Page 21 - Flathead Beacon // 8.13.14

FLATHEADBEACON.COM
AMTRAK'S BROKEN BUILDER / AUGUST 13, 2014 / 21
WHITEFISH – About an hour before dawn on a Friday morning, Amtrak’s eastbound Empire Builder crept into the station, already an hour and one minute late into its 2,206-mile journey from Seattle to Chicago.
Under the glow of the yellow station lights, a handful of passengers hauled their luggage off the train while another group waited to climb aboard. In the minutes before the train pulled out of the station to continue its journey east, the sparse crowd had already dispersed and the platform, with the exception of a conductor and a woman looking for her lost bags, was empty.
Eighty-five years after its debut as the Great Northern Railway’s premier passenger service to the west, the Empire Builder is broken.