Slipping through rural Louisiana, with giant grain silos and water towers sliding silently past the window, my boyfriend and I were in the middle of a hand of cards. Then the whistle blew, the carriage jolted hard, and the massive silver train ground its brakes. As it squealed to a stop, the reason behind our sudden lurch came sliding into view on either side of the tracks. On one side sat the front of an articulated lorry, the bemused driver climbing out of his cab, cap in hand, scratching his head; on the other side of the train was the back half of the truck, grain spilling down the embankment. The lorry had been torn in two like a piece of tin foil. And people say that train travel in the US is boring.
In fact, they tend to say a lot more than that. American friends we talked to before our epic rail trip around the west had generally one reaction — that we were certifiably insane. Rail transport, they told us, was prohibitively expensive and painfully slow. If we wanted to get somewhere, people said, domestic airlines were a cheaper and safer bet.
But we didn’t listen. As travelers who wanted a journey more than a destination — and craved the room to work, read and relax on the way — the train seemed an obvious solution.
Photo: Bloomberg
And it was surprisingly affordable: US$389 covers you for two weeks of train riding. Or, more specifically, it covers you for eight separate segments of travel within 15 days.
Careful planning meant we could make a loop that would take in 17 states, with stops along the way in cities as far flung as Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Chicago. It was a journey of 10,418km by rail, using four major lines; there would be six nights spent sleeping on trains, and 147 hours in all would be spent on the rails if everything went to plan (and everyone we spoke to about the trip assured us it wouldn’t).
Many Americans suggest that the best way to see the heartland — a blank space between major cities — is through the bottom of a cocktail glass from 10,000m, as if we were all George Clooney in Up in the Air. These are dismissively referred to as the “flyover states” that out-of-towners would only visit under duress or if you paid them enough.
And there’s certainly some truth in that: there were times on the longer legs of the journey when I wanted to take a prairie, snap it into quarters and make it magically four times shorter and four times prettier. The one thing you couldn’t do is make it four times flatter, but this is what you get for skirting the borders of the west.
The first leg had brought us from San Francisco down to Los Angeles — from the low suburbia and cities of industrial estates that lined the track as we skirted Silicon Valley through hundreds of kilometers of fields, where temporary workers under canopies picked fruits and nuts in the midday sun, and then out to the Pacific coast, alongside the beaches, dolphins and whales dancing in the ocean beside us.
After the jumbled chaos of Los Angeles, the chance to strike out across great desolate plains and untouched prairies was soul calming. Skimming the southern border of the US, we spent one whole day looking at Mexico some hundred meters away on the other side of the window. Once we cut through the swampy, sticky bayous of Louisiana’s Gulf Shore — with a short delay to cope with our brief train crash, though thankfully nobody was hurt — we turned a corner at New Orleans and cut up to the rail hub of Chicago. Here the flatness remained, but the aspect changed. One day we were in 35°C and 80 percent humidity, lying on the floor in our underwear in front of the air conditioning; a few days later we were trudging through the snow in Montana, watching hotels making preparations for the winter, shutters down and the fluorescent “Rooms” signs switched off for the season.
Riding a train through the west provides a feeling that the other more perfunctory routes in the east do not offer. You get a sense that you’re cutting through a slice of American history. The idea of a transcontinental railroad was an engineering dream of early America — and in 1869, after a lot of politicking, land-finagling and hard business nous, the first route opened from New York to California.
Though we did not take the route that skims the original transcontinental railroad, it’s hard not to feel like a pioneer sitting on board trains with wildly romantic names — the Empire Builder, the California Zephyr, the Sunset Limited — and striking out across land that looks untouched, even though you know how tightly guarded it all is now.
American criticisms of the service are, to some extent, well-founded. While America owes a huge historical debt to the train (the country’s dramatic growth in the late 1800s was largely built on the back of rail expansion), the modern inheritor of US railroads, Amtrak, has long been pilloried. Set up in 1971, the service was intended to protect passenger rail from a collapse caused by the primacy of the car. Today, despite heavy subsidies, it’s one of the least-used rail systems in the developed world and the network — around half the size it was at its peak — is used primarily for freight. Though there is a slight renaissance (Amtrak has posted record passenger numbers over the past few years), the vast majority of Americans consider train travel only for the aerophobic or the retired.
Riding in these great silver beasts, though, passing slowly across hotly contested lands and wildest wests, you gaze across the prairies and start to imagine the possibilities they hold and realize the drive of those pioneers.
Each of these expansive, sky-filled stretches was punctuated with the great palaces that are the US’ grand rail stations, empty these days but still impressive. Among the grandest was Chicago’s Union Station, a huge vault filled with gilt lampposts and flags large enough to drape the coffin of a patriotic diplodocus. While not all America’s stations retain their sense of history, the best are outstanding: elegant, classical halls with marble floors and hardwood, high-backed benches that smack of grand dreams and high drama. You can’t escape the feeling that you’re inside some classic film noir or a Raymond Chandler novel. Simply walking around makes you want to run across the floor (tears streaming, heels clacking, fur stole dragging) straight into the arms of your long-lost lover (who would, of course, be Don Draper from Mad Men).
Once you’re on the silver trains, the sensation of passing through the pages of a novel is amplified by Amtrak’s arcane eating arrangements. On one, passengers are instructed to make a timed reservation with the dining car steward and wait for their name to be called — generally either mispronounced or in a pitying tone of voice. Or, if you’re lucky, both. “Pickuuuuurd! Pardy-of-one!” they shouted, just to ensure that everyone realized I was eating alone that particular evening. Except you never are: guests are expected to dine with strangers. If this was the UK, I would expect to be ushered to a table (probably grumbling inwardly about the empty tables I passed on the way), then, once seated, make a curt nod and “hullo” to my table mates before either engaging in quiet conversation with my companion or looking pensively out of the window, trying hard to look like I’m thinking of Very Important Things.
But not in the US, where friendliness is a prized stereotype. We met a couple traveling from the 100th birthday party of a parent, a woman whose boyfriend makes telescopes for national parks as a hobby, and a man who teaches a poker master class.
At night the sleepers go back to their dormer carriages — if they’ve paid the sometimes extortionate price to upgrade. Everyone else, meanwhile, goes back to their seats, which, since they are wide and deeply reclining, feel more first class than economy. Sleeping in a room might afford a sliver of privacy, but the sight of stars hanging in a perfectly clear sky above a prairie with no light pollution for 100km in any direction, or being woken up by the sunrise over new mountains, makes it all worth it.
An Amtrak Rail Pass is available for 15, 30 or 45 days. A 15-day pass that covers eight segments (i.e. eight single journeys) costs US$389. For more information, see amtrak.com
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