Headed home
El Paso Wall
It is early morning when the car attendant announces breakfast will be in fifteen minutes and the kitchen is closed so there are only a limited number of breakfast sandwiches and no other offerings. The she explains that the Texas Eagle passengers will be bussed from Temple to Fort Worth because flooding north of Temple has rendered a bridge potentially unsafe. We were told to get our bags packed and ready to go.
From San Antonio to Temple I am sitting in my roomette with my packed bags watching San Marcos, Austin, and Taylor roll by. Sustained only by the coffee pot in the center of our car.
When we get to Temple, we find that because of the freight railroad waffling on the safety of the bridge the busses had been cancelled the night before and had to be re-ordered from Houston, but were enroute. The car attendant had been emphatic that sleeper passengers were to ride in bus number 1, so we dutifully waited leaning on the wall of the Temple railroad station, while the coach passengers milled around in a somewhat unruly herd.
Bus number 1 arrives and the coach passengers are like the Visigoths storming the gates of Rome. There is no small amount of grumbling when they are turned away, until they discover bus 1 will be stopping at McGregor and Cleburne before getting to Fort Worth. (The same was true for bus 2. Only bus 3 was going straight to Fort Worth to get the train crew there in time to make the beds and get ready to receive the passsengers.
The long awaited busses arrived and were so new that our driver was delayed pulling shipping tape off of the seats. The nominal seating was 57 passengers including the toilet. We had 56 passengers counting the woman who remained in the toilet from Temple to Tarrant Parkway near downtown Fort Worth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kudos
Our car attendant did a magnificent job of keeping us informed and organized throughout the entire operation.
