Rhythm RAILS OF THE
Train offers primer on America’s landscape
At sunrise it was still Kansas. We’d spent our first day aboard the Southwest Chief rocking across the table-flat farmland west of Chicago and the gentle hills of northern Missouri. The sun went down hours before we reached Kansas City, and Lawrence, Topeka and Dodge City were all lost in the darkness as we hurtled west. Now we woke to the sight of cattle standing in their feedlots and oil rigs pumping away like gigantic mechanical toys.
My wife, Sonja, and I were on the first leg of a grand triangular train trip, a springtime odyssey that took us southwest to Los Angeles, north to Seattle, and then back east to Milwaukee. The routes we traveled bore illustrious names from the golden years of American rail travel: Hiawatha, Southwest Chief, Pacific Surfliner, Coast Starlight and Empire Builder. The names were preserved when Amtrak consolidated the nation’s passenger service in 1971. Together the historic routes carried us nearly 6,000 miles in two weeks — 5,924, to be exact.
We got off every so often, of course. Sonja and I spent a day as tourists in Santa Fe, N.M., visited old friends in San Luis Obispo, Calif., and Portland, Ore., then stayed with our oldest son in Olympia, Wash. Each of those stops was a pleasure, but it was the silver threads of the railroad tracks that stitched them all together. After five nights and six days on the train, the rocking and rolling became so familiar that I actually went through a mild form of kinetic withdrawal when we got home: The earth felt entirely too solid.
We had decided that we were both too creaky, in our 60s, to endure five nights in the coach cars. Instead we paid roughly double the standard fare for a “roomette,” a cleverly designed space a little over 3 feet by 6 feet. Two facing seats fold down to a single bed, and a second berth drops from the ceiling. By the fifth night I had a glimmer of what life in a submarine must be like, but sleeping was rarely a problem: The train’s motion was as soothing as any cradle.
I spent a major portion of each day in the dome car, watching the country unfold at more than a mile a minute. Train travel is a rolling primer on the American
landscape. You see it all: mountains and plains, deserts and forests, sprawling cities and cattle ranches the size of Wisconsin counties.
Three segments stand out in my memory. Traveling on the Pacific Surfliner, we left the geographic anarchy of Los Angeles and came at Oxnard to the sea, the incomparable sea. For two hours, we threaded our way up the coast, past beaches dotted with umbrellas and dashed with surfboards. Pelicans skimmed the waves in search of a meal, cormorants arched their wet wings on the rocks, and a pair of what might have been whales breached and splashed far out on the waves.
The Oregon Cascades were gorgeous in a different way. We wove across the range through 21 tunnels, and each opened to a different vista, sometimes above a river, sometimes in a dense conifer forest, and always within sight of rocky peaks before we reached the broad valley of the Willamette and descended to Portland.
The summit of the trip, literally and scenically, was Glacier National Park. Eastbound travelers have to rise early to catch the spectacle outside their windows. The Empire Builder feels its weight on the long climb to Marias Pass, passing under avalanche sheds and over trestles before it reaches the Continental Divide. Our view of the peaks was obscured by a steady rain that thickened to snow in the higher elevations, but the passage was grand nonetheless.
The train, you soon discover, is a great equalizer of landscapes. It doesn’t pause at the beauty spots or accelerate through the flat stretches but moves constantly forward in its rush from here to there. (Big skies notwithstanding, to spend a day traveling through eastern Montana is to be grateful you live in Wisconsin.)
And because the trains run all night, even insomniacs won’t see everything. I slept through most of Kansas, Arizona, northern California, eastern Washington and Minnesota, and travelers headed in the opposite direction will have an entirely different set of gaps.
That’s not to say there weren’t pauses. Amtrak leases its tracks in the West from freight lines who give their own trains priority, and we regularly found ourselves on remote rail sidings, waiting for a freight train to pass. So don’t use Amtrak if you have appointments to keep; the system’s timetable seems to be set more by sundial than stopwatch.
In the end, however, taking the train is about taking your time. The landscapes that Amtrak traverses are remarkably varied and so, when you get tired of looking out the window, are its passengers. Our trains carried tour groups from Decatur, Ill., sisters on vacation to Santa Barbara, Calif., drifters eager to tell their life stories, a variety of Amish families, young Saudis here on business, World War II veterans visiting their retired children, teens from El Paso, Texas, on a Baptist mission trip to San Francisco, and wellshod industrialists afraid to fly — all finding a temporary bond in the rhythm of the rails.
Passengers on the sleeper cars are likely to make the greatest number of acquaintances. Meals are included in the fare, and the seating is democratic: You share a table with whoever stands next to you in line. The conversations are generally more interesting than the cuisine. Amtrak’s menu is limited to begin with, and it varies not at all from route to route — a recent decision that makes even the staff scratch their heads.
I was ready for some home cooking by the time we returned to Milwaukee, but the trip gave me a winter’s worth of visual memories: an elk wading deliberately across the Flathead River in Montana, gas flames lighting up the darkness in the North Dakota oil fields, the vertiginous view of Sunset Falls from a trestle in the Cascades, the late-night stream of headlights running parallel to us on Interstate 40 in Arizona, the morning mist swirling above Klamath Lake in Oregon. What you experience on a long-distance train trip is the sheer breadth of America, a country where you can travel thousands of miles without a passport, and someone else does all the driving.
It’s been only a few months since we stepped off the last platform, but there are already times when the ground starts to feel too firm and the landscape passes by too slowly. I’m rooted and glad to be, but it’s then that I find myself yearning for the headlong motion and sideways swing of travel by train.
IF YOU GO
Our route took us on Amtrak’s Hiawatha train from Milwaukee to Chicago. From there we took the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles, the Pacific Surfliner to San Luis Obispo, the Coast Starlight to Seattle and finally the Empire Builder back to Milwaukee. For more route ideas, prices and reservations, call (800) 872-7245 or see amtrak.com.
Consider traveling on a USA Rail Pass. The option we chose allowed us to make eight stops in 15 days for a bit less than it would have cost to buy the segments individually.
Make sure to get out and stretch your legs during the longer service stops. There aren’t many opportunities to stand on the train, much less exercise.
Set your alarm to make sure you see all of Glacier National Park on the eastbound Empire Builder.
Use the observation car. It’s surprising how many people pass up a 180-degree view of the American landscape for the limited perspective of their seats.
Don’t expect consistent cellphone service. Bring a good book.
Talk to people. You’ll rarely find a richer (or more captive) crosssection of the American people.