All aboard: Riding the rails from Los Angeles to San Antonio

The Orange County Register (MCT) - I'm heading east on one of the most storied trains in America. The Sunset Limited, a name more than a century old. Out of Los Angeles and into the desert, toward Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

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The sun is low on the western horizon as we rumble and shudder east. We've been on the rails for three hours and are in ... Palm Springs.

"It takes 90 minutes to drive here from my house," grumps a lady in the dining car.

Such is the combination of romance, ineptitude, serendipity and inefficiency that are the hallmarks of Amtrak, the national passenger rail service. You have to really love trains to enjoy them in the U.S. It's a leisurely journey, a bit like this story.

I'm an Amtrak veteran, so I am used to the drill. No one offers to help me with my bags at Union Station in Los Angeles. Though I already have my ticket, I am ordered to stand in a long line to check one bag through to my final destination, San Antonio.

The twisting line is full of backpackers, retirees, vacationers, and families loaded down with toys. Going to the end of the line in New Orleans and all points in between.

It's not unlike a group at the airport, save for a trio of guys _ a high-as-a-kite duo transporting their stuff in tied-up garbage bags and a mangy-looking, slightly deranged guy with a cardboard box under his arm. At the airport, they'd likely be getting the bum's rush to the curb. But here, the Amtrak agents behind thick glass sell them a ticket for my train (though luckily, for me, they'll be partying back in the coach area).

A crackling station announcement calls the Sunset Limited. I huff and puff as I roll my book bag up the long ramp. A mother and two children struggle with a luggage cart. Two Amtrak employees stand at the top of the ramp, but neither budges to help. I have both arms full, but a man with a single trolley piece of luggage offers some muscle to also push the family's huge cart up the ramp.

"Names?" the Amtrak agent says to our sweaty little group. Well, hello and welcome aboard to you, too.

Things change for the better as I approach my sleeping car. "You'd be Mr. Warner," shouts Joseph, the attendant. He helps me get my bags upstairs. The car isn't crowded, so he suggests I switch to "lucky No. 7" as my cabin. It has two seats, which convert into beds at night. There's enough room to stash a minimum of gear and I can spread out my papers, snacks, computer and toiletries. It's small, but compared with a coach seat on an airplane, it is the Taj Mahal on steel wheels. I can close the door and have that greatest of travel rarities _ quiet.

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GOODBYE, L.A.

We roll out of Union Station, past the jail and the graffiti-covered concrete walls of the Los Angeles River, sliding along on a track in the middle of I-10. Through Temple City and El Monte. It's a clear day, so Mount Baldy looms overhead, without its usual veil of smog. I learn from a train brochure that Pomona is named after the Roman goddess of fruit. It is a torturous crawl, with long stops to let freights go by _ the rail companies own the rails and have the right of way. We're already a half-hour behind schedule by the time we get to Ontario, and it just gets worse.

"You'll notice that we have stopped again," the conductor says. "There's going to be a lot of that today. I will keep you informed."

A crew member mentions that the westbound Sunset Limited coming into Los Angeles is running six hours behind schedule. The Sunset Limited arrives on time less than 14 percent of the time, and that isn't the worst record in Amtrak. There's an official timetable, but in reality it is a land cruise with a very loosey-goosey schedule.

I count on being late, or worse. Over the years I've been stranded on the Altoona curve east of Pittsburgh when the Broadway Limited seized up one winter night. There was the trip several years ago on the Coast Starlight, crawling up the Pacific Coast _ getting into Seattle more than 10 hours late. Then there was the time the Southwest Chief en route to Chicago broke down altogether in a Kansas farm patch and passengers were roused at dawn for a bus ride to Kansas City, where we were dumped on a curb in a driving rainstorm. I rented a car and drove the rest of the way.

Before you are scared off by Amtrak horror stories, and that would be a multivolume set that could fill a small city library, there's the upside to consider. Why I keep coming back.

The trade-off is you are rolling through "flyover" country. The real world going by outside your window. You see the backside of a great city. The junkyard, concrete block factories, oil drum farms, truck depots, industrial parks and grain elevators, the rail yards full of locomotives in the yellow and red Southern Pacific livery. The apartments with iron bars wrapped around a window air conditioner, places where the poor live who can't afford anything other than a cheap walk-up next to the tracks (no sound wall here). The asphalt mountain with the American flag fluttering in the Santa Anas on top of it. The snow on top of San Jacinto and San Gorgonio. The neon of old bars and restaurants in places like Rosemead and Beaumont.

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And that's just in the first 75 miles, before the vast open spaces of the West fill your windows from dawn to dusk.

Dinnertime

As on a cruise, you have to rely on luck for whom you sit down to break bread with each night. Sometimes you get a table of stiffs or blabbermouths. Sometimes you get fun people like Patti Garcia, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz. She had taken the Southwest Chief overnight westbound to Los Angeles, arrived in the morning, went to Olvera Street across the street from Union Station, then came back and got on the eastbound Sunset Limited to Houston. After a day at a conference, she would retrace her route, back west to L.A. and east to home. I point out that is a lot of going the wrong direction to get where she wants to go. She has a simple answer, one I often hear on trains the world over.

"I hate to fly," she says. "I'm going to spend more time on the train than at the conference, but I enjoy the train. I like having the space. I don't like the going through all the security and then being on a crowded plane."

Chatting around with the group at my table and the one across the way, I hear a litany of reasons for taking the train. An elderly lady at my table says she is going to visit her brother in Shreveport, La., and hasn't flown since 9-11. A couple behind me from Placentia talk about the joys of a leisurely trip, even if the schedule is a fantasy.

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SLEEPY TIME

At night, the train passes through a desert landscape, unseen. Nothing but black land and stars in the sky. The occasional distant house or ranch or God knows what. Then a suddenly illuminated industrial yard with a pile of some kind of stone. Then back to black.

Before bed, I walk the length of the train and into the coach cars filled with rows of seats. This trip, it's not too crowded. There's lots of room, with most people who want a row to themselves able to stretch out without a stranger's elbows in their side or day-old breath in their nostrils.

"It's fine," says Bob Wallace, who was heading home to Marble Falls, Texas. "I have two seats and can spread out. I don't mind sitting up. It's a quiet crowd. And you save an awful lot of money."

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In the dome car are the insomniacs who come to drink beer or get away from the snorers back in the coach cars. With its swaying and squeaking, it is hard to remember you are on a train _ it feels like an airplane going through light turbulence.

Back at my compartment, an attendant arrives to prepare everything. He pulls a lever and the bottoms of the two facing seats slide together. They stop short of meeting. Like a deft chiropractor, the attendant pops the recalcitrant joint into place. Some sheets and a pillow, and I have a bed.

The cooling system leads to a bit of a war among my fellow travelers. My compartment feels overheated, the air stale. I find another attendant who says the air flow has been turned down at someone else's request. The airflow resumes out of the overhead vent. I'm happy, but within 20 minutes, I hear a lady in the hallway complaining, "Why is it so cold?"

The rocking and dim light are like a sleeping pill. I put down my book and within minutes, I am out. As I dream, Yuma comes and goes. Maricopa, Tucson and the sprawling Air Force "bone yard" of unused aircraft at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base all pass in the dark.

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MORNING

There is something pink. I open my eyes and out the window the wide, brown, flat New Mexico desert stretches off to the low Florida Mountains, and beyond them the higher Three Sisters. The pink is the sun _ just popping up over the jagged horizon.

I had slept through Arizona and the Continental Divide, though at just 4,587 feet, it's the lowest elevation of the major rail crossings in the U.S. A cloudless sky shows a hint of red and purple on top of the ridge line. The ground is carved with the paths of dry washes. This is rattlesnake heaven _ hot and dry in the day, cold at night.

For an empty place, a lot has happened around here. Up there in the mountains is where Pancho Villa led raids into the U.S. in 1916. Off somewhere nearby was Mesilla, where Pat Garrett had shot and killed Billy the Kid.

It's around 6 and within a half-hour, the harsh glare that would stay with us the rest of the day had overtaken any color, turning everything a muted whitish brown. A sign says Deming. My clock says 7. We were supposed to be here at 6:15. We had picked up time overnight.

We pass Sierra de Cristo Rey, a 33-foot statue known as "the Jesus of the Rockies." It's at the spot where Mexico, New Mexico and Texas meet. We're crossing over to the Lone Star state, which will take the train a full day to traverse (though I am getting off about halfway).

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OUT ON THE BORDER

As we approach El Paso, the train tracks run along the Rio Grande, right up against the border with Mexico. At one point, we are just 30 feet from Mexico. We can see the cinderblock houses to our right, while on the left, two Border Patrol cars sit on a bluff overlooking a ramshackle fence. A billboard on the highway nearby reads "Border Patrol _ Now Hiring."

Off in the distance, in Ciudad Juarez, a massive Mexican flag billows atop a tall pole. My wife had once joked that Amtrak's slogan should be "we show you the ugly end of America's cities." I am sure the folks in El Paso could show me some pretty spots, but with the exception of the Southwestern-themed railroad station (designed in 1905 by the great Chicago architect Daniel Burnham), it's pretty grim collection of sad houses, empty pools, junkyards and the loading dock of the local newspaper.

We pass a freight train that shows the mix-and-match reality of railroading these days. Three Southern Pacific diesels pull a collection of cars: Santa Fe, Burlington Northern, CSX, Canadian Pacific and Norfolk Southern.

After a shower in the stall with a cracked floor, peeling plastic and a handle that doesn't let me turn off the water without a violent twist, I head for breakfast. I sit with Tom and Diana Zehrung of Mariposa, Calif., near Yosemite.

"It's a nostalgic trip for me and I dragged him along," Diana jokes. "I traveled on trains in the 1960s and just fell in love with it. I did four or five trips when the kids were small. I remember we once brought the dog along and they would stop the train so he could do his business."

The couple had taken Greyhound from Mariposa to Los Angeles, and is taking the train to New Orleans before boarding another to the East Coast.

"We have the time, which is nice," Tom says. "You get to see the country. It's not like you are flying over and looking down from a mile up."

Outside the window, a hawk swoops low over the sagebrush, looking for its own breakfast.

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WHY ME?

That's a big part of the draw for me. I wanted to see West Texas but didn't want to drive. I wanted to experience the long distances without being afraid of falling asleep at the wheel. I wanted to see the stark, empty landscape and then when I had my fill, take a nap or watch a DVD, write or read or book, and then look again.

This is an incredibly old part of the world. Some of the oldest American Indian artifacts in the country are found here. At Ysleta, we pass a chapel that has been in use since 1682, the year William Penn founded Philadelphia. The only adobe courthouse in the country is in Sierra Blanca. Unshackled horses run to a concrete water hole next to a vintage windmill. Cows lie down in the midday sun.

The dry conditions preserve more recent artifacts. Shuttered gas stations, a 1930s-vintage market, an old adobe, a World War II-era Quonset hut, an abandoned oil tanker truck on a dirt road, a clapboard house with no roof, the wood bleached gray. Dreams and lives that came and went.

Amtrak service ranges from brisk to brusque to nonexistent. Anyone who thinks their car attendant is at their beck and call is quickly dissuaded of the notion by the simple absence of personnel. The two times I hit the call button _ once for a problem with the seat, once for a faucet that had become loose and wouldn't stop flowing _ no one came. But when an attendant is there, he's as nice as can be.

We're back to traveling at a crawl again. A two-lane road next to the tracks says the speed limit is 70. Cars blow by us. But the train, while slow and halting, is relentless. It moves along without needing a refill of gas, a bathroom stop, to check the map or stop for curios. It doesn't get lost. It is impervious to my hunger, sleepiness, distractibility. If I see a jackrabbit bounding through the brush, or a goat with two babies, I can stare instead of keeping one eye on the road to make sure I don't float into the lane of the 16-wheeler next to me.

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WEST TEXAS TRACK

We pass through the Eagle Mountains and come to Marfa, which I have wanted to see. It's the filming location of much of "No Country for Old Men" and also part of "There Will Be Blood." An earlier generation would know it from "Giant." It was also a POW camp for Germans in World War II.

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"I used to work out here," says Alma Ramsey of El Paso. "It's a long way from nowhere. My dad did work for the Means Ranch. Remodeling some of the buildings. He couldn't get a crew to stay out here, so he called in his markers on the family and my two brothers and I helped out. I loved it. If you need a Starbucks every day, it's not for you. But if you want to see all the stars in the sky and hear all sounds of nature, even if it's just the winds or just silence, then it could be the place for you. If you are at peace with yourself, you can be happy here."

Alpine is the gateway to Big Bend National Park. We pass along Warwick Flat, which crosses the great Comanche War Trail, a 1,000-mile-long foot path used by warriors traveling from Chihuahua in modern-day Mexico to northern Texas. It's also a popular spot to go hunting for wild pigs.

There's more and more cactus _ not the stately saguaro like you see around Tucson, but the low, spiky or paddle-shaped kind. The car's air-conditioning system strains against the midday sun. I wished I had booked a room on the left (northern) side of the car.

The town of Sanderson brags (if you want to call it that), that it is the "Cactus Capital of Texas." It was also a big wool town, and the ruined Sanderson Wool Commission building west of the city is evidence of that past. Sheep herders had as rowdy a reputation as cowboys. It was their barroom behavior that gives us the term "wild and woolly."

There isn't much to see in the dome car, but it's filled up with a mix of sightseers and parents from the coach class who have brought their kids up. Two different groups are playing their rap music on small speaker systems _ not exactly booming through the car, but neither adding to the atmosphere of "scenic America." The mom of one group tells the two boys to switch to headphones because it is disturbing people, but another two tables up, four teenagers listen to an MP3 player turned up to the point that the speaker is distorting.

All the Amtrak staff are in the dining car chatting _ some counting tickets, some doing paperwork, some preparing for dinner, but others just hanging out. Obviously on a multiple-day trip, there is downtime. But everybody seems to be taking it at the same time. For the second time, I have to rouse an attendant to fix the air on the overheated air system.

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Some of the passengers are also on the grumpy side. A woman who is told that the kitchen is out of Buffalo wing appetizers asks for the name of "who is in charge." The flank steak is surprisingly good, as is (note to my wife: Cover your eyes for rest of sentence) the creme brűlee cheesecake.

Langtry is the former home of that great Western oddball, Judge Roy Bean, really a saloonkeeper who took to handing out his own version of "the law west of the Pecos." He named it after English actress Lily Langtry, who never visited the place. By this time, the restroom in the car in front of me is overflowing. The train itself does need a bathroom stop.

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STALLED OUT

Getting "east of the Pecos," usually a highlight of this route, turns out to be our nightmare. The High Bridge over the Pecos River is the highest railroad bridge in the United States. It crosses the deep ravine carved by the Pecos. We are slow to cross it, then head up the hill and onto a siding. Another freight. A very long freight. Evidently a too-long, too-heavy freight. It stalls out next to us, just before the bridge. It can't budge and, on the siding, neither can we. Dinner of chicken fried steak comes and goes, the sun sets with a few wispy clouds to lighten the deepening blue sky. All to the constant soundtrack of the batteries of the freight train a few feet away trying to start up.

Finally the freight moves off. It's pitch-black outside, but I hear the grinding of the wheels. Then comes the clincher, the voice of the conductor: "Next stop, Dellllllll Rio."

Del Rio is the "Mohair Capital of the World." From the train you can normally see Ciudad Acuna, over in the Mexican state of Coahuila. I wouldn't know. It's the dead of night and all I can see is a gas station and a bar. A Border Patrol truck passes by the railroad crossing. We're now three hours behind schedule. I get a weak cell signal and call my hotel to tell them it will be after 1 a.m., perhaps 2, by the time I get in.

There's an old song "Waltz Across Texas." It might be a good theme song for the Sunset Limited _ slow, with lots of dips.

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FINAL DESTINATION

Through the dark, we climb through the Anacacho Mountains to San Antonio, home of the Alamo, five missions, Tim Duncan and more than a million other people who make it the seventh-largest city in the country. They're pretty much all in bed by the time I get there.

On the final evening, Rachel McRae, a dining room management trainee, had come by to ask for a dinner reservation time. I ask how late the train is running. About an hour. "That's OK," I say, "I kind of think of it as a cruise."

McRae politely bristled over the delays that so many _ Amtrak employees and passengers alike _ take in stride.

"There are some people who would like to just tear up these trains and throw them away," McRae said. "But wouldn't it be wonderful to have trains like they have in Europe. Wouldn't it be great if all the people who have never been on a train had a chance to see what you're seeing and get there on time. But then I love trains."

In the end, I spend parts of three days on the train. We pull into San Antonio hours late. I lug my bags down the narrow staircase and step out into the humid, cool night. It's 2 a.m. and my hotel is four blocks away. I roll my bags along the empty streets. About the time I get upstairs and put my head on the pillow, the Sunset Limited is on its way east. On to Houston and New Orleans.

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IF YOU GO:

CABIN CHOICE: Traveling east, the even-numbered cabins are on the north side of the train, which gets less direct sun. Try to get one in the middle, away from the bathroom, doors and coffee pot.

I prefer the superliner cabins without bathrooms. They are the best deal. Deluxe cabins come with an unnecessary chair, and they aren't that much more comfortable.

PRIVACY HELP: Bring a safety pin. The Velcro on the curtains that cover the windows to the cabin is sometimes worn out.

LIMIT LUGGAGE: Check as much of your luggage to be picked up at your destination as you can. The space in the cabins is limited, especially at night, and the only storage space is downstairs in a luggage rack, near the exit doors. Unless you want to run downstairs at every stop to make sure someone isn't taking your bag, it's better to have it back in the baggage car.

EXTRA EATS: Bring lots of snacks _ selection is limited on the train and, as with most captive audiences, the prices are high.

DON'T COUNT THE TIME: Always leave plenty of wiggle room for delays. It's not unheard of for trains to arrive four to six hours late. If you want to try the Sunset Limited, I suggest you take it eastbound out of Los Angeles. Since that is the terminus, the train will nearly always depart on time. If you are heading west, start in New Orleans if you can. Call or check the Amtrak Web site to find out if your train is delayed.

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FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: Bring a portable DVD player. Even though the socket says "razor only," it's OK for DVD players and laptops. I brought along "Michael Clayton" but could have used one or two more, particularly with the long delays. Even with the reading lamps, the rooms aren't conducive to reading at night.

INFORMATION: Amtrak offers a host of discounts and special fares, so check the Web site at www.amtrak.comor call 800-872-7245 to get the exact fares for the dates you want to travel. Book holiday season travel well in advance.

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Gary A. Warner: gettingaway@ocregister.com

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© 2008, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).