Overland Route

Started: 2026-02-15 11:56:08

Submitted: 2026-02-15 13:53:31

Visibility: World-readable

Riding the California Zephyr the rest of the way home across the Great Basin across a snowy Donner Pass through Sacramento into the Bay Area

I slept in a sleeper roomette on the westbound California Zephyr as it traveled through the night through the Great Basin from Utah into Nevada. According to the timetable the train made several stops in the middle of the night, but I don't really remember them. I am not used to sleeping with the gentle side-to-side rocking of the train, but aside from occasionally threatening to roll me over in bed when I wasn't expecting, the sleeper bunk proved to be a comfortable sleeping arrangement. (And it turned out that Amtrak's pillow was significantly better than the pillows provided by both of the Airbnbs we stayed at.)

We ate breakfast in the dining car while the scenery of the high desert in Nevada rolled by outside the train window: dry land with scrubby shrubs and low rocky hills in the middle distance.

Our train made a lengthy station stop in Reno, giving me plenty of time to step out onto the platform and walk the length of the train. I recorded the numbers of each of the cars in the train, from front to back:

1. 61 GE Genesis diesel locomotive
2. 158 GE Genesis diesel locomotive
3. 39012 Transition sleeper
4. 32033 Sleeper
5. 32006 Sleeper (this was the car that we traveled in)
6. 38045 Dining
7. 33022 Sightseer lounge
8. 34041 Coach
9. 31012 Coach/baggage

According to the car numbers, this was a mixture of Superliner I cars (built by Pullman between 1975 and 1981) and Superliner II cars (built by Bombardier between 1991 and 1996).

Heading out of Reno we began to climb into the Sierras, following the Truckee River. I took the opportunity to take a shower on the lower level of my sleeper car (which was probably the first time I've had a shower in a moving vehicle); this was considerably more comfortable than any overnight plane flight I've had.

As we continued west, following the route laid out for the first trans-continental railroad, I joined Kiesa in the observation car for a better view of the scenery leading up to Truckee and over Donner Pass. Unlike Winter Park where I spent three days skiing, the Tahoe basin got dumped with snow starting at Christmas (to the point where I began to wonder how much snow was too much snow to begin to disrupt train travel). We traveled in a break in the long line of storms; the skies around Truckee were partly cloudy. The train stopped in a snow-covered Truckee, where every ticket was sold and the train crew expected every seat to be full (and kept reminding us to move bags off seats in the coach cars).

West of Truckee the train made its final approach to Donner Pass, heading up a long valley then looping back the other side to gain elevation at a grade more gentle than nearby I-80. The trees were completely covered in snow; it looked like the trees were flocked and that someone had gone overboard dumping too much snow on the trees than they could handle.

I tried to track the progress of our train with Google Maps cross-referencing the Roseville Subdivision page on Wikipedia, but I didn't have a detailed map of precisely which of the tracks were considered the current main line. We cut through a ridge in a tunnel and emerged with a commanding view of Donner Lake below, with the interstate highway visible on the other side. I could just make out trucks and cars crawling up the grade to Donner Summit, and I indulged a look at Google Maps to see how bad traffic was on the highway.

As we climbed slowly to the Sierra crest surrounded by trees covered by sticky snow we traveled through a series of snow sheds protecting the track from the heaviest winter snow. In this picture the snow shed visible on the left is part of our route; the snow sheds on the mountainside in the middle of the picture make up the original route to Donner Summit, now mothballed (but not officially abandoned) in favor of a lower-elevation tunnel through the mountains to the left.

Our trip through the Sierra crest ended with a trip to the two-mile-long Tunnel number 41, built a few hundred feet below the old rail route across Donner Pass. We emerged through the tunnel's west portal under the Sugar Bowl Ski Resort, and began our long gradual descent down the still-snow-covered west side of the Sierras towards Sacramento.

Once we were past Sugar Bowl the magnificence of the scenery began to subside; we were traveling through more snow-covered forests with occasional views of the interstate highway but there were no more stunning vistas of mountain scenery. I headed back to my sleeper roomette, transiting the hallway next to the full-sized sleeper rooms to the right, with the snow-covered scenery sliding by on the left. It was an interesting experience walking through a large, climate-controlled vehicle next to the outdoor scenery, jostling as the train bumped along the tracks but isolated and protected from whatever I could see outside.

We ate lunch in the dining car on our long descent towards Sacramento, as the snow began to subside and the forest began to transition from evergreen to deciduous. I watched the 2017 version of Murder on the Orient Express. Having just seen the 1974 version the night before I approached watching the movie like a fairy tale: what choices would they make in this version that were like or unlike the other? I liked both versions but it was also clear that they were products of the time in which they were made, influenced by and commenting on their environment rather than faithfully reproducing the original 1934 novel.

The train stopped in a number of cities on the long broad valley descending towards Sacramento. I got out at Roseville and walked around the station platform in the beginnings of the next storm of the system of storms that hit California starting at Christmas. (This storm turned out to be the final storm of the month; the weather remained uncharacteristically dry for the next six weeks until the middle of February.) West of Sacramento, the Yolo Bypass was flooded with overflow from the Sacramento River from the winter storms.

From Sacramento the rest of the way to Emeryville I knew the route from previous trips on the Capitol Corridor (once to Sacramento, a few times from Martinez). The long-distance California Zephyr made fewer stops along the way than the regional Capitol Corridor. We rolled through Solano County, crossed the Carquinez Strait, stopped in Richmond, and finally pulled into the last stop at Emeryville, two-and-a-half days after the train left Chicago and 31 hours after we boarded the train in Winter Park.

The Amtrak station in Emeryville may be convenient for people trying to get to Emeryville, but it was not especially convenient for us, because we needed to get back to our car where we had parked at SFO two weeks ago before Christmas. To get there we boarded the Amtrak coach parked in the parking garage opposite the train platform and drove across the traffic on the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. I expected the coach to drop us off inside the Salesforce Transit Center, but instead it dropped us off in the rain on the curb in front of Salesforce Tower a half-hour after leaving Emeryville. From there it was a two-block walk through the rain to Embarcadero Station, where we road a slow creaky elevator down to the BART platform, permanently staffed by an attendant whose primary purpose seemed to be to keep unhoused people from using the elevator as a urinal. From Embarcadero we took BART to SFO then caught the people-mover to long-term parking, finally arriving at the car more than an hour after arriving in San Francisco. (In retrospect the better choice looked like it would be to transfer to BART at Richmond.)

We drove the rest of the way home, arriving home after being away for almost two weeks visiting family for Christmas, skiing for New Year's, and taking the train the rest of the way to the Bay Area. The California Zephyr in a sleeper car was a great experience and I'm thrilled we got a chance to ride it.