WINSLOW, ARIZ. — Early on a bright, clear May morning, bracing and brilliant in a way I've always associated with the American West, I stepped down from Amtrak's Southwest Chief at the trim adobe depot at Winslow, in northeastern Arizona. The rambling, Spanish-Colonial-Revival La Posada was adjacent.
I entered the original front door, on the railroad side of the building, and found a lobby, lounges, restaurant and guest rooms that were handsome and redolent of the past. And through the inn's figurative front yard rolled a seemingly inexhaustible fleet of freight trains. I was in a train fan's paradise.
That trip, taken a few years ago, was so enjoyable that I returned to La Posada with my wife, Laurel. This time, like almost all visitors, I came by car and entered the Arizona inn through what's now the front door, from an intact section of the fragmented but still famous Route 66.
La Posada, it turned out, was better than ever, with new landscaping and more (and more-luxurious) guest rooms. Rooms run from $99 to $149 a night, though prices are scheduled to bump up in March.
For our February visit, I'd requested a room with a view -- of the trains. We were assigned No. 101, facing the tracks, with a door opening right on the South Arcade, so I could scramble outside with my camera at a moment's notice.
Approached from either side, La Posada seems little changed by the nearly eight decades that have passed since it opened in 1930. Actually, that perception is deceiving, because La Posada (Spanish for "inn") has changed plenty. But now it's more or less back where it started.
La Posada is a destination in itself, and not just for train enthusiasts like me. Using the excellent booklet the inn provides, we explored its every nook and cranny and absorbed its history.
The inn's back story involves one of the most successful business partnerships in America, sealed with a handshake in 1876 by Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe Railway.
Before dining cars were common, lunchrooms were an important -- and generally unpalatable -- aspect of rail travel. Harvey thought he could do better. The deal he struck with Santa Fe called for the railroad to construct and own lunchrooms, restaurants and hotels along the rail lines, and he would run them.
The railroad would also supply the coal, water, ice and transportation of furnishings, food, supplies and personnel -- most notably the Harvey Girls, waitresses recruited by the company through its offices in Chicago and Kansas City, Mo.
