Diary Summer 2017: Training.

By Train: Sunset Limited, June 19-28, 2017

During the past two weeks I have been on vacation in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and in numerous venues throughout the American Southwest, a place I love. During the sojourn, I have kept my Dining Diary pretty rigorously. And here it is. The first part is largely about railroads, a longtime hobby of mine. As it goes on, it will shift to food I encountered along the way. June 19, 9:00 a.m.-Amtrak Train #1 leaves New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal. 9 a.m.-Train passes next to Jesuit High School baseball stadium. Something new since I was there. 9:21 a.m.-Train crosses Central Avenue, then begins to climb the approach to the Huey P. Long Bridge, the world’s longest railroad bridge. 9:30 a.m-Train crests the Huey P. Long Bridge peak and crosses the Mississippi River. 9:40 a.m.-Train back on terra firma. 9:47 a.m-Train passes through two large railroad yards, then enters an assortment of very dense woods alternating with sugar cane fields. The latter are all the same size, and line up uniformly 1:34-Bridges cross the bayous in the Des Allemands. This is where the best wild-caught catfish are fished locally, and where the name of the place is a mark of quality. 9 a.m-We run along the edges of the most extensive sugar cane fields we will see, extending to about half of the horizon. 9 a.m.-The sugar cane tapers out in favor of trees-mostly oak, often covered with Spanish moss-bushes, and an improbably large number of bayous, many of them connected with Bayou Lafourche, a former distributary of the Mississippi River. The train races along at speed; track is quite good, and sometimes very smooth. 10:35 a.m.-Train arrives in Schriever, the first stop on the westbound Sunset Limited, whose name is the oldest in the gazetteer of train names. When the train leaves Schriever, it is five minutes late. 10:53 a.m.-Train enters a swamp rooted in many 50-foot and taller trees, with standing water about eight inches deep and covered with bright greenish-yellows and magentas. Beautiful in its way. 11:00 a.m. Train crosses the Atchafalaya River at Berwick, where the Sunset Limited once derrailed into the river. There were fatalities, which is a rarity in passenger railroading. The bridge was rebuilt handsomely. 11:30 a.m. The train travels alongside of US 90, which follows almost all of the Sunset’s route. Here it especially obvious, what with the many businesses selling the needs of the petroleum industry. It can all get more than a little unpretty. I talk at length with a young woman who is learning the ropes of being a sleeper car attendant. We discuss trains and model trains. She says that model trains are the way grown-up men act like children. I resemble that remark. 11:40 a.m. We pass a freight train heading in the same direction as ours. It’s the third freight train we’ve encountered. The first was on the Huey P. Long bridge at the same time we were crossing the river. This train carries ninety-four cars behind four diesel units. We will see many more freight trains with many more cars. Many, many automobiles are among these shipments. I’m guessing, but it looked like around over a thousand automobiles are going one way or another. 12:18 p.m. We cross the New Iberia city limits. Here is the most flagrant example of what is called “street running.” The main ri. It has the main line of a major railroad sharing the tracks with everyday street traffic. I saw a particularly bad such combination, our train heading west while five passenger automobiles moved slowly eastward. I watched it from the window of the Sunset Limited. 12:34 p.m. The dining car requires reservations, to keep everyone from trying to dine at the same time. I chose half-past noon. When I showed up, I was seated with a man and his six-year son. The boy has a sharp wit and an articulate speaking style. The third person is a young woman working on her PhD in Psychology. She’s quiet, but I think this owed entirely to big-mouthed males sitting with her. I order a quesadilla, which would have been better described as two flour tortillas with bacon and cheddar in front of it. I should have ordered the Korean pork sliders, and I will have the opportunity to do that tomorrow. The father of the sharp six-year old, after a few minutes, figures out who I am. He used to work as a sous chef at Carrollton Market. He also cooked at Cuvee and a few other first-class restaurants. The conductor on this train and an attendant in my sleeper car are others who ask me about I had no idea so many Amtrak people are into food. As the conversation went on, the dad with the chef credentials figured out who I am. That has almost never happened to me on a train. Meanwhile, the waiter neglected to bring the salad I asked for. I got even with him by not having dessert. (It didn’t appeal to me.) I go back to the roomette and mostly just stared at the window. Which is, of course, one of the more pleasant activities on a train. 13:34 p.m. Sooner or later I knew I would require a nap, since I was up before five this morning. I fold down the bottom seats and let it go at that. I slept about an hour and fifteen minutes, only until the dining room steward came by to ask when I’d like to have dinner. Six-thirty, I tell him, hoping as I do that the Amtrak steak is still there. It was delicious two years ago. 14:00 p.m. The train remains at the Lake Charles depot for a long time. A passenger needing to debark can’t be found on the train. Never found out what happened to her, but she is forgotten except by this diary and get rolling again on this hot, sunny day with our freezing-cold sleeper car. We slow down for a 114-car freight train, then go to Beaumont, Texas. This is the point at which the BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) gives way to the Union Pacific. The Union Pacific in these parts used to be the Southern Pacific. Indeed, the Southern Pacific ran the entire Sunset Route from its earliest years, until the UP bought it a few years ago. 4:30 p.m.The most miserable part of our rail route follows US 90 between Beaumont and Houston, where the 1927-vintage US highway number disappears in the center of the big city. It emerges from Houston on the west side of town, but not until going through some of the most distressing rail passageways I've ever seen. It’s in the northeastern part of the well-spread city and is highly industrial, with immense piles of what can only be called “material.” The railroad yard is made of what looks like at least thirty parallel , rusty, parallel lines of classification yards. It’s all ugly in a host of different ways. Only the handsomeness of the big buildings in central Houston lift one’s heart above all this junk. 5:28 p.m. We escape from that mess, but in so doing we learn that there was some sort of accident on our route somewhere along our route. The train sat waiting for this to be cleared up. The engineer tells us nothing. This is the big problem with passenger rail service. If a train or even a streetcar stops, action on other rails nearby stops dead. They can’t back out, they can’t shift to an adjacent track, they can’t do anything but wait either for what lies before us and what lies in back. 6:18 p.m. We start moving just as I have that thought. Am I glad. I am starting to think in a very pessimistic way. Almost as soon as we did, my name was called by the dining car for dinner. This cheers me up. I am seated with a young couple from Los Angeles, heading home after spending a good bit of time in New Orleans. They seemed to want to carry on their own conversation in hushed tones, I try to insert my thoughts into the conversation. As part of my appeal to my dining companions, I offer to share my bottle of Cabernet with them. They remain engaged with one another. I shift my attention to dinner. It begins with a salad composed of iceberg ribs and those lathe-carved fake baby carrots. Neither of which is easy to chew. Thing warm up in the entree section, from which I ordered the most expensive ($25) meal I’ve ever had aboard an Amtrak train. It’s a nicely-encrusted, juicy strip sirloin, served with a prefabricated but tolerable bearnaise saice. I never though I’d ever see the king of the French sauces in service on Amtrak, but here it is. This is served with little green beans and corn with tiny tomatoes, but this is good enough, I didn’t yet know that this same combination will turn up four more times during this trip. 7:44 p.m We roll along at a less-than brisk pace when, after the little passenger traffic that Houston’s railroad operation supports, we pull away with speed. After another twenty minutes, we stop again. This time I ask around as to what’s going on. Answer: a fire on a highway about half a mile away from the train is close enough to one of its tracks for the UP to send some of its conductors out to manually set the points that direct the train. Our train rolls over the joint gingerly, first in one place and a little later in a similar spot. And then we were off at last, with only brief stops until we reach US 90 ALT, which we follow until San Antonio. 8:50p.m. It is almost a dozen hours since we left New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal. Somehow, It feels more like three days. This is Tom’s Good-Time Stretching Theorem, which says that when you’re having a good time, the time will seem to pass longer than if you’re having a bad time. Which seems to be the opposite of the way it should be, but it always works for me. 8:57 p.m. I begin getting ready for bed, since I had only a short, sleepless nap a few hours ago. I fall asleep easily, even though I am being serenaded by “To Your Good Health, From Squibb.” This is a 1941 radio music show featuring vocalists whose musical tastes were popular as they are relaxing. It would probably be considered as opera or classical music. The thirty recordings I have of these fifteen-minute shows puts me right to sleep. I do awaken at half past eleven for the racket of putting two trains together. One of them is our Sunset Limited with the Golden Eagle. The latter came from Chicago, and will become part of the Sunset as it heads toward to Los Angeles as the longest train route in the Amtrak system.