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Domed silos stand like sentinels on the horizon. Black Angus cattle amble toward lopsided gray barns. Giant TV antennas, strung with a maze of guy wires, soar 30 ft. above tiny farmhouses. Irrigation ditches run to nowhere. And standing forlornly in fields of stubble corn, boys in blue denim coveralls stare back, but they do not wave.
Next morning, after being run through an automatic washing machine in Denver's Union Station,* the Cal Zephyr climbs 4,000 ft. into the Rockies, passing into the first of 46 tunnels cut through the granite walls. In the crystalline mountain air, passengers in the Vista-Dome can see more than 100 miles, from the snow-veined summit of Pikes Peak in the south, to the rugged profile of Longs Peak in the north. Lying far below now, Denver looks like a toy town.
Winding ever higher, the Cal Zephyr disappears into the dank blackness of the 6.2-mile Moffat Tunnel, which crosses the Continental Divide at an elevation of 9,239 ft. After the train emerges, H.C. Livingstone lights an after-dinner cigar and remembers aloud how he worked on the tunnel until its completion in 1928. "There were a lot of bad accidents on that job," he recalls. "In the four years it took to finish it, 81 workers were killed."
Happier Man. The train meets the Colorado River and follows it for 238 miles, wending through myriad multihued gorges. At twilight the Cal Zephyr descends into a red desert and then goes highballing across the salt flats of Utah. "I take this train every chance I get," says George Vogel, 45, a budget analyst. "It's my form of relaxation, a chance to get back to myself. I don't have to worry about telephone calls, cutting the grass or crying kids. And when I get home, I'm a happier man."
Next morning, over steak and eggs and fresh copies of the Rocky Mountain News, passengers who were strangers a few hundred miles back are now chummily addressing one another by first names. The Cal Zephyr begins its 118-mile run through California's ruggedly beautiful Feather River Canyon. Rushing by waterfalls, thick stands of ponderosa pines and beds of bright orange poppies, the train passes Rich Bar and Oroville, towns that boomed into use in the days of the great gold rush.
The last leg of the 50-hour journey runs a straight course toward San Francisco along the rice fields, olive groves and vineyards of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valley. Gradually slowing, the Cal Zephyr chugs under an increasing number of highway bridges and then, at the outskirts of the metropolis, finally fades into the smog of civilization.
* For a while, the Zephyr will continue to run from Chicago to Denver. But there its through service will be interrupted by a 22-hour layover. The rest of the route West will be changed.