The fifth leg of our journey was on the California Zephyr from Emeryville, California, just outside San Francisco, to Chicago, Illinois. We were supposed to get to Chicago around 3 in the afternoon and were to stay a night in a hotel and catch the Lake Shore Limited to Rochester, New York at 9:30 the next evening.
On the California Zephyr we again had a roomette, identical to the one we had on the Coast Starlight since this train also consisted of Superliners. One thing we figured out was that if we left the upper bed down during the day that gave us a shelf on which to put our luggage. We just had to watch out when getting up from our seats, so as not to bang our heads. Carol insists that her head is *still* sore from all the times she forgot. Our meals were again included and were on par with what we were served on the Coast Starlight. Unfortunately the menu did not change, we were offered the same thing every day.
We left Emeryville a little after 9 in the morning, right about on time, and saw the mothball fleet again on our way out. We headed east across California and by early afternoon were in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Sierra Nevadas seemed steeper and more rugged than the Canadian Rockies. There were more tunnels and bridges than on the Canadian line. One amazing view was of the American River more in its valley more than 2,000 feet below the train. By early evening we reached Reno, Nevada and the high desert.
Even though we had to wait for every west-bound freight we got to Reno, Nevada before 4:45 pm, only about half an hour behind schedule.
During all this our car attendant quit in the early evening, before we even got to Elko, Nevada. All the passengers in our car noticed that he was not doing a good job. One of the other passengers spoke to the conductor about him and it turned out he had not been doing his job at all for some time, but union rules kept them from taking swift action. The attendants from the other sleeper cars took over our car as well as their own and had us well taken care of until we got to Denver and a new attendant came on board for our car. Kudos to Bob and Jim! Especially Jim who worked for something like 20 hours straight to get our car in proper condition.
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