California Zephyr

Started: 2026-02-11 19:50:55

Submitted: 2026-02-11 22:22:52

Visibility: World-readable

Heading home on an overnight train

After spending the first three days of 2026 skiing at Winter Park, the final part of our multi-part Christmas/New Year's travel was catching the train home on Sunday, the 4th of January.

Before we left Winter Park I walked around the ski village and found a shop selling Mary Jane stickers. I hadn't really been able to ski Mary Jane because of the marginal snow, but I still wanted a "No Pain/No Jane" sticker, and I hadn't been able to find it at the other shop I visited in the ski village in front of our ski condo. This particular shop also had trail markers for sale, including the trail named Cranmer that I had spent entirely too much time on, so I didn't feel like I needed to get a trail marker to remember it.

The westbound California Zephyr exits the Moffat Tunnel opposite the Winter Park ski village, but it skips the train platform at the ski village to the station a few miles away in the town of Winter Park. (The ski train stops there, then proceeds to the Winter Park/Fraser station to wait until the end of the day and head back down the mountain.) To get to the Winter Park/Fraser station we had to catch a local bus, which picked us up at the ski village and carried us down highway 40, then meandered through a residential neighborhood before dropping us off at the Amtrak station. We arrived with plenty of time before the train was scheduled to arrive at 10:53 MST.

From the town of Fraser I could see the Continental Divide to the east, covered in snow; but I couldn't identify any of the mountains I saw. I spent twenty-five years living in Boulder looking up at these mountains from the east, and I can still name every one of them; but from the west they all looked different and found it disorienting. The one formation I could identify was Devil's Thumb, sticking up from the ridge below Point 12,660.

Our train arrived right on time, pulling into the unstaffed station where we waited on the platform with maybe two dozen other people. There were boarding positions marked in letters on the single platform, but it wasn't clear what those positions corresponded to. We waited towards the end of the platform on the theory that the sleeper cars would be at the front of the train. When the train stopped we had to walk backwards along the train until we found our car, the third sleeper car, conveniently located right in front of the dining car.

When we boarded our two roomettes weren't ready yet so the sleeper car attendant directed us to one of the full-sized sleeper rooms around the corner to wait for a few minutes until he prepared our rooms. Each of the full-sized rooms was at least twice as big as the roomettes we traveled in, but they still held only two people; though it looked like there was a sliding partition door to join adjacent rooms.

It was only a few minutes after the train pulled out of the Winter Park station that our roomettes were ready. We moved into our rooms and settled in for the trip overnight to Emeryville. I ended up in a room with Calvin; Kiesa and Julian occupied another room across the hall and several rooms away.

I like trains and I will go to great lengths to find excuses to ride them; but Kiesa is especially interested in sleeper trains (probably because it gives her a chance to sit and read and do nothing else with all of her meals catered for her). So this trip had something for each of us.

We rode in sleeper #32006. According to the Superliner article on Wikipedia, this was one of the Superliner I cars built by Pullman-Standard between 1975 and 1981. (These were the last rail cars that Pullman built. A few of the cars in our train were Superliner II cars, built to the same design by Bombardier in the 1990s.)

Our train headed north, stopped in Granby, then turned west to follow the Colorado River. From where I sat in my roomette, I could only see out the right side of the train, so I missed half of the scenery. West of Kremmling the tracks left highway 40 and continued following the Colorado River downstream into a rugged canyon that my map tells me is Red Gorge. Around this time we headed to the dining car for lunch (our sleeper car tickets included meals in the dining car) and had the opportunity to pick our table; but we picked wrong and ended up with a table on the right side of the train, where the view was mostly the hillside; rather than the left side of the train, where we could have seen sweeping views of the rocky gorge above the river. (The windows were large enough that we could still look across the aisle but it wasn't the same impact.)

After lunch I traded seats with Julian and rode with Kiesa; though I still ended up in a backward-facing seat. This gave me the chance to look out the left side of the train as we entered another section of canyon on the Colorado River, downstream of the town of McCoy in the general vicinity of Burns. (None of these town names mean anything to me; this wasn't a part of Colorado I visited.)

I watched my map and the time carefully so I knew when we were coming into Glenwood Canyon. As the train headed through Dotsero I headed back to the observation car and found a seat looking out the right side of the train.

The Superliner observation car is probably the best part of the whole train, with large windows offering an expansive view of the scenery, plus windows curving into the ceiling offering a view of the walls of Glenwood Canyon climbing high above the train.

Glenwood Canyon is an engineering marvel, fitting an entire Interstate highway (two lanes in each direction) and a long-distance heavy-rail line, plus a bike path, into a narrow canyon carved by the Colorado River. The highway mostly sits on the north side of the canyon; the rail line the south side. In places the westbound lanes are carried on long viaducts; in others the only place to fit the westbound lanes is a tunnel, while the eastbound lanes can remain on the surface next to the river.

When I moved to Colorado with my family in 1991, I-70 was still under construction; it was one of the last pieces of the original interstate highway system to be completed. While I lived in Colorado I drove Glenwood Canyon multiple times (most recently ten years ago while moving from Boulder to San Francisco); this was my first chance to see the highway from the perspective of a train on the opposite bank.

I got Kiesa and Calvin to join me in the observation car, though I think I may have mislead Kiesa about what I was interested in seeing in the canyon. I was there for the engineering marvels, though the natural scenery was stunning too.

My favorite part of Glenwood Canyon is the Hanging Lake Tunnels: where all four lanes of the highway crosses the river on a bridge and immediately enter a pair of tunnels, leaving the whole canyon untouched for a short distance, except for the parking lot at the Hanging Lake rest stop where weary drivers see dire signs warning them of the dangerous conditions on the strenuous trail climbing to the lake.

We emerged from Glenwood Canyon into Glenwood Springs and stopped at the station, our first stop since Granby a few hours earlier. I left the observation lounge and returned to the roomette. We continued traveling west, following the Colorado river through western Colorado, past Rifle (where we didn't stop) and Grand Junction (where we did stop). I got out of the train at Grand Junction, to stretch my legs and walk along the train platform; but I didn't leave the platform. (This was one of the longer station stops on the route, and the conductor told us we could visit the convenience store in the station where we could buy things not sold on board like phone power adapters.)

We continued west as the sun set. In the dark we entered Utah and left the Colorado river behind. We ate supper in the dining car, as the trin rolled through the deserts of Utah through the evening, then returned to our roomettes.

For the trip I downloaded two movie versions of Murder on the Orient Express on my iPad, intending to watch both of them on the two days of my train trip. For Sunday night I picked the 1974 version and found it quite enjoyable for my train trip. (I was amused to see The sliding door connecting adjacent rooms that I had seen earlier in the day on our sleeper carriage as a plot point in the movie.) Then I prepared my little room for night (Calvin took the top bunk, folded down from the ceiling; I got the bottom bunk, formed by folding down the chairs facing each other) and discovered the blue night light in my room, which I had also seen in the movie. It felt a bit like the movie was coming to life around me; but the movie stopped there and no further plot points escaped into my life.

I went to sleep on the westbound California Zephyr as the train traveled between Provo and Salt Lake City, and onward along the Great Salt Lake towards California.