3 of the longest hours of my life...

Question: When is a trip to Ogden really like 2 trips to Ogden?
Answer: When you're riding UTA FrontRunner.


Last night Lauralee, Emma and I decided to take a ride on the new commuter rail. I guess we feel an affinity for it since it runs within several feet of our backyard, shakes our house slightly, and makes it impossible to hear the television when it honks its horn. Plus it was free.

We headed down to the Woods Cross station at about 6 o'clock; a Northbound train pulled up just as we got there, so we hopped on and headed toward "The Land of Og." (I actually heard that phrase on the train and thought it was hilarious.) Lauralee, a native of "O-Town," was interested to see how the train wound its way into Union Station there.

We boarded the train and headed upstairs; the car was pretty full. There was only one obviously available seat, next to a lady with two special needs teenagers. I let Laura sit there (she had the baby) and she became fast friends with one of the boys, who apparently referred to himself as "Willy Wonka." I actually spotted a friend of mine and stood in the aisleway talking to him. He was coming home from work. I asked him how his commuter rail experience had been. He said he wouldn't ever ride it to work again, but was glad that it was at least taking cars off the road so he could drive home faster.

After our stop in Farmington, some more seats opened up and Lauralee and I got to sit together. Let me tell you this: it has been highly touted that these trains can go up to 79 miles per hour, but we didn't get anywhere near that. In fact for most of the trip we were going slower than the cars on the freeway.

We finally arrived in Ogden at about 7:30. That's right; it took us an hour and a half to make a 40 minute drive. There were obviously some bugs in the system: most obviously was the fact that we sat for a very long time at each station rather than just long enough to load/unload.


We had initially planned on walking around at least for a little while in Ogden. However, we were concerned that it would take us just as long to get home, so we hopped off the Northbound train and were going to hop right on the Southbound train on the other track. Just after we got off our train, and much to our surprise, it started going backwards. It turned out that the train that was 'pointed' South wasn't really going anywhere. The train we had just gotten off was about to go back South in reverse! By the time we realized that, it was already gone.

After a few minutes of waiting (and dodging teenage smokers who seemed to have a knack for following us around), a new train came for us to board. Up to this point, Emma had been fantastic, with the exception of a squealing outburst just before we got to Ogden.

We got back on the train and found two seats together toward the front of the car. In front of us was a partition with a window in it, then two more seats, then the front of the car. A family with 3 young kids sat there in front of us and we chatted for a few minutes. They were really nice, and it was fun to have a 4-year-old and 3-year-old pressing their faces against the window and making funny faces at us. It entertained me, anyway.

We finally started back for Woods Cross. The return trip was faster; there were fewer people getting on and off at each stop. Emma got a little upset but eventually fell asleep in Laura's arms. As we got closer to 8:30, we knew that Emma would be hungry. Around 8:00 she woke up and was obviously starting to get hungry. My saint of a wife played "Patty Cake" and "The Wheels on the Bus" with her something like 78 times just to keep her distracted.

Some time between 8:30 and 8:45 we finally pulled in to Woods Cross, ran for the car, and jetted home. We had been gone for almost 3 hours.

Final thoughts on FrontRunner:
I'm glad we rode on it, but in the end it wasn't a very pleasing experience. It didn't seem practical at all as a form of commuter transportation. It was slow and there were long periods of just waiting on the track. The cars were nice, but track actually goes through some of the seedier parts of town -- hey, North Davis and Weber Counties: ever hear of a Weed Eater and lawn fertilizer? I did feel bad for a couple of trailer park residents, though: the track when within just a few feet of their trailers. You could actually see what they were watching on TV.

Riding FrontRunner was not as fun as Riding Trax, but more fun than riding a bicycle with no seat.