Updating "Zephyr"

In a few weeks the Lady Friend and I will embark on a ten-day trip to the West Coast aboard Amtrak's California Zephyr, subject of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, updated as an e-book in 2012.

The journey is in the service of still another update to see what has happened to the train and its environs in the last three years. I lost exact count some years ago, but this seems to be about the 25th or 26th trip I've taken on that train. I have yet to grow weary of the sameness.

This time I think that instead of adding still another epilogue to the book, I'll write a complete trip report in travel-writer fashion, and append that to the end.

We'll be staying overnight in Denver, where a new hotel has opened inside the grand old Denver Union Station, and in Glenwood Springs, where we will once again Take the Waters in the Hot Springs pool. We'll also stay a night in Emeryville before returning on the eastbound Zephyr.

It ought to be a nice break in the routine of mystery writing.

There's a Nook for 'Zephyr,' too

The Nook edition of 'Zephyr' is now online. Other formats are on the way.

Shot in the dark

The biggest problem I've run into while updating my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America for ebook publication this spring is tracking down the old Amtrak train crew members the book celebrates.

I rode the California Zephyr with a dozen of them and interviewed another dozen or so in crew bases and at stations. That was in 1991, more than 20 years ago.

The idea is to tell "Where They Are Today" in a long epilogue written for the new edition.

So far I have located ten crew members and station personnel, plus two civilians also featured in the book. But there are seven to go, and despite my best efforts they are elusive.

Part of the problem is my lack of resources. If I were wealthy, I could hire a skip-tracer private eye to do the magic they do on television cop shows with computers and supergeeks. But no, I've had to rely on free Internet tools available to me, such as whitepages.com.

The trouble with these Internet resources is that they are at bottom commercial ones and naturally want to be paid. They may find people with the same names (and ages) as the ones you're looking for, but more often than not the information they display is old and outdated (the phone numbers tend to be out of service) and if you check the box to see what the most recent info might be, you get a page asking for money first. A couple of times I've paid, but to no avail.

Of course some of the old crew members I have found have been helpful—they remember that So-and-so moved to this locality and here's his phone number, but it's ten years old. Often checking a local phone directory for that locality yields a number of identical names, and a couple of times just eliminating them one by one finds the man or woman I'm looking for.

What about Amtrak's media relations and personnel people? Won't they help? I have asked, but they seem to be extremely busy as well as perhaps overextended—right now the national railroad is streamlining its management ranks by downsizing with buyouts and the like. I doubt that they have the resources to help out writers of old forgotten books.

And so here's a shot in the dark—these are the old crew and personnel from 1991 I'm still trying to find:

Reggie Howard, train chief based out of Chicago, now returned to sleeper service
John Davis, chef, based out of Chicago
Altagracia Romo, food specialist, based out of Chicago
Noel Prell, lounge car lead service attendant, based out of Chicago but a resident of New Orleans
Mimi Earley, Denver station manager
Chris Younger, assistant engineer based in Oakland
Bob Pimm, conductor based in Oakland

If by some chance you are a rail buff and happen to know where any of them might be, pray let me know. You'll get a free copy of the e-book in the format of your choice as well as my undying gratitude, for whatever it's worth.

A cover for the e-'Zephyr'

By George, I think I've got it: a suitable cover for the e-book edition of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. I'm aiming for early spring 2012 publication, for there's a lot to do.

I found the photograph of Amtrak's latter-day California Zephyr on a keen web site called railpictures.net, where photographers of all skill levels post their favorite shots. This one of a westbound Zephyr in Colorado's majestic Glenwood Canyon is by Scott McClarrinon, who kindly assented to its use for my purposes.

The font used for the title and byline is aptly called Zephyr Gothic, and it is based on the actual font the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy/Denver & Rio Grande Western/Western Pacific railroads used for the train and car name boards on their original stainless-steel Vista-Domed streamliner California Zephyr in 1949. I found the font on another rail-themed site, railfonts.com.

Coming up with a cover design for a nonfiction e-book is decidedly easier than for a mystery novel. Nonfiction lends itself to the use of photograph illustration much more easily than fiction. The designer doesn't have to struggle so much to be creative. (It helps to have a chum who's adept with Photoshop, and Tina Davidson helped me with a vexing problem. She'll also be doing the route maps for the e-book.)

Now that the original book and its photographs (plus some new shots from my archives and others from railpictures.net) have been scanned into my computer, the next task is to track down all those Amtrak crew members I wrote about 20 years ago and re-interview them for a new Epilogue. I've found some, but quite a few are elusive, for there have been deaths and retirements and changes of career.

Onward, as they say.