Amtrak to the 2008 Handmade Bicycle Show

Go By Train

In February 2008 my buddy Paul and I took the Amtrak Empire Builder from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Portland, Oregon, for the 2008 North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS). This account will go into the details of the Amtrak travel, staying in Portland, working as volunteers at the show, and even a bit about the bicycles we saw whilst there. Other sites have covered the NAHBS in more detail; in particular, I'd recommend these:

...and of course, I'd highly recommend this page! And so, without further ado, here it is.

Genesis of the Trip

The North American Handmade Bicycle show started in the bicycle-friendly town of Houston, Texas, in 2005. In 2006 and 2007 it was held in San Jose. I'd seen the coverage on the web with all these lovely handbuilt frames and knew a few of the builders from their web presence. After the 2007 show, they announced that the '08 show would be in Portland. I didn't think much of it, but my longtime cycling buddy Paul did. In an email from last June 8, in the interegnum between the Lake Pepin Three Speed Tour (which he'd come up to ride) and the Great River Energy Bicycle Festival/Nature Valley Grand Prix (which he would shortly be coming back up for again and for which we both volunteer), there was this paragraph:

One last thing. I have already made a train reservation for both of us going to Portland next Feb for the NAHBS. I made the reservation because I always wait too long to do these things and the price goes up. Anyway, I can change or cancel it anytime. For now, I have us scheduled to leave the night of 5 Feb and to get back the morning of 13 Feb. The NAHBS is Feb 8-10 so that will give us a couple of extra days in Portland. The cost is only $434 each RT, with a sleeper and all meals on the train.

OK, then, I'll give that some thought. I'm not really in the market for a handmade bicycle. I've already got one, though it's not custom, a 68cm Rivendell Atlantis (and no, that's not a misprint, it is 68cm, I'm a tall bugger) and I really like it. I suppose in theory a full custom bike could be marginally better, but it wouldn't make me any faster or more attractive to members of the opposite sex, which is ok since I'm married already anyway. Still, custom bikes are cool. A lot of the things I enjoy straddle the border between technology and artistic expression, and at the custom builder level, the bicycle frames can be quite artistic while working in cutting-edge materials. Besides, Paul and I do a lot of bike things together; later that summer and fall we'd do the League of American Bicyclist Road 1 course and then the League Certified Instructor training together down in Des Moines, and in January, just a month prior to the NAHBS, we'd both attend the Iowa Bicycle Summit. What the heck, as time went on, I figured that the Portland trip would be fun, got the wife's consent, and planned to go.

The Trip Out

The Chilled Express

We left on Tuesday, February 5th. I worked all day, leaving slightly early as I do the first Tuesday of each month to attend the Saint Paul Bicycle Advisory Board meeting. This ran 4:30 to 6:30, and then Paul and I went home. The kids were set to studying and Paul, Karla and I went to Gabe's by the Park for dinner. Once done with that, we went home, loaded the bikes and gear into Paul's pickup truck, and drove over to the Amtrak station in Saint Paul. We were carrying on our actual luggage (two Ortlieb Bike Shopper panniers, in my case) and checking my bicycle in an Amtrak bicycle box. Paul was taking his Bike Friday in a nylon bag as a carry-on.

You can take bicycles on Amtrak. On some routes, they have a program called Bikes on Board where you just roll your bike onto the train into a bicycle rack and leave it there. This would be great (I've done this before in Britain, in 1980, when British Rail trains typically had a mail/baggage car), but the Empire Builder service from Chicago to Seattle/Portland doesn't offer this (take a look here for Amtrak's bicycle policies). If you have to check your bicycle, it needs to be in a box and it can only travel between baggage stops, which aren't every station (the next one south from here is Winona, for instance). Last summer, Paul took his bike to Winona on the train to shave a day off his return trip. Amtrak charges ten bucks for one of their boxes, so we rustled up a box from County Cycles and wedged Paul's bike into it, a tight fit. I was anxious about this, so I called Jim at Hiawatha Cyclery to see if he had any mongo bike boxes sitting around. He said the Rivendell boxes could be quite sizeable (mine hadn't been, but my Atlantis came as a frame only) but that the Amtrak boxes were generously sized. I stopped by the Amtrak station a week before we left to buy a box and they had a used one I could have for free. What the heck, I'm cheap, I took it home and it was going to work fine.

This, by the way, might be a way to meet babes. My used box had a name, address and phone number on it, a couple of cheerful smiley faces, and she obviously likes bicycles and trains! I haven't been in dating mode in more than 20 years, but I am a volunteer coordinator this year for the Nature Valley Grand Prix/Great River Energy Bicycle Festival (could the name be any longer?) so will be giving this person a call to see if she'd like to volunteer.

In any case, I'd decided to take my winter bike, a 1996 21.5" Marin Pine Mountain mountain bike on which I have fenders, a riser stem and Albatross bars. Even though Portland didn't promise to be too snowy, I left my studded Nokian Mount & Ground 160s on just in case (I was in Portland last year in January, weather was fine, I left on Sunday and Tuesday they had a huge ice- and snow-storm, so you can't be too careful). All I had to do to fit the bike in was release the front brake, loosen and remove the stem and strap the handlebars to the top tube, remove the pedals and drop the seat all the way down. The bike rolled right into the box and I taped it in there. I had a Carradice Barley seat bag on the seat and just left it there. As it turns out, the dowel is a bit wider than the box and kind of deformed it, but it worked out ok for me on this trip.

Paul and I got to the station just after 9:30. You're supposed to be there an hour early if you're checking bags, and the train is scheduled to leave westbound at 11:15PM. We got checked in and given the code to get into the First Class lounge (when you travel in a sleeper on Amtrak you are essentially a first class passenger and treated well). There were comfy chairs in there, a television, a coffee machine, some magazines. We weren't in there 10 minutes when the train showed up, idling slowly up from the south and into the station. Paul said that an attendant would be along to get us, and sure enough, a conductor guy came in and paged us. We took our stuff and walked to the last car on the train, the Portland sleeper car. As we walked back I recognized a couple of guys; it was Alan and Owen Lloyd from Chicago, who I'd met on last year's Three Speed Tour. Owen works for Rapid Transit Cycles in Chicago, his Dad Alan was going just as a civilian like us. Hey, he says, I know five people in Minnesota and here are two of them getting on my train! We exchanged hellos and went on board. There were racks to put the bags in, and then up to the Roomette number 11. The attendant had already made up the beds. We dumped a bit of our stuff in there. The attendant guy said the club car was three cars up the train and the dining car was five cars up. Breakfast was from 6:30 to 9:00, showed us where the bathrooms were, the water and coffee, and left us.

People asked me later what the Roomette is like. I asked them if they'd seen Das Boot?. While we didn't actually have to sleep with any torpedos, it was a squeeze in the room. Paul graciously let me have the lower bed which at 6'6" is one inch longer than I am tall, while he took the upper one which is just 6'2" long. The Amtrak site says there is room for two small tote bags, and they do mean small. With the room already made up into the bunks, we couldn't really stay in it unless we went to bed, and I wanted to see how we get out of the Cities, so we walked up three cars to the Club Car. There was a small group of young guys scattered around a couple of tables up there; "Are you heading to the Bicycle Show?" I asked. "Yep", and so we introduced ourselves and sat down.

A couple of the guys were from Roark Custom Titanium Bicycles in Brownsburg, Indiana and a couple were with Bilenky Cycle Works in Philadelphia. Steve Bilenky had contacted a bunch of framebuilders and suggested a Framebuilder's Express to Portland, since it's a great way to move a bunch of bicycles for $5 a shot and to hang out on the way. He'd picked the dates Paul had booked back in June and so we were part of it even though we're not framebuilders.

Paul got us beers and right on time, and almost imperceptibly, the train began to pull out of the station. You go pretty slowly to start with, under the Raymond Ave bridge, past the site of the new Minnesota Gophers football stadium, by Broadway, then a little faster through the rail yards up along Saint Anthony and Columbia Heights and on to Coon Rapids. On a train you don't see the best parts of town anyway, it's a lot of the backs of factories and the bits of people's backyards where those too poor to live any farther away dump their leaves over the fence, but at night you don't see this so clearly. As we moved north I lost track of any landmarks I knew and it was just the diminishing sprawl of the nothern suburbs at night. It was getting late, so we went back to our sleeping car and turned in.

People ask how long this trip takes. It's about 36 hours. The schedule looks like this:


WestboundStationEastbound
10:31P
11:15P		Minneapolis/Saint Paul, MN7:50A
7:05A
3:35AFargo, ND2:13A
6:13ADevil's Lake, ND11:32P
8:34A
9:06A		Minot, ND9:42P
9:22P
12:26PGlasgow, MT3:47P
2:39P
3:04P		Havre, MT1:32P
1:12P
8:56P
9:16P		Whitefish, MT7:46A
7:26A
11:49PSandpoint, ID2:32A
1:40A
2:45A		Spokane, WA1:15A
12:13A
5:35APasco, WA8:57P
10:10APortland, OR4:45P

You can also read the Detailed Route Guide.

And so we rumbled through the night. Besides being longer, the lower bunk also has the windows next to it. You can draw the curtains to make for a more restful sleep, but an inveterate window-instead-of-aisle seat person like myself can't help but watch. There'd be a WHOOSH as trains went by the other way. I'd peer out, but you can't see a thing, the other train might be going 60-80mph as well and is about five feet away, so there's just a blur. I'm pretty certain I saw the eastbound Amtrak go by, it was shorter than the other trains and lighter coloured, but I could be imagining things.

Lying there, you'd hear the Doppler effect of clanging road barriers at some crossings, the slowing down and speeding up, and not much to see mostly in the rural night. I expected to be rocked gently to sleep, but instead kept waking up. I was awake to peer out the window at Staples, where a guy got off and ran across the tracks and into downtown in his t-shirt despite the cold. I awoke to look out at Fargo, where, despite being 3:30 on a cold February morning, there seemed to be quite a lot of people getting on and off. Poor Fargo, the eastbound train is through at 2:15AM, the westbound at 3:30AM. I eventually woke up for good about 7:00, in time to see Rugby, North Dakota. Paul, an earlier riser than I, was up and about already. I got dressed and found him in the Club Car; we went in to the Dining Car for breakfast. On Amtrak, they seat you with others at a table. We sat with a couple of other bicycle guys and chatted away while having omelets or French Toast and bacon with juice and coffee. Meals are unhurried on Amtrak, there's not like there's anything else to do, and the scenery just rolls past as the sun comes up and illuminates things.