Storymania - Metrolink111 Education On The Rails by Shelley J Alongi

Metrolink111 Education On The Rails
Shelley J Alongi

September 12, 2009, the one year anniversary of the Metrolink111 crash out of Chatsworth finds me on Amtrak’s train 799, the Pacific Surf liner on a private rail car for a wine tasting trip to Santa Barbara. We’re going to the area to do sum wine tasting and then we’re going to have lunch there, perhaps do some more wine tasting and then go home. But this is no ordinary train trip; at least not like any I’ve ever taken. This is in a private rail car built in the 1940s and formerly owned by the Southern Pacific, coupled to my favorite place, the locomotive, the one that’s pulling the train, and in the case of the return trip, coupled to the cabbage car, two locomotives pushing the train. I still have to wort that one out. Where does the crew sit when the locomotives are pushing the train? I think they’re in the cab car. It’s a fun trip and boy is it the best trip ever! I talk to people, I learn about locomotives, I taste wine, some would say that’s the whole reason I went, well the locomotive part, anyway. We talk about Chatsworth, we walk all around the little town, we talk, we laugh, ad I’m a very happy camper. Yes, I think of Rob Sanchez, especially on that first trip from Chatsworth to Simi Valley. I think of him all day. I leave flowers on September 11 for him (you can read about that in a different essay), ut the thoughts are mitigated by my other train interests: locomotives. I can’t even tell you how much fun I had though I’ll try to give it a shot.

I’m up at 4:30 in the morning, getting ready for my trip. I feed the cats and make sure they have water, do my routine of checking to make sure all is in order in the house, and somehow manage to get dressed in five minutes, waiting for a cab, it’s a good thing I’m organized. When I come home on Friday to the train station before going to Chatsworth I see a cab driver I know and he agrees to pick me up on Saturday. He shows up early and I am off to L.A. Later I learn that there’s a bus I could have taken from Fullerton to Los Angeles but no matter, this morning I’m there, I find my way to the station with assistance, get my seat and wait in the lobby for the train. A woman shows up, her name is Rita, we sit there and she and I discover that we’re headed for the same train. We get a red cap somehow, get to the train, find the car an board. We’re on it! The car is wide with expansive picture windows, and blue carpet, tables with blue table cloths and curtains on the windows of blue and peach. There is a Muriel of a Santa Fe train, recognizable by the logo, their cross, and there is another train, I don’t remember what it is now. We clip along in luxury, the trip organized by L.A. Rail, conductor Bill hatchet whose family is the waiters, servers, and helpers. Bill, by the way, knows Bob Hildebrand. He calls him “Bobby” or did in the phone conversation we had two months ago when I bought the ticket to the train. I knew two months ago that I wouldn’t have money this month and that may be the case, but two months ago I had money for a ticket and said I would purchase it then. It’s a good thing I did. It was an excellent $100.00 investment. I loved it. And I learned so much. Larry, the So historian two or three weeks ago at the SOCAL Train Travel meet up group asked me if my connection with trains was emotional or intellectual. I think it’s emotional, but as things often do for me, they become intellectual. That happened months ago I think though the connection is still emotional. But today September 12, a year after I lay on the couch and observed the media dragging Rob Sanchez’s name through the mud, I found the intellectual part of my obsession: locomotive specs. I have an entire trip to write about so then I better get started.

The morning starts out with breakfast: waffles, eggs, fresh fruit which consists of melons and grapes, coffee, orange juice with Champaign, and chicken sausages. It’s not a bad deal and quite good. We sit talking about the interests of the travelers at the table. Rita is going to an Art Limbaugh concert after the trip, Melissa and Youri (a female) haven’t slept for most of the night because they got to bed late and then didn’t want to miss the train. One of Youri’s friends overslept and missed the train. Oops! I didn’t wanton do that either so I set my alarm for 4:30.

The entire trip to Santa Barbara I cant’ decide if I want to stay on the train to San Luis Obispo or get off at Santa Barbara. Part of me wants to go all that way but then I have to decide what to do there. I’ve already seen Santa Barbara but I haven’t done the wine tasting. I don’t want to spend much money, which I said I wouldn’t do. But part of me wants to take part in the wine tasting and so I decide at the very last minute to get off at Santa Barbara and stay with the group doing the wine tasting. A large group of us head down to the pier, sharing the concrete then wooden sidewalk with Porsches and other cars, bicycles and people on foot. Logs and railings line the pier, a bit of a scary combination for children we decide or adults simply not paying attention because one misstep and you can be in the water. We determine that there is about a fifteen foot drop from the pier to the water.

We make our way to a glass shop with the statue of a captain sitting in the corner and I stay outside while Tom investigates. The wine room isn’t open so we trudge our way to the Geisinger wine tasting room, losing part of our group along the way to take a bicycle trip. Tom, Jill, Dennis, Shelley, Melissa, Youri, and Rita congregate around the counter as Aica the bar tender and today’s wine poorer gives us our glasses and menus. We can get nineteen tastings for $8.00. Jill shares with someone and her husband shares with me. Dennis figures prominently in the story because he is the one who shares all the locomotive specs with me later on in the evening. We stand sampling whites and reds and dessert wines. I’ve decided I like only about three of the nineteen tastings. I definitely don’t like reds; their acidic quality drives me away. I guess I favor a less acidic, less sugary mix or treatment of the grapes, whichever is the proper term at the moment. We laugh and talk about the different tastes. The second wine I say tastes like one of those wines you get for $1.99.

“You mean the one in the big box?” Jill says. Well, this assessment as you’ll later see, is better than the one that comes at the second wine tasting. We finish our tasting after a lot of laughter and general discussion about wine and tastes and part of our group heads off to rophy Brothers. Brophy Brothers is a restaurant I wanted to visit on my first trip to Santa Barbara last October and never did.

Since it’s already 1:30 or so we decide to go in search of lunch. I’m not particularly interested in seafood today. Tom, Denis, Jill and Shelley head off to a place called Union Ale and order burgers and pizza, and no wine. I stick to Diet Coke. I’ve decided if I’m going to go wine tasting I am going to eat carbs all day. I don’t usually drink a lot of wine and so its richness combined with the sometimes spicier palate in fish sounds like a little too much for me, so I decide to combine carbs with the wine so that it will absorb the alcohol. I don’t really think it’s that much that I’m drinking and since I’m not a regular wine drinker I order something called a Santa Barbara burger with alfalfa sprouts, peppers, all kinds of vegetables and my favorite, tri tip strips. The meat is actually better than the steak I had at Steakhouse 55 at Disneyland on my birthday.

I ask everyone how they got interested in trains. Dennis, a retired military air force test pilot has always liked trains since childhood he says. Jill didn’t know she was marrying a railfan; he never mentioned trains while they dated. Tom’s story escapes me right now, something about watching trains with his grandfather. We discuss movies and the food comes and then I launch into my story.

I got into trains, I explain, after last year’s Chatsworth accident. “You’ll probably laugh” I say. They ask me how a train rack made me interested in trains so I told them the truth. “It was the engineer’ I said. “Something connected with me in his story” and the rest is history. We discussed the accident; the safety violations, the NTSB report hopefully to come out by the end of this year, the different kinds of trains, and the questions. “Can’t you tell I spend too much time reading about this accident?” I ask. No one says anything. I suppose we all make our journey to railfanhood in some way and so we all understand the strange twists that can make. All of us have a unique story, I suppose. Most railfans, I’d say all the ones I talk to, don’t see Rob Sanchez through my eyes. But they probably have something that I don’t get either, so we’re all even and no one holds it against me that I have sympathy for a man who was text messaging when he shouldn’t have been. Dennis tells me about a test that someone ran and a Metrolink engineer called a red signal as green. The crew was pulled out of service tying up trains for hours, he said. I suppose this is wee they have testing. He says that signal was red. First he had a red over yellow and then getting to the red signal he called it as green. Then we discussed safety issues. We manage to fill two hours with lunch, train talk, and Jill’s discussion of her Masters thesis about Darwin. She teaches and is involved in high education, something I gave up, for what? For peace of mind? Basically for having my own time to do with what I wanted since I spent twenty years in academia.

In September of 2008 I explained, I decided to give up my Masters so I could read son write what I wanted. Denis chuckled at this. It seems, for the last year, I’ve been reading and writing about trains or at least my experiences with them. I remember making that comment about a week before the Chatsworth accident and now I’m so overwhelmingly obsessed with it that I am definitely reading and writing what I want to read and write.

We make our way to another winery which isn’t nearly as exciting as the first one. This winery holds the distinction in our day of serving Port, something that to me tastes strongly of cough syrup. I guess if I gave that to on of my formerly sick children, or, haha, one of my characters in a story when they come down with a cold, I wouldn’t have any trouble with them for a while. They might feel worse later on but at least they might think they’re taking cough syrup. After tasting a few acid reds and not too many good whites and taking a dose of cough syrup, Tom heads off somewhere, Denis heads out to watch trains and we go inside and talk bout Darwin, trains, the engineer, and whatever else consumes our afternoon.

A woman comes up to us and says the train is running ten minutes late. That’s pretty good since when I called to check on it the train was running eleven minutes late. Ultimately the train runs five minutes late, pretty good for a Saturday.

The return trip is quite engaging. Another woman named Jill has definitely had too much to drink. She sits across from Dennis and Jill and talks to them for awhile then excuses herself to go sit somewhere else. I sit there wondering about the locomotives. Here’s where my intellectual attraction to trains appears. Sitting with my back to the window I wonder if Dennis will satisfy my curiosity. I move up to their chair and ask where Denis is, then start to ask my questions.

“You’re asking Denis questions he knows the answers to,” Jill says.

“I know. That’s why I’m asking him,” I say. And so we’re off.
The biggest question I have is about locomotives.

“When it comes to locomotives what should I know?” I ask him. Somehow through my asking questions and his anticipating my information I get the following responses. Locomotives that move passenger trains maintain a 4400 horse power, and hold 3000 gallons of diesel fuel. Locomotives that pull freight trains can hold up to
6000 horse power and hold 5000 gallons fuel. The new Union Pacific engines use air to start instead of electricity. At the fullerton station Larry has been telling me how to know how many axles a steam locomotive has and what the numbers mean. This information, 242 or 282 which means that the first axle has 2 wheels, the second has four wheels (and there may be a third with four wheels in an 8 configuration) and the next has two wheels translates a little differently in Diesel locomotives. Letters and numbers designate whether the wheels are powered or not. A = an axle or two wheels that are powered and B = a set of wheels that are not powered. The letters translate to A1 and A2 I think but I’ll have to look at that on in order to understand it more. I’ll need to bring a drawing board and have someone draw an axle for me and label the classifications. I’m no engineer, or at least not a mechanical one, and I definitely wouldn’t make a good train one. Maybe I would.

Speaking of train engineers earlier I tell the two railfans at the lunch table that signals confuse me.

“Red means stop,” Tom says.

“I knew that!” I laugh. “That’s easy!”

I think the indication is that red should be easy! Stop! What’s confusing is red over yellow; something about crossing over and the next light is going to be red. Maybe it’s the solid yellow and the flashing yellow that confuses me the most. Some would say that it confused an engineer on September 12, 2008. Maybe so. Maybe not. It sure confuses me. It doesn’t seem like rocket science understanding railroad signals; the only differences seem to be that they mean different things on different railroads. I suppose then that just as soon as I get it figured out on one railroad I’ll have to go to another owned and start all over again. Apparently the signals confused the NTSB because I remember them having a gigantic discussion about what Rob Sanchez saw and didn’t see. It was so confusing that I was confused. I’m only confused about signals not the engineer. And I’m not confused about axles.

Our discussion of locomotives was interrupted by frequent offerings of wine, coffee, Diet Coke, water, and dinner. Dinner was a light affair tonight, s smart choice since most of us probably ate very good lunches. Our meal consisted of steak salad and bread with yummy butter, and a dessert of brownies with cream puffs and raspberry sauce with little sprinklings of berries on the plate. Definitely it was plate art. Dinner and breakfast by the way came served on plastic plates and plastic silverware but we all pretended we were at a Harvey House. Harvey House was the Santa Fe railroad’s fine dining experience for reasonable prices with real silverware and real china. It was the modern age dining experience for our own version of the Southern Pacific or Santa Fe routes. It was all very good and there was plenty of it. I never saw so many types of lettuce on one plate. After consuming carbs that day I was happy to have a salad.

The rest of the trip passed with a discussion of Jill’s climbing into the locomotive cab with a stiff knee, they took a trip with the engineer through the royal Gorge and had to pay for it. I asked if the engineer was worth the money. Not the train, not the scenery, the engineer. Hey, it was an engineer who made me a railfan! Shelley smiles! It’s becoming a little bit of both, I think.

Now some would say I’m a wine fan, my sister’s husband will have fun with me tasting wine. I’m sure someone else will have something to say about that. I have this to say about all of It: it was the best trip ever.

Remarks on Being a Railfan

Today seems to have renewed my obsession with the Chatsworth train disaster. I’m so obsessed with that accident at times that it drives me to learn more about them. It’s been one short, emotional year. My life has been turned upside down, some people might ask why. I don’t ask that, I just expect it. I enjoy having an all consuming hobby. At first I didn’t think I would be interested in trains but it has developed to the point where I am doing everything I can to learn about them. Lilian, Rob Sanchez’s friend, said something to me about this. She said that I’m more interested in trains now because the people who are interested in them took me into their fraternity. She might have something there. She said it happened with she and her dog show interest, the way she knew Rob Sanchez. So even Rob’s friend told me I had it bad. She knew one who had I worse than I do. Maybe I’ll become a rail fan’s rail fan, or an engineer’s engineer. Is that like the boy who was texting Rob said he was going to wear all his engineer gear to get in the cab with Rob? I thought it was cute on those messages how he said he was going to wear his hat and his uniform and his bag. Rob called it his PPE (personal protective equipment). Unfortunately, Rob didn’t have enough PPE that day.

I go to the station to remember him and talk to all my new compatriots. I don’t know that I’d call them friends. We all hang out on the patio and watch trains. Sometimes we even travel on them. Today I’ve taken a train right through the place where the accident happened, where two lines converge. By the way, I forgot to mention that today when we got out of the Chatsworth station we stopped at the very same light that was missed on that day. We sat there for about ten minutes waiting for the southbound Surf liner. We all sat there eating, chatting, planning, hoping for the best. I never would have thought of where we were unless the accident hadn’t happened. Now, one year after it happened here I am, remembering Rob Sanchez, eating frittata, socializing, picking a man’s brains about locomotives, and curing my train sickness with the only thing that seems to help: trains. And I have to say again that it was the best trip ever.