When she first streaked across the plains 21 years ago, the California Zephyr was a gleaming wonder-on-wheels. The first luxury Vista-Dome streamliner to run between Chicago and San Francisco, the stainless-steel train topped 90 m.p.h. on the straightaway, dazzling onlookers at every wayside crossing. Last week the Cal Zephyr, rattling from disrepair and more than 6,000,000 miles of wear, made its through-run for the last time. Latest victim of rising costs, declining patronage and the reluctance of railroads to promote passenger service, the train was, as one member of the Interstate Commerce Commission termed it, "a unique national asset." Rolling for 2,525 miles through some of the U.S.'s most scenic and historic terrain, the Cal Zephyr afforded a view of America which new generations, hurtling along billboarded freeways or locked inside pressurized plane cabins, may never see. With that in mind, Associate Editor Ray Kennedy and Correspondent Mark Sullivan recently rode the Cal Zephyr for one last look. Their report:
Her coaches are shabby now. The mattresses in her sleeping cars sag and the sheets are threadbare. Resting there in Chicago's ancient, crumbling Union Station, she seems already part of the past. Yet once the California Zephyr lurches to life, hissing and huffing blue smoke, there is a sense of elegance remembered, a time when, as one porter put it, "they built trains for travel and not just transportation."
The Pullman beds and wash basins, folding out of the walls like part of a Chinese puzzle, still fascinate the children on board. In the dining car, the tuxedoed steward still seats passengers at tables with vases of fresh Colorado carnations resting on the white linen. There are Rocky Mountain trout, California champagne served in silver ice buckets, and afterward a selection of cigars and cordials. Sitting in the glassed-in Vista-Dome cars, passengers gaze out at the fleeting landscape like transients in time.
In the Cal Zephyr's cab, Engineer Ray Flaar, 61, shouts above the wild clatter of the rails: "I've made this run so many times I know every crosstie and humpback. But I'll tell you, there is always something new to see." A red pickup truck whirls out of a dusty side road, races the train for a few miles and then, pulling ahead, suddenly swerves over a crossing just 50 yards ahead. "Come fall," Flaar shouts, "when everybody is going down to the grain elevators, you get lots of guys racing you to a crossing." He tugs on the whistle and sounds a series of short toots and long wails. "That's my hello to an old gentleman in his 80s who lives back there. His relatives say it gives his morale a big boost."
Rumbling through Illinois, over the old steel-truss bridge spanning the Mississippi River, the Cal Zephyr crosses trails once plied by the Pony Express. Onward it races through Iowa and Nebraska. In the cities, the tracks are rimmed by hulking warehouses, rusting automobile graveyards and smoking garbage dumps. Then, gradually, such signs as ROYAL KNITTING MILLS and BOECKER COAL & GRAIN, SINCE 1898 give way to BEER 10¢ SHOT 25¢ and COOP FEED. Suddenly, after a cluster of mobile homes, the train plunges into a great open expanse of farm lands.