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In episode thirteen I travel on the California Zephyr from north of Denver, Colorado, then along our diversion across Wyoming to Rawlins, an oil town in Carbon County.
The diversion is to allow engineering work on the California Zephyr’s normal route. We are travelling along the historic Overland route last regularly used by a passenger train over 20 years ago. The Amtrak Pioneer. The Pioneer ran for nearly 20 years from June 1977 until May 1997.
Although we stopped many times on our journey none of the stops were in a station, so we had no air break for many hours.
We passed through Greeley where the former Union Pacific Rail Depot which closed when the Pioneer service ceased in 1997. Find out more about the history of this station by clicking this link.
We then crossed the desolation of Wyoming passing through Laramie in the early afternoon – click this link for more details. We have left the arable farming area and now we only see cattle; and in many places there is nothing!
As the afternoon progresses we come into a belt of the first snow of the winter. Considering that this is early October I imagine that it can be pretty cold in mid-winter. In the desolation there are some wind farms, I imagine that the winds can be fierce here.
This episode ends as we reach Rawlins in Wyoming’s Carbon County (more details here) and our locomotives are refuelled. The station first opened in 1901 and finally closed in 1997.
I’ll tell you more about the journey as we travel from Rawlins to Reno on the California Zephyr in the next episode of US Rail Journeys in two weeks time.
Click on any of the ‘thumbnails’ below to open the photograph gallery.
My thanks go to the passengers and crew on our journey from Chicago to the Bay Area, aboard the California Zephyr, for their tolerance of the man waving the microphone. It truly is a magnificent journey.
Full definition copies of the photographs taken by MrT are available on Flickr. In addition a selection are on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
The music Steam Railway is used under licence from AKM Music.
This podcast is also available through iTunes (Apple podcasts), Spotify and Stitcher as well as this website.
© The MrT Podcast Studio 2017 to 2019
