Originally published in
the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine
Feb. 1, 2004

If long-distance train travel has a future,
this is it.Joseph, a burly, ex-Special Forces Marine is sitting next to me munching peanuts and gazing out the big, domed windows of the Pacific Parlour Car. We are traveling on the Coast Starlight, the daily train that runs between Los Angeles and Seattle, a 1,389- mile trek that is arguably the most beautiful stretch of railroad in the country. I met Joseph only a few hours ago, but already I know more about him than I do about some of my closest friends. I know about his dying mother, his sister’s disappearing husbands, the writing contest he once won, the six months he spent living out of his truck and his nonexistent sperm count. It’s part of the odd and completely wonderful dynamic that happens on long- distance trains, the way people who would never even meet in "real life" – like Joseph and me -- form brief but intense connections when they are in limbo, when they have relaxed into that long, timeless stretch of time between here and there.It is after dinner on the second night of the trip. The train sidles along the Columbia River passing through the rich, river-bottom farmland north of Portland and makes its way north to hug Puget Sound. This trip is supposed to take 34 hours but, because of a prolonged delay earlier in the day – typical for this train, which has earned the nickname the Coast Starlate -- we have already been on the train close to 34 hours and are still many miles and several hours from our destination.About an hour south of SEATAC airport, Joseph starts laughing."You know," he says, "someone could take off from LAX right now and still beat us to Seattle." We are both quiet for a moment thinking about that and munching our peanuts. I smile and shake my head. He looks over at me. "Yeah, I know what you mean," he says, although I have not said anything. "I feel sorry for them, too."In an era when every other form of long-distance transportation—air, car or bus--is fraught with tension and aggravation, Joseph’s remark speaks to a secret Amtrak re-discovered with the Coast Starlight: It’s not about when you arrive. It’s about how you get there. It’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey..And what was true in the 1990s, when an Amtrak genius named Brian Rosenwald reinvented the Coast Starlight, is even truer now as security crackdowns are transforming air travel into a tedious, time-consuming and unpleasant experience. But for passengers on the Coast Starlight, there were no long lines and cramped seats, no crowded highways and bad road food. Instead, those who traveled the train Rosenwald remade found leisurely gourmet meals, roomy armchairs and comfortable beds. They loved it, and they flocked to first-class accommodations in record numbers. In a few short years, the Coast Starlight became a model of long-distance train travel.Or maybe not. As often happens in large organizations, especially those with government oversight, one man’s singular vision has a way of being blurred over time. As rewarding as Rosenwald’s innovations have been for passengers and as financially rewarding as they have been for Amtrak, the Coast Starlight is losing some of its luster these days. It’s still a remarkable journey, but Rosenwald no longer oversees the train. Whether the Starlight continues to flourish is a question that may well determine the future of long-distance trains in the U.S.The Coast Starlight used to be known, in Amtrak circles, as "Brian’s train." That’s how closely he was associated with this route, how influential his leadership was, how well he knew the train and everyone who worked on it or for it, from the coach car attendants to the galley cooks to the engineers to ticket clerks in stations along the way. Back in the mid-1990s, a period which he now considers the high-water mark of his three-decade Amtrak career, Rosenwald was general manager of the Coast Starlight. During his almost five years n the job, he traveled the train more than 200 times and has almost as many tales to tell.His favorite story begins with a truck full of mushrooms wrapping itself around the locomotive of the northbound Coast Starlight in late December, 1998. The train – jammed with passengers making their way to New Year’s Eve celebrations in Portland and Seattle -- was stuck in Salinas for nine hours while a crane extricated the locomotive from the mess and then another six hours for repairs. This normally wouldn’t sound like a story a general manager would want to tell about his train, but Rosenwald delights in it. When he got the distress call at his L.A. office, his first thought was the hundreds of passengers who were not going to make it to their destinations in time for New Year’s Eve. He dropped everything, jumped on a plane to Sacramento, then caught a turbo prop to Klamath Falls, Oregon, where he arrived two hours before the now 15-hour late train was due in the station.He corralled the Klamath Falls ticket clerk and together, borrowing cash from the train station till, they headed for the local grocery store where they bought out the entire stock of champagne and every party hat, party favor and small gift they could find. When the train finally arrived, Rosenwald boarded and, with the charm and verve that are his hallmarks, proceeded to single-handedly orchestrate an off-the-cuff New Year’s Eve party for 320 guests. It was, he says – and the passengers agreed – an affair to remember.A voluble and animated man in his early 50s, Rosenwald looks a little like Gene Wilder, with his now-thinning but once-wild curly hair, his mischievous grin and his boyish high energy. He is a man with a direct gaze, a ready laugh, and lots and lots of ideas.Sitting in his L.A. office at Amtrak West in 1995, Rosenwald had a vision of what train travel could be, a vision based on childhood memories of riding the great American passenger trains of the 1950s, the Santa Fe SuperChief and El Capitan, from his home in Chicago to visit his grandparents in Albuquerque. Train travel, he reasoned – he remembered -- was more than a way to get from point A to point B. A train trip should be a wonderful, memorable experience, the kind of experience you told others about, the kind of experience you wanted to repeat. The kind of experience he had as an eight-year-old.Rosenwald was in the right place at the right time. He was in charge of a spectacularly beautiful route that served four great cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. And he had a boss, Gil Mallery, then-president of Amtrak West, who said those three little words one rarely hears from bosses, especially bosses in phlegmatic government agencies: Go for it.So Rosenwald did. He reimagined the Coast Starlight and initiated a series of dramatic upgrades, from regional specialties in the dining car to distinguished local wines (uncorked and poured, not the screw-top splits that were standard elsewhere on Amtrak), from fresh flowers and souvenir appreciation gifts in sleeping car bedrooms to live onboard entertainment.But his greatest innovation was the Pacific Parlour Car, a separate upscale bi-level lounge for first-class passengers, the place Joseph and I whiled away the hours eating peanuts, watching the scenery and pitying the people who traveled by plane. Rosenwald found several vintage 1950s Santa Fe Railway lounge cars, possibly some of the same cars he traveled in as a kid, and spent $3 million refurbishing them. The new Pacific Parlour Cars featured upstairs lounges with mahogany paneled walls, glass sconces, domed viewing windows, swivel armchairs, couches, banquettes and full bars, and downstairs cinemas with big-screen TVs and classic movie theater seating for 19.The cars were an immediate success. There was – and is – nothing like them on any other train in the system. When Rosenwald added a complimentary breakfast buffet and a mid-afternoon wine tasting, first-class ridership on the Coast Starlight jumped 77 percent, and first-class revenue rose from $6.5 million in 1994 to $15.9 million in 2001. Passengers were getting what Rosenwald called a "land cruise experience," and they were loving it.But Rosenwald was swimming upstream.The National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak’s official name) had been limping along since its inception in 1971 and seemed to face insolvency on a annual basis. For three decades, no one had wanted to face the truth that, regardless of the success of any one train, like Brian’s train, the business of moving people requires, and will undoubtedly always require, significant public subsidies. Amtrak has never been self-supporting, let alone profitable. In fact, no national rail passenger system in the world is profitable. All depend on the largesse of their governments.But the U.S. government has been particularly stingy. During the past two decades, as federal support for the national highway system doubled, and funds for aviation nearly tripled, Amtrak’s appropriations have been slashed by one-third. This fiscal year, Amtrak’s new president, David Gunn, was able to squeeze $1.2 billion out of Congress for his operating budget. Still, the U.S. passenger rail system remains among the least subsidized in the world.This hand-to-mouth existence, with its attendant bare bones budgeting and yearly belt-tightening measures is undercutting Rosenwald’s efforts and has begun to nibble away at his vision. The train that he made into a national showcase is today not quite as wonderful as it was in the late 90s.Several things behind the scenes conspired to nudge the Coast Starlight off its millennial peak. The tension between corporate cost-cutters and what Rosenwald calls the "amenities people" had always been intense, and Rosenwald’s innovations worsened it. He argued that amenities – which more than paid for themselves with higher revenues – are what made the experience and that cutting them, even in tough financial times, was short-sighted. But to the cost-cutters, Rosenwald was squandering resources. Managers of other routes, jealous of his success, were grumbling.Soon Amtrak's hand-to-mouth existence, with its attendant bare-bones budgeting, undercut Rosenwald's efforts. In spring 2000 he was offered a chance to supervise passenger services for three of Amtrak's long-distnace trains out of Chicago. Shortly after, it became hard for anyone to innovate anywhere. That’s because, in yet another of a string of cost-cutting moves meant to inch Amtrak toward the impossible goal of self-sufficiency, the corporation reorganized itself. Its new geographic divisions took away "ownership" of any single train from any single group of people. The Coast Starlight, for example, is now under the supervision of both the Southwest Division (L.A. to San Luis Obispo) and the Pacific Division (san Luis Obispo north). It’s not "Brian’s train" anymore. It’s not anybody’s train.It is mid-November on one of those bright, balmy days that makes everyone remember why they live in L.A., and I am sitting in the Pacific Parlour Car of the northbound Coast Starlight sipping a cup of herbal tea as we leave Union Station.I’ve stowed my luggage in compartment C, a deluxe sleeper two cars forward,a private seven-foot by six-and-a half-foot room with a five-foot-long picture window. Along one side of the compartment is a couch that opens into a twin bed. (There’s a pulldown berth above to handle a second traveler.) The couch faces a comfortable armchair. Between them is a small table with a bouquet of fresh flowers. I have a small closet, a vanity with a sink and lighted mirror and an enclosed cubicle for the commode which doubles as a shower stall. An airline would pack nine coach passengers in the space that is mine alone for the next day and a half.Two hours out of L.A. with Santa Barbara up ahead, the scenery is all tall palms and pink stucco houses. Beyond the manicured backyards, each with its own swimming pool, lies the Pacific, smooth and pewter gray under suddenly stormy skies. Inside, lunch is being served from a menu that includes quiche Lorraine, jambalaya, a roast beef and muenster sandwich, grilled chicken, and a salad of field greens, tomato, hard boiled egg, olive topanade and white asparagus spears topped with a piece of dill-seasoned salmon.Brian Rosenwald understood many things about long-distance train travel, not the least of which was the importance of the meal. One of his tonier innovations for the Coast Starlight was the Winemaker Dinner, with California and Oregon vintners invited onboard to talk about their wines, conduct tastings and, with guest chefs, orchestrate special meals. Rosenwald, himself a card-carrying oenophile, arranged more than a dozen of these, meeting with predictably excellent response. But the logistics of scheduling turned out to be too tough and time-consuming.More successful was his plan to change the dining car menu into a series of regional specialties highlighting California cuisine and Northwest seafood. One of the great moments of Rosenwald’s tenure with the Coast Starlight was when Saveur magazine, in its "100 favorite things from the world of food and drink," listed "Dinner on the Coast Starlight." The meal, Rosenwald fondly remembers, was halibut in a pesto crust."Brian was one smart cat," Willie tells me. "He had this train smokin’." Willie is the onboard chef, although he prefers the humbler title of "cook." An engaging man who could give Denzel a run for his money in the looks department, he has been a cook all his adult life and an Amtrak cook for more than ten years. Today, his forty-third birthday (a fact that has been circulating among the crew all morning, along with plans to surprise him with a cake), he will work a 17-hour shift down in the galley. Some of the food he and his crew will prepare from scratch – the salads, the breakfast egg dishes – but most of the lunch and dinner entrees come to him flash-frozen and vacuum-packed from Amtrak’s L.A. commissary. The quality is better than you would expect, although nothing like the unique meals on Brian’s train of yore.Rosenwald’s regional menus are also, unfortunately, a thing of the past, discontinued in mid-2002 when yet more cost-cutting measures took away local autonomy from the trains. The Coast Starlight itself was doing fine. It was at least breaking even and, during high season (summer and holidays), it might have been turning a profit – if Amtrak figured profitability on a train-by-train basis. But that’s not the way the system works. The costs of operating the entire national railroad enterprise are spread across the system, which means that even though Rosenwald had made a success of the Starlight, the train could not reap the rewards.During the ensuing dark period that followed the mid-2002 cuts, all Amtrak trains served exactly the same limited menu, a situation remedied when an Amtrak exec found himself traveling for 12 days on three separate trains and eating from the same menu every night. Now the trains operate on four cycles, with four different groups of entrees split across the national system.For the passengers, eating onboard is more than cuisine – although decent food is important – it is a social occasion. In the 64-seat dining car, with its 16 tables of four, the rule is "community seating." That means the dining car steward seats you wherever there is an open seat.At lunch the first day, I find myself seated next to a lively, artsy 75-year-old woman from Taos and across from a blonder-than-blond San Diego couple, he a medical insurance salesman with harrowing malpractice tales to tell. In under seven minutes Willie and his crew of two have the meals up, and we’re eating. With more than 200 passengers onboard and only one dining car to serve them, efficiency is a must. But somehow we don’t feel harried. It may be our server’s good humor or her Carolina drawl. It may be the cheesecake that comes for dessert, drizzled with either chocolate or cherry sauce. Or it may be the serenity of the tableau streaming by the window, mile after mile of perfect, deserted Pacific coast line. This section of coast halfway between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo is part of Vandenberg Airforce base. It is inaccessible to automobiles. This is a view you cannot get from your car window.North of San Luis Obispo, as the train snakes inland through the tawny hills of Paso Robles, Jose, the car attendant, announces the afternoon wine tasting, another of Rosenwald’s brainstorms. Jose sets out two platters of cheese and crackers on the buffet table at the center of the car, then goes back to the bar, gets on the P.A. system and begins talking about the wines.He’s no expert – he’s reading from a script provided by the wine sales staff who have contracted with Amtrak – but the script is a good one, with knowing phrases like "hint of blackberry" and "soft finish." As Jose walks the length of the car pouring generous tastes – more like half glasses – he also hawks the wine. Rosenwald’s idea was that the cost of the daily afternoon wine tastings would be offset by purchases of wine on board. The wine is moderately priced, $12 to $14 a bottle, and there are a number of takers in the car this afternoon.This daily afternoon event outlived both budget-slashing and Rosenwald’s tenure with the Coast Starlight, but others of his schemes have not. In its not-so-distant heyday, the Coast Starlight featured live, onboard entertainment with musicians, comics and magicians roaming the train. There were live concerts in the Pacific Parlour Car, jazz as the train pulled into Monterey Bay, classical guitar as the sun set on the Pacific. And, for one brief and shining moment, there was onboard massage.This afternoon, a lively bunch is gathered in the Pacific Parlour Car, a room full of strangers who, at this moment, have nowhere to be but here, nothing to do but sip wine, look out the window and chat. Across from me, the insurance salesman is deep in conversation with a burly guy who sports a shaved head, trim goatee and gorgeous full-arm tattoos. At one of the six banquettes, a Danny DeVito look-alike with thick Russian accent talks with a big bruiser of an Australian who is in the U.S. for the first time, traveling the country by rail not so much to see the scenery, he says, but to meet the people.Sitting next to me is a strapping young women who appears to be wearing pajamas. She tells me that she is a gofer for a trucking magnate, and then confides, sotto voce, that they are sharing a sleeping compartment. From her I get the gossip of the day: Drew Barrymore is traveling on this train, holed up in compartment B in the next car. I would be more impressed if Willie the cook had not already told me that the Dalai Lama recently took the Coast Starlight, bringing with him a private chef and a cadre of armed bodyguards.Somewhere outside Salinas, the storm clouds part to reveal an almost full milk-white moon. I had been hoping that we would outrun this storm and that the skies would clear because tonight is a lunar eclipse. Now I watch out the Parlour Car window as the dark gray shadow of the earth drifts across the face of the moon. I haven’t sat like this, in deep and thoughtless meditation, since, well, since I can’t remember. I hear a passenger say the train is right on time. I haven’t looked at my watch for hours.At dinner, the menu offers lamb shanks, T-bone steak, salmon, a chicken dish made with goat cheese and herbs and a vegetarian pasta. I am seated across from the Crawfords. David is a 60-ish part-time novelist, part-time designer of pharmaceutical facilities who spent formative years at Berkeley in the early 1960s. Pamela is a transplanted Canadian with a striking, luminous face that looks as if it was – as Jimmy Stewart said of Katherine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story" -- "lit from within."They are traveling to Seattle on their way to a three-day stay at a B&B on Vancouver Island. It’s a trip they had planned to take in the spring, but a few weeks ago an oncologist told Pamela that she had a rare form of lung cancer that had already metastasized to her brain. He gave her eight months to live. So that is exactly what she and her husband are doing: living. I watched them an hour ago in the Parlour Car as they took in the eclipse. They were holding hands, their shoulders touching, their faces serene. The train is perfect for them, a metaphor for how they are choosing to live – a long, seamless, timeless moment, no past, no future, all present.Sleeping on the train is a special joy, partly because the train cradles you with its motion, partly because there are no alarm clocks or phones or kids to drive to school in the morning. I tear myself away from the lounge car, where I sit after dinner conversing with my new friend, the ex-Marine Joseph."I can’t remember ever having talked so much, especially to a stranger," he says, an hour into our conversation. "I don’t know what’s come over me.""The train has come over you," I say.Back in my compartment, I fall asleep almost immediately, awakening just in time to see a pre-dawn indigo sky tinged with lemon and a full moon over Mt. Shasta. As I lie in bed with the curtains pulled back watching the day begin, the train cuts east above Dunsmuir to cross into Oregon, where, as if on cue, big purple rain clouds lumber in.Then I do something that seems deliciously sinful: I lock myself in my private cubicle and take a shower as the train chugs over the mountains at 30 mph. The water is hot, the pressure is strong and all the towels are above average. It doesn’t get much better than this.Late morning and I am talking with Jerry Griffo, a operations supervisor who sometimes rides this train. He’s good-looking, mid-50s, with a thatch of silvery gray hair, a neat moustache and one of those lively, always-in-motion faces that is not a middle-aged man’s face, not a supervisor’s face, but an aging kid’s face with a kid’s sense of adventure and mischief. Griffo grew up a few blocks from Union Station in what was then an Italian neighborhood, signed on as a car attendant with Amtrak twenty-five years ago and has been on track ever since. He has spent most of the trip chatting up passengers, making witty announcements on the P.A. and generally spreading charm and good cheer throughout the train. He doesn’t have Brian Rosenwald’s clout or independence, but Griffo does share his ex-boss’s sensibilities.We are sitting at the crew table in the back of the now deserted dining car where he is telling me about his plan to renovate the Coast Starlight’s Kiddie Cars, one of Rosenwald’s particularly brilliant innovations. The Kiddie Car is a coach-baggage car, with the lower level, where baggage used to be stored, converted into a big, open kids’ playroom. There’s carpet on the floor, a kiddie picnic table, toys and games, a VCR and TV screen (with a stash of cartoon videos) and benches for parents along the sides. Parents love the Kiddie car almost as much as the kids. But the real fans are the childless passengers in coach who no longer have to endure little kids running wild in the aisles.The original conversion was done for minimal cost more than seven years ago, and the cars have gotten some very hard wear in the interim. Amid Amtrak’s austerity budget and perennial financial uncertainty, Griffo has managed to find some money to recarpet the floor, paint the walls and restock the toy bins. Rosenwald’s torch has made it into the right hands.As Griffo talks, the train slows and then stops. We had been on time as we pulled out of Klamath Falls earlier that morning, twenty-two hours into the northward journey. But now, about half way down the western slope of the Cascades, two hours from Eugene, our luck has apparently run out. There’s a freight a half mile ahead of us without the horsepower to make it up a hill. An extra engine is going to have to travel from Klamath Falls, connect to the front of the freight and pull it onto a siding so we can get past. This will delay us for maybe an hour and a half.No one seems particularly upset. It’s not like we’re stuck in a cramped airplane cabin breathing stale air and staring at the tarmac. The train has stopped in a beautiful spot, the tracks cutting through a thick Douglas fir forest dotted with blazing red vine maple. It also helps that Jose keeps the Bloody Marys coming in the Parlour Car.In the cab of the locomotive, the Starlight’s two engineers now have some unwanted free time on their hands. I’m a little disappointed to note that they don’t wear overalls or steel-toed engineer boots or those nifty blue and white striped cloth hats with bills. But at least they have nicknames. The engineer at the controls is Porkchop; his co-worker – they trade off throughout their 318-mile stint – is Butterball. They are both philosophical about the delay. Butterball, also known as the Galloping Gourmet because of his skill at preparing Hungryman TV dinners on top of the big diesel engine, tucks into his brown-bag lunch. Porkchop, a thirty-year Amtrak veteran who dreams of opening an art gallery when he retires, leans back in his chair and starts talking about the job."Hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror," he says with a laugh. Butterball chews his sandwich and nods in agreement. Then they regale me with tales of what they and other engineers of their acquaintance have hit, from deer, elk and the occasional owl to a pick-up truck full of grain (which spilled out and filled the cab up to engineers’ necks) to their all-time favorite accident: a house. It was on the back of a flatbed making its way across the tracks at 5 mph. "Anything that can get in your way, does," says Porkchop. Then they both nod sagely.We’ve been stopped for more than an hour now. The problem is not simply the disabled freight up ahead but the fact that most of this route is single track, meaning that two trains can’t pass each other, or in this case, one train can’t get past another. Whichever train the Union Pacific dispatcher in Omaha says has to yield must back up to the nearest siding (which can be miles away) and wait for the other train to pass. Union Pacific owns these tracks, not Amtrak, so UP’s real moneymakers, the freight trains, usually get the go-ahead. Amtrak’s passenger trains sit and wait. This is one of the main reasons the Coast Starlight is, more often than not, the Coast Starlate.Porkchop thinks this is no way to run a railroad. Like everyone who works this train, he wants to see the Coast Starlight – and all the other long-distance passenger trains – succeed. And it’s not that he needs to protect his job. In fact, he’ll be retiring in just a few years. It’s that he loves trains. He believes in trains. He thinks the world would be a kinder, gentler place if we all took trains."What we need here," he says, "is another track, a dedicated track, a track just for us." Some stretches of the Starlight’s route are double-tracked, but adding another set of tracks through this portion of the Cascades would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which Amtrak doesn’t have and the federal government doesn’t want to spend. But it would mean that passenger trains could run on time, as they do throughout Europe and in Japan, which would mean people would be more apt to travel on them, as they do throughout Europe and Japan.Porkchop doesn’t see that day coming. He is disgusted. He talks about a multi-million-dollar freeway widening project and shakes his head. "That’s where the money goes" he says, "and that’s why it’s always going to be like this for us – just sitting and waiting for some freight."And that’s just what we do. We wait for the locomotive to come from Klamath Falls, and then we wait for the disabled freight to be pulled off on a siding, and then we wait for a freight behind us to go through. More than two hours since we first stopped, Porkchop hits the whistle button, releases the dynamic brake system and allows the 960 tons of train cars attached behind us to push the Coast Starlight down a two percent grade as we descend into the Willamette Valley and then point our nose north to Seattle.Brian Rosenwald made the Coast Starlight into a great train, the best long-distance train in the Amtrak system. The engineers, Jerry Griffo, Willie the cook – they are all True Believers, all followers of the Gospel According to Brian. And they all wan t to preserve what he created. And it should be preserved. If this train is less luxurious than it was in its heyday in the late 1990s, if it has fewer of the amenities Rosenwald imagined for it, it is still an experience worth savoring: a timeless adventure, a short course in conviviality, an important lesson about making connections in a world often experienced by proxy, a Zen tutorial.I don’t know if Rosenwald will be able to export his vision to Chicago, where he now oversees the California Zephyr and the Texas Eagle. He’s been consumed by budget cutting since taking the job. Much of the focus has been on survival, he says, with a vision for long-distance trains with upgraded service deferred at least for the near future. But Rosenwald has allies – from Congressional supporters to citizen lobbyists, from train-obsessed rail fans to those of us weary of air travel and congested highways who have begun or renewed our romance with the rails.In the midst of Amtrak’s ongoing struggles, I’m betting on Brian. In fact, I’ve already booked passage on my next land cruise, a 2438-mile journey aboard the California Zephyr.