Intermountain Rail

I just completed a round trip on the Zephyr from Salt Lake City to Denver for a meeting. Here are my observations of the trip:

-The train arrived eastbound in Salt Lake City on time despite it leaving Elko almost 2 hours late. Right now the Zephyr has to back in and out of the Salt Lake Station while they put in the new tracks and switches for the FrontRunner Commuter Rail Service. We ended up leaving a few minutes late due to a medical emergency on the train.

-The crew was excellent on this segment except for one incident with the Assistant Conductor on the Grand Junction-Denver segment. I boarded my coach, the car attendant asked if I needed anything, and put my luggage away. Since it was almost 4:45am and I normally get up at 5:00am to walk/jog, I decided just to head to the lounge car so I wouldn’t bother any of the sleeping passengers. A couple of minutes later the car attendant came into the car and made sure I found a seat ok, if everything was all right, and told me where I could find him most of the day. In addition the crew as very visible, constantly cleaning and checking on the customers.

-Timekeeping: In Springville (just outside of Provo) we got held up for 15-minutes by a BNSF freight train. Then just before Thistle we stopped for about 20-minutes with no explanation but I saw the crew on the ground inspecting the train and found out later the coach in front of the lounge car was setting off hot box detectors, and in addition it had minor flat spots. Besides that incident we had few delays except for 3 signals being dark and slow orders due to tie gangs working in a couple of different spots.

-The only bad incident of the day was when we stopped at Fraser. The conductor very clearly said that this would be a quick stop and no one was to get off the train unless their stop was Fraser. However, the assistant conductor had a couple of smoking buddies on the train so he let them and a couple of their friends off for a smoke. Then a couple of more saw them smoking and jumped off also. All in all it turned out to be to be a 15-minute stop instead of a couple of minutes.

-We arrived in Denver about 20-minutes late with the make up time and I simply walked down to the tunnel, over to the light rail station, paid for my ticket and got it out of the machine as a train pulled in, jumped on and had a 20-minute ride to the Southmoor station and stayed at a Marriott Towne House Suites that sits next to the Park-N-Ride lot at the station.

Return Trip:

-Arrived in Denver 2hr 30min late due to a BNSF freight train breaking down in front of the train between Omaha an Lincoln.

-The train was the same consist that I had coming east except for the trouble making coach in front of the lounge was replaced.

-The lounge car attendant was very friendly but beyond that not much can be said about the crew. The car attendants would be present when we would make a station stop and disappeared until the next one. Trash cans were overflowing, the cars were dirty, and they were missing the things that cover the headrest, so in other words a crew that just didn’t care. In fact there was a blind lady riding that train and she pulled the car attendant light and no body responded for 3 hours. Finally a passenger from Ireland helped the lady get to the restroom and then helped her to the lounge car. After she sat in the lounge car for about an hour the car attendant came in and yelled at her for leaving her seat.

-Timekeeping: I will have to say that UP did a good job trying to get us across the system. Once again we had three dark signals (in totally different areas than the eastbound problems) but otherwise the dispatcher put everything in the sidings for us. We arrived in Salt Lake City exactly two hours late.

This says it all about the on-board crew of this train: Since it was after midnight and people were trying to sleep, I walked down to the lower level of the coach and stayed in the vestibule for the last hour of the trip. About 20-minutes out of Salt Lake City, the car attendant came down stairs and said, “Oh, someone is actually getting off in Provo?” I said no, I am getting of in Salt Lake City. She says that I should go back upstairs because we are just entering Provo and I informed her that we stopped in Prove 40-mintes ago. She told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and that we had stopped in Helper 40-minutes ago and we are now arriving Provo (the last time I checked it takes 2-hours to get from Helper to Provo). Finally she looks out the window the left, comes back over and opens the window on the right side of the train and I point out the TRAX train going by and said Provo doesn’t have light rail. Then she looks around for a few minutes and says “I guess I need to wake up people getting of in Salt Lake, but how come we didn’t stop in Provo?”

Ridership: Neither train was more than half full. The station agent at Denver said there would only be 80 people on the train from Salt Lake to Reno and 115 beyond Reno.