Traveling Outside of Time
“What we need here,” he says, “is another track, a dedicated track, a track just for us.” Some stretches of the Starlight’s route are double-tracked, but adding another set of tracks through this portion of the Cascades would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which Amtrak doesn’t have and the federal government doesn’t want to spend. But it would mean that passenger trains could run on time, as they do throughout Europe and in Japan, which would mean people would be more apt to travel on them, as they do throughout Europe and Japan.
Porkchop doesn’t see that day coming. He is disgusted. He talks about a multi-million-dollar freeway widening project and shakes his head. “That’s where the money goes” he says, “and that’s why it’s always going to be like this for us – just sitting and waiting for some freight.”
And that’s just what we do. We wait for the locomotive to come from Klamath Falls, and then we wait for the disabled freight to be pulled off on a siding, and then we wait for a freight behind us to go through. More than two hours since we first stopped, Porkchop hits the whistle button, releases the dynamic brake system and allows the 960 tons of train cars attached behind us to push the Coast Starlight down a two percent grade as we descend into the Willamette Valley and then point our nose north to Seattle.