Trip Report: August 22 - 28, 2001
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
MONTANA DAYLIGHT
DAY THREE: SANDPOINT TO MISSOULA
Friday, August 24, 2001
Passengers on the Montana Daylight usually board a chartered bus in Spokane to meet the train. The sun comes up and a busload of passengers (only about 50 people this time, an unusually light load) arrives to board. In this year's brochure there are two classes of service listed: Discovery, with coaches, access to the lounge car, and meals at one's seat, and Summit class, which gives passengers access to the two Vista Domes, the dining car, and also the lounge car.
Our itinerary includes an overnight stop in Missoula, bus transfers to and from the Holiday Inn (included in the price) and then on the following day a trip to Livingston. Round-trip passengers have hotel accommodations booked in Livingston by the railtour company, officially known as Montana Rail Tours.
We are experiencing the preview of a additional class of service to be offered in next year's brochure, and known as Montana Gold. Passengers luxuriate in the elegance of restored private business cars, with a private chef and steward, and bedrooms for the overnight stays. We are in Rail Ventures' Yerba Buena, with open platform, lounge, drawing room, three bedrooms, dining room, shower, and kitchen. This car will be replaced in 2002 with a two-car set, the Northern View observation lounge, which sports a vista dome, a dining room, a bar/lounge, and an open rear platform. Its companion car is Northern Nites, a sleeper with six bedrooms and one Master Suite.
As there is going to be a very light load on this week's Yerba Buena, we are assigned to Drawing Room B en-suite with Bedroom A. Bedroom C is unoccupied and Bedroom D is being used by our car attendant, Barbara Klein.
Room B has two lower berths and an enclosed lavatory. A very narrow door connects to Room A which has a sofa and a desk. I set up our portable office on the desk and retire at 5 AM. Breakfast will be at 8:30 AM, so I set my alarm for 8:15. But I forget to change my clock to Mountain Time, and receive an knock on the door at 7:15 Pacific Time.
Breakfast is set up for the two of us in the dining room. Barbara is working the kitchen, serving breakfast, making up our room between courses, and cleaning up afterwards. This is all accomplished with quiet efficiency. By the time we complete breakfast, the bus arrives from Spokane with about 50 passengers. About half are dropped off at the Discovery Class coach, the other half at the Big Sky class Silver Scene Vista-Dome Lounge car. A couple, Bob and Mary Walker of Sandpoint, who contract photograph services to the company, arrive by car and join us in Yerba Buena. They are riding with us as far as our first stop in Missoula this evening. After we get acquainted, we are off at 9:30 AM and we all head for the open platform as the Montana Daylight rolls along the shores of Lake Pend Orielle.
At noon we are invited with a call on the Degnan dinner chimes, just as it used to be done in the "old days." Here we join the Big Sky passengers for luncheon, where we have a choice of three entrees, complimentary wine or beer, and dessert and coffee. Our choice of entrée is the Brook Trout. Dessert today is lemon meringue pie. After lunch we are back on the platform for the climb up to Evero Summit.
If we did not have access to the platform, we would be up in the Vista-Dome, but the platform is a really fascinating way to see the Montana Rockies, and we would be glued here for most of the trip, as "platform hogs." Barbara set up four folding chairs outside for our comfort and we sit here with our cameras, enjoying the lakes, streams, and mountains. Of course, much of our pleasure is in observing the passage of the train along the right of way. The roadbed on the MRL is superb, all ribbon rail except for the Evero Pass line. The ride outside is smooth and quiet. There are many semaphore signals along the line. Generally we move along at about 40 to 45 mph, although after a slowdown for some track work, we move out at nearly 60 to get back on schedule. Before we know it we are rolling downhill into Missoula, our first night's stop.
The passengers are bussed to the Holiday Inn. Bob and Mary disembark to drive back to Sandpoint. We join Mike Phillips, Vice President of Passenger Operations, for dinner at the Depot Restaurant, just one short block from the magnificent Missoula NP depot, where we enjoy a 24 oz. Montana prime rib. Then it is shower and to bed.
Saturday August 25, 2001
The second morning on the train takes us across Mullen Pass, down into Helena, up and over Bozeman Pass, the Continental Divide, then up the Missouri River to its headwaters at Three Forks. Here we are on the Trail of Lewis and Clark, who paddled up the Missouri to its headwaters in 1804. All too soon we arrive in Livingston, the former Gateway to Yellowstone Park. Northern Pacific used to transfer passengers at this beautiful station to the Comet, a connecting train to Gardiner, at the northern entrance to the park. Alas, Americans no longer take the train to Yellowstone, but rather clutter the park with their own private automobiles, taking something away from the experience that they came for.
Here at Livingston, about two thirds of the passengers have completed their train ride and many will be transferred to the Bozeman airport after overnighting. Some will continue on tomorrow with a bus tour of Yellowstone. We join Bill and Jan Taylor, the narrators, for dinner at the Steak and Chop House across from the depot, then a shower and to bed to look forward to the return trip to Sandpoint.
LIVINGSTON TO MISSOULA: DAY FIVE
The Montana Daylight is stabled overnight on a siding next to Depot Park in Livingston, Montana.
New passengers boarding today arrive by motorcoach from Bozeman, and have a tour of the classic, ex-Northern Pacific station an imposing structure of sandstone designed by the same architect who produced Grand Central Station. It still has the Northern Pacific logo, a circle divided with an S curved line into red and black halves, worked into the outside walls. Inside, it is now a museum with memorabilia of both NP and the Milwaukee Road the latter an electrified railroad whose abandoned roadbed runs parallel to the former NP tracks on many parts of this route. These NP rails were deemed surplus by the far seeing management of the Burlington Northern, and are now leased and operated by the Montana Rail Link, carrying, of all things, BNSF freight trains.
A walk around Livingston is a walk back into the 1950s, with funky neon signs on the buildings. Many of the buildings themselves are built of brick and are over a century old.
Soon the Montana Daylight, sporting a consist of vintage equipment, including two Vista Domes, pulls into the station. The Discovery Class (or coach) passengers are ushered aboard across a red carpet; then the train moves up for the Big Sky Class (dome) passengers to board.
We head for the dome Silver Scene. Passengers in Big Sky have reserved seats in the lower level and take turns enjoying the view from the clear class domes, where no seats are assigned, on a informal rotation basis.
Pulled by two blue-and-white Montana Rail Link engines, most of the carriages are stainless steel with a gold letter board over a blue window stripe. Our narrator, Bill Taylor, a native Montana historian, explains that the dispatcher is in Missoula and will be handling approximately 16 trains (all the others carrying freight) on the system today. The American Orient Express is stabled in Helena today, and will not be moving.
At the other end of our itinerary, passengers will detrain tomorrow in Sandpoint and be bussed to Spokane. While MRL does have trackage rights over the BNSF into Spokane, it doesn't have a contract to carry passengers on the segment between Sandpoint and Spokane. According to train manager Mike Phillips, only Amtrak does; thus this train would have to be hauled by Amtrak engines in order to reach Spokane. This is a complexity neither railroad wants to get into at the moment.
We have assumed that the difficulty of getting to this train's end points might be too much hassle for our clients, but now that we've finally done it ourselves, we think the trip is well worth it. This train is into the wild west shortly after departing the tiny towns at its endpoints. In other words, to get to out-of-the-way rural scenery, you have to go to some extra effort. Critics, according to CEO Marsha Pilgeram, have called this "the train from nowhere to nowhere." But the whole idea is to enjoy the scenery, not to go from A to B.
Getting to and from the train.
It is possible to fly or Amtrak into Spokane, stay at a hotel that will pick you up from Amtrak, and overnight in Spokane. Then a bus connection from Spokane to Sandpoint, where passengers board the train, is provided by MRRT, and at the other end, a motorcoach to Bozeman airport is also provided. Should passengers wish to travel from Livingston to Salt Lake City to connect with Amtrak's California Zephyr, it is now possible to do so as Montana Rockies Rail Tours offers one-way car rentals from Livingston to Salt Lake.
And, starting in 2002 self-drive options will be available along with the motorcoach segments in this year's brochure. So if you've ruled this trip out because you didn't want to include the trip to Yellowstone by motorcoach, you can now drive a rental car. MRRT will reserve your hotels so all you have to do is enjoy the journey!
It is difficult to describe the variety of scenery here in Montana; the wide-open spaces, trees, streams, lakes that abound at every turn. Don't ask us to remember the name of every river we encounter. Suffice it to say that one of them is the locale that inspired the book "A River Runs Through It." Another is the river where Robert Redford chose to actually film the movie. There are some grand and expensive homes isolated in these hills; many belong to celebrities.
Today we start climbing up to Bozeman Pass as soon as we depart, with our two engines laboring and belching smoke. Standing at the open vestibule, their sound is quite reminiscent of steam locomotives! We cross the Continental Divide at Bozeman Tunnel, nearly 6000 feet in elevation. Interstate 90 goes over the top, while the Montana Rail Link traverses the tunnel.
At Three Forks we veer away from I-90 to Trident where the Gallatin, the Madison, and the Jefferson meet to form the Missouri River. We see only three boats on it even though it is Sunday. Many deserted homesteads are falling to ruin, bearing silent testimony to the harsh conditions and weather extremes that have driven their occupants away from this beautiful area.
As we go through Helena we pass the stabled American Orient Express, with an Amtrak Genesis engine at the point in the new, bright-blue Acela-inspired paint scheme. Her passengers are out on a motorcoach excursion, and will return tonight.
Departing Helena we begin climbing Mullen Pass and stop for a red block. A long freight, with two BNSF engines on the point and four Montana Rail Link helpers in the middle, is struggling upgrade near the summit. As it rounds a sharp curve, we see one half of the train heading in one direction while the rear moves in the opposite direction. We move ahead slowly to find a downhill BNSF freight engine in a siding for us. The grade on the eastern slope is 2.2 %, gaining elevation with a sweeping S-curve and leaping side canyons over two curved steel trestles more than 200 feet in height. The western slope is more gentle with long tangents permitting some fast running. Our speed up the hill is about 20 mph, down the other side about 40 mph. The highest speed on the level straight away is about 65 mph.
"This train transforms people," our onboard historian, Bill, tells us privately. "They come aboard with an airline mindset, and they fuss about their luggage and feel confined to their seat. Pretty soon they realize that they can walk to the lounge or the dome, and then lunch is served in the dining car and they sit with other people. They start to relax and make friends and get into the experience of a leisurely train ride, and at the end of the trip, they get off and they're just not the same nervous folks who got on at the start of the trip."
On arriving in Missoula we join the Big Sky passengers on a short bus ride to the Holiday Inn, followed by a short walk to the Missoula Carousel. We can't resist the offer of a ride on this magnificent conveyance, which moves at a dizzying 13 MPH at its outer rim, and is accompanied by a 400 pipe band organ. Across the river is the handsome Milwaukee Road passenger station, now utilized as an office complex. Next to carousel park is the 1921 Wilma Theater, a National Historical Landmark, and now under restoration. On the lower level of the Wilma Building is Marianne's Restaurant, an art deco showcase. The original ceiling of the restaurant had been hidden with a lowered false ceiling for decades, and it was a moment of discovery when the ceiling was ripped out to discover the vaulting original ceiling with elaborate plaster bas-relief. Art deco chandeliers were brought in from a demolished Portland theater to complete the décor. It is always amazing to me to see how much architectural magnificence of the 1920's and 1930's was deemed excessive and either destroyed or covered up by the easily embarrassed generations of the Fifties and Sixties.
Missoula is off the beaten track and does not yet have Sprint Digital cell phone service. The Holiday Inn was even unable to come up with a phone with a data port, but fortunately the nearby Best Western Executive Inn allowed us to use their lobby phone with data port to send and receive e-mail with our laptop. We topped off this delightful tour of Missoula with a prime rib dinner at the Depot Restaurant, just a short block from the train, then showered on board and turned in for a good nights sleep in private car Yerba Buena.
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