Desert Wind: Passenger train service at the end of the line

      "My heart is warm with the friends I make, And better friends I'll not be knowing; Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, No matter where it's going." -- From "Travel" (1921), by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
      But the passenger train doesn't go to Las Vegas. Not anymore. Not after Monday.
      The last run of Amtrak Train No. 35, the westbound Desert Wind, was scheduled to depart Chicago's Union Station about 3 p.m. Saturday for Omaha (mile 501 out of Chicago) and Denver (mile 1,037), along with intermediate points from Ottumwa and Osceola, Iowa, to Hastings and Holdrege, Neb.
      If it's on time -- a mildly miraculous occurrence in these days of fast freights and fading passenger trains -- the Desert Wind will leave Salt Lake City about 1 o'clock Monday morning.
      And eight, or nine, or 10 hours later -- 2,057 miles from Chicago's Union Station and 340 miles from Los Angeles' Union Station -- the Desert Wind will pull into Las Vegas and come to a stop outside the Amtrak station at the Plaza.
      Passengers -- from the Midwest, New England, the Rust Belt, the Bible Belt, overseas -- will leave the shelter of the shiny steel-clad Superliner and pause on the outdoor platform, attempting to adjust their eyes to the glare of the desert sun.
      And the assembled Los Angeles-bound riders, along with those destined for intermediate California stops in Barstow, Victorville, San Bernardino and Fullerton, will take their places as the Desert Wind breathes its last, ending 91 years of passenger service between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City via Las Vegas.
      Not for the first time, however.
      In 1971, the Union Pacific suspended its City of Los Angeles and Challenger passenger trains when the quasi-public National Railroad Passenger Corp. -- better known these days as Amtrak -- took over intercity service.
      Amtrak established the Desert Wind as a daily train in 1979, then cut back to a thrice-weekly schedule in 1995.
      Nov. 10 was the Desert Wind's first announced expiration date, "but it got an eleventh-hour reprieve" for six additional months, notes Martha Akemon, Amtrak's Salt Lake City station agent. "I don't think that's going to happen this time."
      Neither do the 20 or so passengers assembled in Salt Lake City's Rio Grande station, awaiting the westbound Desert Wind as it enters its final week of existence.
      Some have already ridden one marked-for-death Amtrak train, the Seattle-to-Denver Pioneer, planning to add the Desert Wind to their "rest in peace" railroad log.
      A wheelchair-bound grandmother medically unable to fly, international tourists experiencing the vastness of the American West, parents with rambunctious children and Las Vegas-bound tourists share the midnight quiet of the spartan Salt Lake City waiting room.
      Outside, atop the towering Beaux Arts-Renaissance Revival structure, circa 1911, a neon sign heralds the station's former railroad tenant: the Denver and Rio Grande railroad. Its stylized letters seem to lean ever so slightly, as if they were ruffled by the breeze of a passing train.
      But the Utah Historical Society now occupies most of the massive station; Amtrak's waiting room takes up a corner, its functional fluorescent lights and vinyl floors providing melancholy contrast to the building's grand exterior.
      Granted, train travel has lost much of the luxury and luster it delivered during its heyday in the first half of the century.
      But these waiting passengers seem more attuned to the amenities rail travel still provides: an ever-changing panorama a window away, room to stretch out or wander the aisles, time to see -- and dream.
      The train may be more than an hour late, but no sense of urgency or impatience grips Iola Gibbons and Diana Timm, a mother-daughter team from Olathe, Kan.
      "We're not in no rush," says Iola. "If we drove, you'd be tired," she tells her daughter.
      "In Europe, the times are strict," notes David Correa, who's visiting the United States from Colombia. "Here, they are not on time. ... But people accept it. Nobody complains. In Europe it's different. People are more patient here."
      For Cleve and Myrna Meyerhoffer of Ogden, Utah, "it's harder to stay up" for the train's early morning departure time, Myrna acknowledges.
      Nevertheless, she and Cleve, a retired railroad worker, have made the trip to Las Vegas aboard the Desert Wind four or five times a year for the past several years. "Lately, we've slowed up," Myrna admits.
      This will be their last Desert Wind excursion; they'll have to take a bus back to Ogden.
      But "you don't tell train people to take the bus," counters Bob Marshall of Waltham, Mass.
      That conviction prompted Bob and his wife Marianne to rearrange their 18-day vacation so they could visit friends in Las Vegas -- where Bob was stationed during his Air Force days two decades ago -- before the Desert Wind's demise.
      "It's a sad combination of events," Bob muses. "People want to be too many places too fast."
      Or, as Australian Craig Hollis puts it, "Americans don't have the time to make the time."
      He's glad he made the time to ride the rails during his visit to the United States.
      "I've been here since early April, catching up with friends," Hollis explains.
      And he's made even more friends riding the Coast Starlight, which took him from Los Angeles to Seattle, and aboard the Pioneer to Salt Lake City.
      "I've got a whole list of names of people I've met and I'll keep in touch with," he says. "If I had taken a plane, I wouldn't have done that -- because I wouldn't have had the time to get to know them."
      Australia also curtailed its cross-country passenger train service, "but they brought it back," Hollis says, "because they realized people want to use it."
      Not many people, perhaps. "I think many services are necessary though they don't produce profit," Correa says. "A train crossing the country is a link -- a means of union, integration."
      For the 20 or so passengers boarding the Desert Wind in Salt Lake City, their tickets serve as passports.
      And every small pasteboard seat check they receive from the conductor in exchange grants them entry into a self-contained world on wheels. (Sleeping car passengers, traveling first-class, have even more exclusive spaces reserved for them.)
      The train is about 85 minutes late, the hour is late, so when the westbound Desert Wind finally arrives about 1:25 a.m., attendant J.L. Peyton directs coach passengers to the appropriate car: Las Vegas straight ahead, Los Angeles next car down the track.
      After 42 years working on the railroad -- 23 aboard Amtrak, 19 before that on Santa Fe's premier passenger train, the legendary Los Angeles-Chicago Super Chief -- this is his penultimate run.
      "I hate to see this one go," he says of the Desert Wind. "It's the gateway to Las Vegas."
      Following one more daylong layover in Los Angeles and one more return trip to Chicago, Peyton will head into retirement -- and home to Monticello, Miss., for a life of "piddling around on the farm" and looking for "somebody to put up with me for awhile."
      As the locomotive inches out of the station, passengers scurry up the stairs and take their seats while Peyton pulls open the trackside window and takes one last look along the platform: "Here we go, folks."
      Upstairs, the car lights dim as passengers settle into their recliner-sized seats, setting up leg rests and adjusting the travel-size pillows Peyton distributes.
      Overhead, blue night lights cast a soothing glow, providing a reference point for travelers heading toward the stairs to visit the smoking lounge, retrieve a clean shirt from a suitcase, use the toilet or stand in the vestibule and savor the sound of the whispering wheels.
      Bob Marshall glances outside, watching the lights whiz by, and calculates the train's speed -- a moderate 45 mph -- as the Desert Wind leaves Salt Lake City behind, its two sleepers and three coaches carrying about 260 passengers over the three-day run. (About 180 or 200 are bound for Las Vegas, train supervisor Rick Johnson estimates.)
      Unless and until passenger trains "can have prime (track) time and prime-time speed," they remain an endangered species, Marshall says. "They're never going to have the speed an airplane has."
      They're never going to have seat belts, either -- or intercom voices asking passengers to return their seatbacks and tray tables to their full upright and locked positions for a jet-powered takeoff or a white-knuckle landing.
      Some travelers stretch out in their seats, letting the train's gentle side-to-side sway rock them to sleep as rattle-and-hum rhythms provide a mechanical lullaby.
      Other riders stare out the window, transfixed, as paved streets and orderly streetlights give way to sagebrush and sand and stars.
      Whenever the Desert Wind rolls across a grade crossing, the wheels perform a percussive snare-drum tattoo. Every so often, the two-note harmony of the diesel locomotive's horn echoes down the track and across the empty landscape.
      Cleve Meyerhoffer stirs, then walks haltingly down the aisle, using the high seatbacks as handholds until he reaches the spot by the stairs where paper cups and a water spout await parched passengers.
      Above the water spout, a plaque on the wall proclaims "Beech Grove -- Proudly Rebuilt by the Superliner Team, 1995 ... Progressing Into the Future."
      There may be no future for the Desert Wind. But for the passengers on board this train, time stands still -- and stretches into infinity.
      Riders need no alarm clock to announce the morning. They awaken to the dawn stealing across Utah's Escalante Valley, silhouetting craggy peaks in the distance, painting the cotton-batting clouds overhead pale pink and peach or fiery orange.
      After the briefest of stops in Milford, Utah, the Desert Wind sweeps into Nevada and from Mountain to Pacific Daylight Time, delaying the dining car's opening by an hour.
      (Peyton had warned riders when the Desert Wind departed Salt Lake City, setting his watch back an hour to West Coast time and joking, "We just lost an hour, you won't find that till you get back.")
      Some hungry passengers wait in the observation car, where curved glass panels reveal the brightening sky and the reds, browns and greens of Meadow Valley Wash north of Caliente.
      And even in the diner, fresh mushroom omelets and fresh perked coffee can't hope to compete with the visions of Rainbow Canyon south of Caliente, from wandering deer and soaring hawks to multihued rock formations jutting higher than the bilevel train.
      "I could sell this," murmurs Las Vegan Scianna Augustine, a travel agent who won this first-class trip at a company travel fair, as she gazes at the passing panorama. "I could tell people how wonderful this is."
      Not quite as wonderful, perhaps, as the trains Bob Marshall remembers: streamliners such as the 20th Century Limited and the Broadway Limited that used to streak past, linking America from coast to coast and border to border.
      "Those were the days," Marshall sighs, gazing into the viewer of his video camera as he captures the trackside scenery along the almost obsolete Desert Wind route. Back then, "You could sit on your porch and log off 50 trains in one afternoon."
      The 50 trains have dwindled to a precious few, but Bob and many of his fellow passengers will keep riding as long as they can.
      For Herman Stanfield, however, Las Vegas represents the end of the line.
      At 85, he's tried life in Arkansas and Florida. Now, he's moving to Las Vegas, hoping to find affordable senior housing -- and plenty of 99-cent breakfasts -- at his final stop.
      Natty in his beige suit, using his walking cane to trigger the automatic door between coach and observation cars, Herman settles into a padded seat while the solicitous Peyton brings him a cup of coffee, complete with extra packets of sugar and creamer.
      "I intend to stay (in Las Vegas) the rest of my life," Herman announces forthrightly. "I don't know whether it'll be 10 seconds -- or 10 years."
      That same uncertainty seems to hover in the air-conditioned atmosphere, a ghostly shadow playing hide-and-seek with passengers and crew members who know how soon the Desert Wind will follow its namesake into oblivion.
      But perhaps they also know riding the rails has a way of seeping into the bones.
      "The railroad track is miles away, and the day is loud with voices speaking," wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay in the days when trains burned coal and belched plumes of steamy smoke. "Yet there isn't a train that goes by all day but I hear its whistle shrieking."
      Hours, even days after the Desert Wind has departed, sending its riders to their separate destinations -- and destinies -- the last passengers still will feel its insistent, persistent motion as it follows the twin steel ribbons toward the horizon.