(The following story by Chris Hubbuch appeared on the La Crosse Tribune website on July 6.)
MILWAUKEE — In the dormitory car of the Empire Builder, Conductor Jim Brando shuffles through the ticket stubs, sorting them by destination and checking them against his manifest as the train zips through the Wisconsin countryside.
It’s a 79-mph office.
Leaving Milwaukee, he has 396 passengers, three shy of a full train. The bulk — 88 — are heading to St. Paul. A dozen or so will go the whole 2,206 miles to Seattle. Nineteen will get off in La Crosse.
Twice a day, the stainless steel, double-decker train clatters through La Crosse on its cross-country odyssey.
Once a crossroads for five rail lines, La Crosse now gets only two trains a day — one eastbound, one westbound. But with gas prices at a record high and airline rates climbing, more people are riding the train, and rail advocates are clamoring for more service to the Twin Cities and Chicago.
Diesel-electric locomotives long ago replaced steam engines, and modern trains offer plenty of luxury accommodations for those who can afford them, but onboard the Seattle-Chicago Empire Builder, rail travel still is an adventure.
‘Old friends’
While the majority of passengers ride only a segment of the route, a few go for the long haul.
The fortunate ride in the luxury of bedroom suites, with Murphy beds and private showers, or private sleeping compartments. Those on a budget go coach, catching what sleep they can in the reclining seats.
Karen Springsteen and Eli Ochshorn were finishing up a five-week journey around the country — part honeymoon, part celebration of finishing graduate school before starting teaching jobs.
David and Ruth Ann Hoover brought their five children on a two-week adventure. The Mennonite family from Mifflinburg, Penn., rode to Flagstaff, Ariz., visited the Grand Canyon and a friend near Los Angeles, rode up the west coast to Seattle and saw Glacier Park during their circuit of the country.
Last week, they headed to Chicago for the final leg of their journey.
David Hoover, a 33-year-old dairy farmer, surveyed the passing farmland. He still was impressed by Montana and North Dakota.
“I never saw so much wheat in my life,” he said.
Amish and Mennonite passengers are a common sight on the Empire Builder.
“There’s an atmosphere that’s different on the train than any other form of transportation,” said George Strombeck, a retired music professor who volunteers during the summer as a National Park Service tour guide. “Everybody seems to be old friends.”
The Parks service coordinates the tour guides for the Chicago-Winona leg of the Empire Builder during the summer tourist season. On a recent trip, Strombeck and partner Joe Kuczynski sat in the lounge car offering commentary and trivia on the Wisconsin landscape. They pointed out cranberry bogs and offered some history of train tunnels as the Empire approached a 1,300-foot tunnel west of Tomah, the only working train tunnel left in the state.
Working on the railroad
Brando is 55 and has been working on trains since 1975. Growing up in Jersey City, N.J., he dreamed of working on the railroad. His father worked for the now-defunct Railway Express Agency, and sometimes Brando would get to ride on the switch engines.
He studied history at Milton College and can talk in detail about the history of railroads. In the Reeseville marsh east of Columbus, Wis., he launches into a story about the construction of the line in 1854, when a locomotive supposedly sank in the muck.
He bemoans the way cars and planes — aided by government policy — nearly made rail irrelevant.
“At its peak in 1916, the railroad had 403,000 miles of track,” he said. “Today, it’s about 210,000.”
He’s just as quick to point out that passenger rail isn’t dead.
The assistant conductor, Ben Bertrand, calls the customer service department to check on upgrading some passengers to a sleeper compartment, but it turns out the sleeping cars are full.
“Yep, nobody rides the train anymore,” Brando says sarcastically.
Full trains are more common this year, as more folks than ever are riding the rails.
Amtrak is having the best year in its 37-year history. Nationwide, ridership is up 11 percent since October. So far this year in La Crosse, it’s up more than 14 percent, with an average of about 2,400 passengers getting on and off the train each month.
Some ride because it’s cheaper than flying. Others point to convenience, camaraderie and the high price of gas, although the La Crosse to Chicago trip still is cheaper to drive, even at $4 per gallon.
Bonnie and Edward Laxton of Onalaska, Wis., recently took their five grandkids for a weekend in Chicago. They wore matching lime green T-shirts commemorating the trip. They cited the price of gas as one motivation for taking the train.
An expensive service
The train is thirsty, slurping about 2.3 gallons of diesel per mile.
But considering the number of passengers on board, it is more energy efficient than either airplanes or automobiles, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
The Empire Builder is Amtrak’s most popular overnight train, carrying more than half a million passengers last year. Such long-distance trains also are Amtrak’s costliest service, operating at an annual loss of more than $490 million.
That’s part of why the government-owned company, established in 1971 to take over the failing passenger rail service, relies on federal subsidies — $1.325 billion for the current fiscal year. Next year’s allocation will jump to $2.2 billion if the Senate approves the authorization bill passed last month by the House.
Such subsidies have drawn the ire of critics, such as the Heritage Foundation’s Ronald Utt, who argues the funding is out of proportion with the railroad’s relatively small fraction of travelers.
But highways and air traffic always have benefited from substantial subsidies, rail advocates argue, and more funding is exactly what’s needed to make trains competitive.
Seats on the Empire Builder are sold out many days in July, and it’s common for the train to sell out from mid-May through early September, said spokesman Marc Magliari.
Amtrak could sell more seats, but it doesn’t have the train cars. This is an argument supporters make for more funding.
“When you start adding additional trains … the passenger volume increases exponentially,” said Bob Fisher, a member of the Wisconsin Association of Railroad Passengers and a proponent of high-speed service through La Crosse.
A real adventure
As conductor, Brando is in charge of the train.
He makes sure all the passengers get to their destination safely and, to the best of his ability, on time. That means getting people on and off the train as quickly as possible, while making sure the engineer stays in contact with crews working on the tracks.
Because Amtrak runs on the Canadian Pacific’s tracks, trains often are subject to delays beyond Amtrak’s control — which accounts for the bulk of the delays on a route that has about a 65 percent on-time rating.
Conductors on this leg work between Chicago and Winona, Minn., where they spend the night before working the return trip. The other 12 crew members work six days at a time — three to Seattle, another three back — often starting their days at 5:30 a.m. and finishing after 11 p.m.
It can be a brutal schedule, even with five days off between trips.
Jocci “Juice” Maclin is a gregarious bartender from East Chicago who’s worked on trains for six years.
He complains his 6-month-old son changes every time he’s away.
“I like what I do,” Maclin said. “I just don’t like how I do it. It was nice when I was single. Real nice.”
Chef Pete Van Zanten and his two assistants work in a steamy, windowless kitchen below the dining car. On a busy night, they might crank out 180 meals from a menu that includes steak, roasted chicken, fish and lasagna. Only two Amtrak trains, including the Empire Builder, offering full service dining, an amenity restored two years ago.
“I’m happy about that,” Brando says. “That makes the folks happy.”
The kitchen is bigger than those in some restaurants, but it moves a lot more. “Trying to cook eggs going through the mountains?” Van Zanten asks, shaking his head.
Things tend to slide down here.
A couple of times per trip, Brando tours the train. At 6-foot-6 with a slouch, his head nearly grazes the ceiling as he lumbers down the narrow corridors, his right arm up to brace himself against unexpected lurches.
“Portage, Portage,” he calls out. “Next stop, Portage.”
At the rear car, he stops to look out the back window, where the tracks disappear in the distance. His favorite view — the one he used to get from the caboose. Those disappeared in the 1980s, part of the mechanization of the industry.
Brando’s radio crackles with a staccato, computer-generated voice: “Mile. Post. Two-oh-seven. Point. Five. Total axles, fifty-six. No. Defects. Train length, 1,163 feet. Seven-one degrees. Work safely. Detector out.”
About every 20 minutes, the train passes a mile marker where an infrared sensor checks for hanging objects or overheated axles.
Inspections used to be performed by station agents who watched the passing trains. Conductors would watch from the caboose for their signals: A lantern or flag held up was a high ball: everything OK. Swung low meant wash out. With a pinched nose, something’s burning.
Nowadays, there’s just a white sign by the tracks marking the automated sensor.
After each stop — most of which last just one to two minutes — Brando uses his cell phone to report the time and how many boarded and alighted.
In the days before cell phones, conductors would scribble messages, attach them to a flare and drop them as they passed a station. A station agent would relay the message up the line. When there were messages to pick up, he would lean out the window and grab a hanging basket with his arm.
“Railroading was an adventure,” he says. “I’m only talking about 30 years ago. It must have been a wild ride 70 years ago.”