Onward and upward
Friday, November 2nd, 2007
From Sacramento I boarded the no 6 train to Grand Junction in Colorado. There were a bunch of people on the train from the rail museum that were staying on as for a Reno to give commentary on the building of the rail network in the area (the Sierra Nevada mountains). There was some very interesting stuff; they gave regular height checks. They mentioned one situation in which there was significant problems getting the line through because of a very steep drop, the line had to take a tunnel through into the next valley and make a dogs leg the wrong way up it.
The scenery was utterly fantastic; we had no derailments, and were pretty much on time throughout. This trip was the best part of a day and a half, including the night in between, now the seats on these trains are good, but not that good, they recline a good way, but not far enough that you can actually lye down on them, so sleep was problematic and on waking up we were approaching the foot hills of the Rockies. Taking pictures while having to hold one eye open is a problem.
On the way into Grand Junction (which is the meeting place of the Colorado and some other river) I got speaking to a couple of guys from there. One of them asked me if I was going to see the monument. Now I’d heard that this place existed, but had no idea what it was, I know it was about 3 miles out of town though, and had no interest in trapsing 6 miles to see some statue with a name tag under it. I was informed that it certainly was worth seeing, and one of the blokes immediately started phoning people to see if anyone would be able to get me a lift out there.
To cut a long story short, for a small fee (most of which was for gas) a very nice friend of his gave me a 4 hour tour of all the interesting bits to see. He also explained to me that the monument was actually a “monument built by god” – turns out that the thing is a sodding mountain. In those 4 hours I took somewhere in the order of 500 pics and we drove about 30 miles.
Back on the train fro a quick 8 hour stint into Denver. The Rockies were pretty cool, the train follows the upper reaches of the Colorado River (that’s the one that made the grand canyon, and stretches from the middle of the continent to Mexico) seemingly it’s the only passable route through the area, because the interstate runs at the other side of the river for most of it.
At the top there is a piece of countryside that is just too impassable to get over, it’s known as the continental divide, all the water that lands on the west ends up in the pacific, all that lands on the east end in the Atlantic so there is no significant water running past it to smooth it out. They put a tunnel under it, a tunnel that never gets fully cleared out of diesel fumes, so we couldn’t move between carriages in there; 11 miles springs to mind.
We had an hour stop at a small ski resort near the top, there were some line repairs going on ahead. There was a rumor that there was a small pub round the corner, so half the train emptied down the road.
Denver was ok, I went to the natural history museum, including an IMAX screen which frankly sucked, it flickered constantly and it’s content was seemingly made for the sole purpose of visual impressiveness. Their planetarium on the other hand was a really cool big cinema style room with the whole ceiling covered in a curved screen with a load of digital projectors, again the content was geared toward visual impressiveness, but at least it had some decent content.
I was amused to find the there was a viewing gallery at the top of the museum, an open air balcony type affair with a really good view of the city, with good sight lines of parts of downtown. I won’t have the pics of that till I get back to the uk due to technical reasons (I shot it all in raw). The amusing part is that it was dedicated to the Anschutz family.
The rest of Denver was frankly an average city, not much to say. The only interesting thing about it is that it’s a mile above sea level. The humidity was something horrific, being so far inland Denver is really dry, it gave me a blocked nose and minor nose bleeds most of the time I was there, very unpleasant.
All in all I was really impressed with the train journey, and have got a $66 voucher to use with them again as a refund for the bit with the derailment, the food was pretty good and net excessively priced, given that it had a fully watered service and was on a train. I can especially recomend the mississippi mud cake, it’s the best I’ve ever seen.
I assume yall know that if you click on an image it gets bigger, then (on my real site) if you click on the right side of the image it brings up the next one?