Train Travel To California and Back (part 1)

Boarding the bus in Martinez, California

One morning in March, I stepped outside my door in Bangor, Maine and walked two blocks up the hill to catch a Community Connector Bus to the Concord Coach bus station on Union Street. From that station, you can go anywhere in the world without a car. Imagine walking out your door in Bangor and ending up on an island in the Aegean Sea. I’ve done it. This time, the destination was more prosaic, and it didn’t involve airplanes. I was going to California by train.

I had twelve days in which to visit a sister in the Bay Area and a daughter near San Diego. I was determined not to fly or drive. Amtrak offers a 30-day pass, good for ten separate legs, or segments, of an extended trip. It seemed like the way to go.

Here’s how it works. You buy the pass for $499, and then you book each segment of your trip on the Amtrak website. This is easy to do, even if you aren’t conversant with apps and interactive websites. I only had to call Amtrak customer service once. I booked the trip in late January, with a departure date in mid-March. I received my tickets by e-mail and printed them out, one ticket for each segment.

Concord Coach exists outside the Amtrak system, so I had to pay separately for a one-way trip to Boston. But it’s super-convenient. The bus you board in Bangor at 7:00 gets you to South Station before noon, and Amtrak’s Lakeshore Limited departs for Chicago at 12:50 pm.

The pass is good for coach seats only, but the seats on the trains are far apart, with plenty of room to stretch out and snooze. Of the eleven nights I was away, I spent five of them on a train and one on a bus. It’s a big country.

All rail routes to the west seem to go through Chicago. Whether you’re headed for San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle, you will spend a few hours in the Windy City. I usually walk down to Lake Michigan and find someplace to eat along the way. I can tell you that it beats the heck out of O’Hare Airport.

Amtrak augments its long-distance train service with buses that provide shorter rides to destinations not served by train. The three-day train trip from Chicago on the California Zephyr counted as a single segment, as did the 90-minute bus from Martinez to Petaluma, where my sister met me in her car. It was the first time I’d been in a car since stepping out my front door in Bangor.

Segment four was an overnight Amtrak bus from San Francisco to Santa Barbara and a train to Solana Beach, between Oceanside and San Diego. This combined trip counted as a single segment. Trains run the length of the west coast, and it is possible to do this segment wholly by train, if you leave in the morning. I opted to spend the day in San Francisco with my sister and take the overnight bus. In Santa Barbara we transferred to a train at six in the morning, and I was in Solana Beach, on the coast north of San Diego, before noon

From Solana Beach I used two local buses ($1.50 each) to get to first Escondido and then Ramona, where my daughter met me and drove me to her mountain home in Julian. Rural California, like rural Maine, is dependent on the automobile, and I depended on my daughter to drive me back down to the coast when it was time to leave.

Segment five was a two-hour trip up the coast to Los Angeles on the Pacific Surfliner, and segment six was the two-night Southwest Chief back to Chicago. The seventh and final segment was the Lakeshore Limited back to Boston.

I had intended to use my eighth segment to take the Downeaster to Portland and catch the Concord Coach to Bangor from there. The pass allows you to add additional segments on the fly. But the Downeaster departs from North Station, not South Station, and the timing with the bus didn’t work out. After an overnight stay at the International Hostel in Boston, I walked back to South Station and boarded a bus for home.

Three of my ten segments went unused. But I still considered it a good deal. On a future trip I might take more time and stop over for a day or two at some interesting places along the route.

In my next post, I’ll hit some of the highlights of the trip and share some helpful hints for anyone considering long-distance travel by train in these United States of the Automobile.

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