Day Two: Utah to Denver

The Great American Train Ride

By Nathan Tsai

August 9^th, 2021

Good Morning Provo!

I woke early in the morning with the hope of catching the sun rise through the desert canyons of Utah and Colorado but instead, I was greeted with the snowy tips of Provo Peak backlit by the sun. While it was certainly a pretty sight, my sleep-groggy brain was momentarily confused by the unexpected scenery. Had I misremembered the station timings? Did I wake up too early?

No.

This would be the first of many delays I would experience riding on the American passenger rail system. While train breakdowns and railway maintenance contributed to some of the slowdowns, overwhelmingly, freight trains were the root cause of the issue. See, in the United States, freight trains are legally required to give passenger trains priority on the rails. In reality, the rules are reversed. Passenger trains are forced to pull over to allow freight trains to pass. Sometimes, these freight trains can be two to three miles long and they trundle along at glacial speeds.

It turns out that overnight, our train was sidelined for almost two hours because a series of freight trains shunted us aside. When I awoke at 4:30AM, we had been parked at Provo Station for the past hour as freight trains clogged up the tracks ahead.

Breakfast

Train breakfasts either consisted of a bowl of cereal, a microwaved Jimmy Dean sandwich (essentially a frozen egg McMuffin), or the microwaved plate of skillet potatoes and eggs.

The potatoes were the right blend of greasy, savory, and oniony goodness that makes them a great start to any day of hard work. The egg however, resembled a dry pancake of egg paste.

The Space Between Utah and Colorado

Between Provo, UT and Grand Junction, CO, there exists pretty much nothing other than sweeping hills, flat desert, and the occasional farm.

Vertical Things

Clouds

Lunch

One of the goals during my trip was to go out of my way to taste and experience "Asian" food through the lens of the Mid-West. When I saw that an "Asian Noodle Bowl" was an option on the menu, I felt compelled to order it for lunch.

It's described in the menu as "Yaki-soba noodles with [vegetables] in a garlic-chili sauce". Those who are familiar with yakisoba noodles are likely used to seeing these chewy wheat noodles stirfried with lots of oil, meat, and veggies. Like Chinese chow mein or any other Asian stir fry dish, it's a fundamentally savory dish with lots of umami and texture.

Imagine my supreme disappointment when I unboxed my microwave meal and was presented with this syrupy-sweet, mushy, one-flavored mess of a dish. The sauce tasted like McDonald's sweet-chili McNuggets sauce but with perhaps double the cloying sweetness. The noodles were pasty with no flavor of their own. The vegetables had been soaking in the sauce for so long that everything tasted the same. There was so much sauce that this was more like a pile of overcooked noodles in syrup soup.

I did not enjoy this one bit.

Train Signs

Through the Rockies

Traveling through the Rocky mountains was a blast. We were thundering through mountain country that was otherwise inaccessible by any other means. Roads, houses, and people became few and far between as rivers and sharp cliffs dominated the landscape.

Over the last two days, our train roared over train tracks that were over 150 years old. This railroad was built by hand and on the backs of mostly Chinese (from the West) and Irish (from the East).

Particularly relevant to me were the tracks that I rode on between Sacramento, California and Promontory Point, Utah. This section of rail was laid by the Central Pacific Railroad Company starting around 1865 and by some estimates, more than 90% of the workers they employed were Chinese immigrants.

These workers were paid half the wages of their caucasian colleagues while being shunted to the most dangerous work details. During one brutally snowy winter, rotating teams of Chinese workers were lowered into shafts drilled into the center of the Sierra Nevadas and hand-carved blasting holes to blow a tunnel through the hard granite mountain. Of the 15,000 workers that were brought in to build the railroad, historians estimate that a few hundred to a thousand Chinese perished as they dynamited tunnels, cut paths along the mountainside, and succumbed to hypothermia and disease.

To this day, we use the same railroad, the same steel, the same tunnels that were meticulously constructed by the hands of thousands of workers who were paid little and gave everything. I am grateful to those workers who connected America.

Dinner

After the catastrophe that was "Asian Noodles", I decided that a retreat to non-ethnic food was likely the safest thing to do.

The menu describes the "Garlic & Herb Cod" as being served with "fresh lemon and Tartar sauce" but neither a lemon (fresh or otherwise) nor Tartar sauce were to be seen. For what its worth, one can't get much safer than microwaving frozen deep-fried white fish alongside boiled rice.

The meal was tremendously bland, but a few packets of salt and pepper turned the meal into a slightly salty and peppery pile of "food". The fish had a strange, stringy chicken-like texture, while the rice and breading provided a bit of mushy crunch.

Over the Mountains

We were running more than 3 hours late at this point and I was getting a bit grumpy as I had planned to already be checked in to my hotel and grabbing some food in Denver.

My mood was lifted enormously because we just happened to catch the sun setting as the train crested the final mountain peak on its descent into Denver. This was easily the most beautiful section of the train ride so far as the whole valley was bathed in golden light and the city of Denver was lit pink with the setting of the sun.