lurch of a rail journey commenced. Denver fell away in a fog, and the passengers fell away into rapture. Since 1949 this poky thing had made the 570-mile run to Salt Lake City in 14 hours. Then and now it had four domed cars, the better to see the aspens and the Douglas firs blur by. Later the Colorado River foamed white alongside, and in the high, cold meadows the snorts of fine horses showed clear as clouds. Here and there little communities clung to cliffsides like cockleburs to a collie. And in the dining room were linen, flowers and heavy crockery. One could have breakfast at the top of the world.

"Look out there," said Julia Sanders, wife of Richard O. Sanders, president of the Central Pennsylvania chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. "Most of the rail fans are not on the train. They're out at the crossings, taking pictures." So they were. As the train creaked and jounced, listed and groaned, shutterbugs in their cars chased like deer flies, buzz-bombing at every vista, no doubt planning blowups to adorn untold mantles. A pesky Mustang convertible appeared to lead the pack. They outran the locomotive, recorded, outran it again.

Aboard was a typical lot: the whiskery old romantics, the backpackers, the bawling babies, the obsessed railroad fans, the golden-wedding-anniversary celebrators, the drunks and the people not constitutionally equipped to function in civilization. Six distribution managers for a major publishing firm hit the club car, took a swim in a sea of vodka and scarcely saw the sights. In the long line for the dining car, people with impaired manners made themselves known as something more than peckish, and thus snappish. (It takes patience to take a train, so why do those who do not possess it always book a seat? One's own inner peace urged the cry: "Slow down! Relax! Enjoy!" Maybe eight-cylinder, eight-lane, jumbo-jet America does not deserve the Rio Grande Zephyr. Maybe the country is too loutish for a good train.)

Then across the Continental Divide and down the western slope, on ground the color of lions. "I sure hate to see the old gal go," the conductor, Red Knuter, had said before the start. Others among the crew were not feeling so charitable. In the lounge, a bartender named Gerald answered a drinker's question about his future plans. "I'm gonna rob banks, man," said Gerald, turning to his friend, a coat attendant named Leon. "Seventy times a day, man," said Leon. "At least 70 times I get asked what I'm gonna do. I don't know. I don't know! You got a job? Ah, hell, we're just an inconvenience to this company."

Engineers, conductors, brakemen on the Rio Grande have the elective of switching to Amtrak. Gerald, Leon and about 20 cooks and waiters do not. Gerald, shutting down the bar on his last run so he could take his lunch, was asked whether he would reopen after he had eaten. "Maybe I will," he said, "and maybe I won't." He didn't.

"What are they gonna do," chimed in a brakeman named Gary Stehle, "fire him?" Stehle is quitting. He went down for a day of indoctrination at Amtrak and found it did not cut the mustard of his standards, sad to say. He sold his uniform to a railroad freak from Florida. Ken Jackson, another brakeman who is quitting, has held on to his uniform. Like Stehle, Jackson is bitter, feeling that the company could have done better by them and kept the Zephyr going. Jackson says sarcastically of his uniform, "I'm going to wear it to Halloween parties, along with my funny little hat. I'm going to go as a meathead."

The train went down a gorge, rounded a bend and entered middle afternoon just as some sated diners entered drowsiness, offending Robert Robinson. An infantry major from Fort Hood, Texas, who said he was on the Zephyr taking pictures with his camera as well as his mind, Robinson looked disdainfully at three slumbering bodies curled catlike across the seats. "Can you imagine that? On this train? On this ride?"

Sunlight shone upon the mountains, and bars of sunlight lay upon the floors of the domed cars. Outside, the speedy, four-wheel-driven photographers kept kicking up rooster tails of dust. Inside, those passengers who were awake and old enough to have ridden other wonderful trains, and who were given to reflection, appeared to set to work. Could they really have lived long enough to be riding an anachronism? Could it be possible not only to tolerate but to enjoy this age, with its computers, its characterless cars, its designers' names flashed everywhere from dumpy derrieres? Could it really be possible to have grown so fuddy-duddy as to agree with Walker Percy's remark that "what nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J.C. Penney pantsuits"?

Then it was over, far too quickly. A mud slide in Utah had truncated the trip. The mud slide would also keep Amtrak crossing southern Wyoming, at least for another month. The Rio Grande Zephyr was out of business all the same. Its last trip west ended at Grand Junction, Colo., 275 miles up the line. Anyone who really wanted to get to Salt Lake City could continue on a bus, rolling through the night. All things considered, the connection was unappealing.--By Gregory Jaynes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.