Our California counterparts were at their emergency stations, and our Oregon counterparts who were flying down from Portland were stuck at the airport because the skies were shut down. As a result the conference was canceled. One of our members lost friends at the WTC. I ended up at the motel watching the carnage unfold on CNN and marveled at the silence of the skies except for the fighter planes making regular passes over the area.
Getting home the next day was another tale.
According to CNN, people stranded away from home were hitchhiking, renting cars or searching for interstate buses. Nobody outside the Northeast Corridor knew that we had a national network of passenger trains that was still running.
The Coast Starlight was three hours late into San Jose. We were placed "in the hole" on a siding in the Sierras for five hours because of a rail terror scare in Utah that turned out to be nothing more than an engineer running a red block signal. We missed every dispatching window on the Union Pacific and were 12 hours late into Portland. Once we got onto the BNSF tracks in Washington state, I could feel the dispatchers in Fort Worth moving us from track to track to get us around slow moving freights. We held to 12 hours late into Seattle, which meant we arrived at 4:30 AM. But the Amtrak employees were there to serve us despite the hour, and the lights of King Street Station never looked more welcoming. I was glad to be home.
Without the train, we would have been stranded in San Jose for weeks or thumbing it up old Route 99.
What an unnerving situation for someone in the travel business. I’ll bet you were SO relieved to get home safe!
I flew to San Jose about 1 1/2 weeks after 9-11 to visit my AF son, and I have never before nor since seen so much patriotism in Northern California. So many flags and signs made up on the overpasses with red and blue dixie cups.