Amtrak – Seattle to San Francisco
Thursday, 27 July 2023
▲Amtrak Coast Starlight to Los Angeles
I’m travelling from Melbourne to London the long way and that includes the daily Amtrak train from Seattle to Oakland down the US West Coast. It continues on to Los Angeles, but my 800mile journey takes 23 hours 30 minutes, that’s an average of 34mph, 55kph. I’m certainly not doing it to save money, there are plenty of flights which take two hours 20 minutes and cost US$110 to US$120 while a seat for the overnight train trip typically costs US$180 to US$220. I’m paying a lot more than that, US$672 for a roomette, which means seats that fold down to make a bed, but no toilet. A room with a toilet and shower is even more expensive.
◄ The Amtrak driver climbs on board
▲ My Amtrak train at King St Station in Seattle –
We’ll go through three states, Washington, Oregon and into California on our way south and there’s plenty of opportunity to watch the scenery go by, particularly from the glassy observation car which surprisingly never gets crowded out. The view is even better with a cold can of Blue Moon beer which the snack barman assures me is the most popular beer on Amtrak, well on this service at least. My beer is accompanied by a long chat with a cyclist who boarded in Seattle. He’s getting off in Sacramento to do a ride in the Sierras and we talk politics, bicycles, demography. Unfortunately there’s no Wi-Fi, but we’re generally in mobile phone range.
▲ Centralia Station in Washington State – we’ve already passed the other Vancouver, the Washington State one, when we pause at the pretty Centralia Station
▲ Union Station, Portland, Oregon – we make a 45 minutes stop in Portland, plenty of time to get off and wander around the very classy station. Inside there’s lots of marble and outside there’s an impressive clock tower topped by ‘Union Station’ and ‘Go By Train’ signs. There’s an interruption for a freight train passing just before Salem. There are views, mountains, towns and in the observation car, where I hang out a fair amount, there’s a very – extremely even – talkative and opinionated African-American guy who is there for almost the entire trip. If he’s not noisy enough by himself (and he certainly is) he also plays his radio (wear headphones they request). I get off for another short stroll at Eugene, Oregon and one of the boarding passengers is toting her fold-up Brompton bicycle.
◄ My dinner reservation – the train has a café and a restaurant, but my pricey roomette ticket includes lunch, dinner and then breakfast in the restaurant. There’s generally somebody interesting to talk with, at lunch I have a pretty good burger and chat with an elderly couple who lived in Berkeley at one time. She tells me about a trip when the train broke down for eight hours at night when it was cold, there was no power and the conductor came around asking if anyone had a phone which still had some charge?
Before dinner there’s another freight train passing, we pull off, the freighter passes, we reverse back and get back on the main line, earlier there was a double crossing, freight trains in both directions. My 715 pm dinner reservation is the last sitting after all the early bird diners. I have shrimp, flat iron steak, lemon cake and a glass of Malbec, the food is really not bad. Then there’s a long spell by a lake and all through dinner we’re passing through forest, a couple of deer, snow drifts and another big lake as the sun sets, but there are only glimpses of it, before everybody drifts off and I do too, at 9 pm it’s shutting up for the night. Although first I do a walk right up to the front of the train, there are quite a lot of seats, but it’s not that full, a number of the more deluxe bedrooms would still be available as well. It’s actually not that long a train.
▲ Davis Station, California – having gone to bed reasonably early in my ‘roomette’ I sleep, pretty well, a couple more wake ups – where are we in the middle of the night, I never see Chico, California passing by? Suddenly it’s past 7 am and we pause in Davis with its nicely Spanish-influenced station and then we’re stopping in Sacramento, the capital of California, and an hour behind schedule. From there we track by the San Francisco Bay, past Martinez, and into the East Bay.
▲ Amtrak Emeryville, Station – I have breakfast while I’m wondering what to do at Jack London Square in Oakland, the end of my trip. The train runs through Oakland, across the San Francisco Bay from the city itself and how do I get from the Oakland stop to a BART station to get into San Francisco? We’re only minutes from Oakland, and I’m contemplating that we’ll be passing the platform by the warehouse of the now closed Lonely Planet office, when they announce we’re about to arrive in Emeryville and there’s a bus service from there straight to San Francisco.
The Lonely Planet office, when Maureen and I first set it up in 1984, was in Emeryville. At that time the Emeryville police chief tooled around in a DeLorean, but the place has grown enormously since then. I hurriedly abandon the train four miles from my intended final destination and take the connecting bus. Twenty minutes later I’m dropped off walking distance from the citizenM San Francisco Union Square Hotel where, mirabile dictu, I can get straight into my room.
