Winter Storms Snarl Train Routes in Oregon

Portland, Oregon -- It's that final bit of spring break, when your heart and mind are already leaning home and you've just got those few hours before you're there...

...except those few hours multiply out to an endless eternity.

I, like many Americans, ride the train. Specifically, given the lack of choice in the matter, it's Amtrak. The benefits of train travel won me over when I was just getting into this whole travel thing: it's inexpensive when compared to the costs associated with a car, gas, insurance, that whole shebang. And it's convenient to get around with the stations being located downtown and how you don't need to worry about parking a car (or getting it thieved), how you get to look out the window at the scenery passing by without a thought for traffic... It's a lovely, lovely affair.

This last Sunday I was riding the Coast Starlight from Sacramento to Portland, the last stretch of land between myself and home. We boarded at midnight on a clear night, and fell asleep to the swaying of the train down the tracks on home.

I woke up not as near to Portland as I should have been. We had a three-hour delay in Dunsmuir, California: one of our locomotives had died trying to get up the hill. Recent snowfall had made conditions much more difficult for the train to overcome the steep mountain gradient. Eventually, another locomotive was driven up, and we were on our way again.

The train then continued to roll through a veritable winter wonderland, one getting whiter by the mile. By the time we neared Mt Shasta, we couldn't even see it: it was a full-on blizzard, with the train inching up the slippery tracks. What glimpses we could catch of the neighboring scenery was swathed in white, great black basalt flows covered over in snow, trees out of Christmas snowglobes-and train tracks, white and smooth stretching out a few scarce yards ahead of us.

Once we had reached Klamath Falls, the blizzard had abated, but the countryside was still white. As we continued on north to Portland, the snow slowly melted, eventually fading out to the brilliant green of Portland, a gift of the gray rain that so many locals complain. This was the world I was used to again.

Were we late? Horrendously so. Regretably so? Nah. Driving would have been much worse, more likely to have left us stranded in one of those mountain towns. And "bad weather", even if it caused a bit of a delay, seems misnamed given the incredibly beauty of the passing scenery, sleek silver train slipping through a world of swirling white below Mt Shasta.