(The following story by Mike Perrault appeared on The Desert Sun website on May 7, 2010.)
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — At 4:47 a.m. Sunday, David Mince winced at the freight train’s lights as it pierced the darkness and rumbled past Amtrak’s station on the outskirts of north Palm Springs.
Less than 15 minutes later, the 54-year-old electrician and father of seven was aboard Amtrak’s Sunset Limited passenger train for a three-hour, 38-minute trip to Los Angeles. It’s a weekend ritual for the Hurricane Katrina survivor who moved to L.A. and often makes the round-trip to visit his brother in Palm Springs.
Mince never rode the rails before moving to California, and he never really had a soft spot in his heart for trains. Now he’s a regular who wants to incorporate train travel into a vacation.
“I definitely want to take the train up through Northern California, at least once,” Mince said as he huddled in a corner of the Palm Springs-owned station to avoid gusty early morning winds. “The train is the only way to see it.”
More people are riding trains these days. Overall ridership on Amtrak rose 4.3 percent from October to March compared to the same period last year.
Ridership on the Sunset Limited, which runs between Los Angeles and New Orleans, increased 15 percent to 41,843.
On Saturday, National Train Day, crowds will celebrate America’s love of trains at depots, train stations and transportation museums across the country, including at nearby stops such as San Bernardino and Los Angeles.
There will be no such fanfare Saturday at the Palm Springs station, one of 22 stops on Sunset Limited’s 2,000-mile journey between L.A. and the Big Easy.
The station has a parking lot, but no ticket booth, no snack machines or coffee dispensers. Passengers who arrive more than a half-hour before their departure said they must wait for a security guard to unlock restrooms.
None of that bothers Miguel Contreras, an American Airlines employee who visits friends and family in the Coachella Valley and enjoys Sunset Limited’s “smooth, safe, relaxing” train rides because they give him plenty of leg room, less stress and no traffic.
“It’s worth it, I’ll admit it,” Contreras said of the $18 trip to Los Angeles.
Contreras and about a dozen travelers gathered Sunday at the desolate, 13-year-old Palm Springs Amtrak station where the Sunset Limited stops a few minutes three times a week to load and unload passengers.
A white-bearded conductor, clad in traditional blue uniform and cap, urged smokers who stepped off the train for one last puff to extinguish their cigarettes. Then, he yelled, “All aboard.”
‘Greener’ travel
Nearly 42,000 passengers caught the Sunset Limited train at one of its more than 20 stops from October to March, a 15 percent increase from the same six-month period a year earlier, said Vernae Graham, Amtrak spokeswoman in Oakland.
Another 133,094 passengers took the Texas Eagle — which also stops three times a week in Palm Springs — to San Antonio, Fort Worth and other Texas cities, then on to Chicago. Ridership on that line rose 8.5 percent during that period.
Overall, 13.6 million people rode Amtrak from October to March, a 4.3 percent increase over last year. That’s on track to break Amtrak’s annual ridership record, Graham said.
At least part of the lure is that Amtrak is considered by some to be a “greener” mode of transportation.
The nation’s inter-city passenger rail operator, which boasts 21,000 route miles in 46 states and more than 300 daily trains to 500-plus destinations, is transitioning to ultra low-sulfur fuels and taking other steps to help environmentally.
Trains generate less carbon dioxide than air and car travel, said Roy Deitchman, Amtrak’s vice president of environmental, health and safety.
Traveling by rail is about 20 percent more fuel efficient than airlines and 28 percent more than automobiles on a per-passenger-mile basis, Deitchman said.
Within about five years, Amtrak plans to replace its entire passenger train fleet.
Train is “the only way to see southern America,” insisted Roland Boer, a Newcastle, Australia, resident who opted for the Sunset Limited.
“I must admit that rail is not the first word that jumps to mind when thinking of the USA,” Boer said. “Which is precisely why we decided to travel across the country by train.”
Boer said “the only shame of it” was some of it was night travel.
“But that gave a whole new angle if you sleep by the window with the curtain open: moonlight, thundering engines dopplering past with blaring headlights, stations at ungodly hours where people stepped on and off blearily and with pillows under their arms.”
For now, Amtrak stops at only one Coachella Valley location. But riders in the east valley could eventually see another stop if the proposed Indio Transportation Center at Indio Boulevard east of the Jackson Street overpass comes to fruition.
Mince applauds National Train Day or anything that will get people revved up about trains. He also takes the Metrolink to visit daughters in Los Angeles.
“For me, the train system out here has been great,” he said.