"Sheldon, please," Amy begged. Her rolling suitcase click-clacked over the pavement as she tried to catch up with him. The sleet was going down the back of her neck. "Think about this." She nearly ran into him when he turned a corner and stopped dead.
"Just look at it," Sheldon breathed. Eyes shining, hands clasped to his chest, he was like a child beholding a much-wanted toy on Christmas morning.
"Sheldon, it's a train station," Amy snapped. Her nose had gone from cold to numb, and her hands hurt. It was half past four in the morning, and the storm was picking up.
"Yes. A really good one," he said.
Amy sighed and looked at it. She supposed Vancouver's Pacific Central was reasonably impressive, as that sort of thing went. The brightly lit facade was block wide, with a grand entrance rising the full height of the building. A celebration of technology from a more confident, optimistic age. An age that regarded taking a mere fourty hours to go between Vancouver and Los Angeles as a revolutionary breakthrough.
"Even if we have to wait until tommorow for our flight, we will still get home before the train," Amy said.
"What if the storm lasts for days? What if it destroys the airport? What if this is the global climate change tipping point, and the world is plunged into years of rain, flood and famine?" Sheldon asked. "I'm not staying in Canada for that." He started across the street towards the station.
Turn around and walk away. The option presented itself, clear and tempting. She could go back to the hotel, take a hot shower and crawl back into bed. Then spend a day schmoozing and gossiping in the lobby with everyone else stuck in Vancouver after the conference until the storm cleared enough to allow her flight. She could be having dinner with Penny and Bernadette tonight, in Pasadena, and Sheldon would still be rattling his way through Oregon somewhere, probably counting trees.
He glanced back over her shoulder, waiting for her, standing in the middle of the empty, pre-dawn street. Why do I do this? Amy wondered, and followed her boyfriend to Pacific Central.
#
"The engine is a Genesis P42DC." Sheldon was almost skipping along the platform. The train stretched out beside them, amazingly long, made up of solid two-deck carriages. Warm, inviting light glowed through it's myriad windows. "It has a maximum speed of 110 mph."
There was a certain granduer to the moment, Amy had to admit. A vast clockface ticked away the time in solemn Roman numerals. Flurries of snow became briefly visible as they danced into the circles of light cast by the platform lamps. Beneath them, people were reduced to small, huddled figures, swathed in coats, scarves and hats, warm breaths wafting white. Their hugs and kisses and goodbyes had become fragile, brave things, lost in the vastness of the storm and the station.
Sheldon was still talking. "...built in 1919. The first Seattle-Los Angeles route didn't start until 1971, after the formation of Amtrak. At first it was called the Coast Daylight, but then it was amalgamated with the Oakland-San Diego route-"
"This is it," Amy stopped Sheldon from walking right past their carriage.
He took a sharp turn and climbed aboard with hardly a break to the rhythm. "-and the new line kept the name." He gestured her down the cramped corridor. "Welcome to the Coast Starlight."
"The what?" Amy hauled her luggage along, checking the numbers above the doors, looking for their cabin. Was it called a cabin, on a train? She found the right door and edged inside. The space was shaped like three phonebooths stuck together, and mostly occupied by two beds that folded out from the wall, one above the other. There was just barely room to stand with her suitcase. When Sheldon joined her and slid the door shut behind him, there was barely room to breathe.
"The train is called the Coast Starlight," he said again.
Amy smiled. "That is so romantic."
Sheldon frowned down at her. "No it isn't."
"Yes it is."
"No."
"Yes."
"It's a train."
"Yes," Amy grinned. "A romantic train."
Sheldon scowled for an instant, and then it was gone. "Dibs top bunk."
"All yours," she said, but it turned out to be easier said than done.
To get to the ladder, Sheldon had to get past her. Amy tried half a shuffled step back, Sheldon tried to slip past her and then they were somehow trapped against one another, sandwiched in the tiny space.
"Um."
"Er."
Sheldon put his hands on her shoulders, trying to turn them both and switch places. The train lurched into motion and threw her fully against his chest, his arms reflexively going around her.
A whistle blew, sharp and bright, and it seemed to infect Sheldon like a disease. His arms tightened around Amy, enough to make breathing a suddenly complex matter. His smile was beatific. "We're underway!"
Amy patted his back. "Yes, we are."
The rhytmic beat of the railway, steel wheels against steel rails, was building up in her ears. A slow, solemn old heartbeat that grew younger and fiercer with every second as the train picked up speed.
Forty hours to Los Angeles, was it?
