Traveling Across America by Train – The Highlights

Our country all looks pretty much the same from Cleveland to Denver. It’s more interesting from a window on a train than through the windshield of a car on the Interstate, but you can see why people fly over it.

I was two days and two time zones from my home in Maine--traveling across America by train. On a Wednesday morning in March, I had walked out my front door and up the street to catch the Bangor Community Connector bus to the Concord Coach station in time for the 7 o’clock bus to Boston. Now it was Friday morning, and I had an hour in Denver to find breakfast.

Denver is a supply stop for the California Zephyr, the Amtrak train that runs from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay area. The train stops periodically along the route, but most of the stops are five to ten minutes in places like Osceola, Iowa. There are only a handful of longer layovers on the way west from Boston. It’s much better than a layover at an airport. You’re usually in town, for one thing, and you can get off the train, go to a store or restaurant, and intermingle with Americans living their lives in the places you’re just passing through.

Amtrak’s long-distance trains run once every 24 hours. In theory, that means they travel through the same places at the same time each day. You will have an hour in Albany on the first evening while the trains from Boston and New York are joined. You will pass through Cleveland in the middle of the night and arrive in Chicago mid-morning.

Whether you are bound for Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle, you can count on a few hours in Chicago while you change trains. You have time to walk down to Lake Michigan, but not to visit the top of the nearby Sears Tower, as my kids and I discovered one summer. The former tallest building in the world is close to Union Station, so close that you can see your train pulling out while you’re stuck on the top floor waiting for the elevator.

The California Zephyr travels the most scenic parts of the route in daylight. It crosses the Rockies on one day and the Sierra Nevadas the next. Two days out of Maine, the trip turned spectacular.

Immediately after the train leaves Denver, it begins to climb a series of switchbacks, offering long views of the Mile-High City behind and below. About an hour into the trip, the train enters the 10-kilometer (6.2 miles) Moffat Tunnel, completed in 1928, and passes under the Continental Divide, the mountain backbone that separates waters flowing into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It emerges on the other side of the Divide several long, dark minutes later.

The weather was completely different at opposite ends of the tunnel. We entered on a gray, overcast morning and emerged into a snowstorm. Intermittent snow continued for most of the day, although the bulk of it, as I was to find out, had already fallen in the Sierras.

The western slope of the Rockies is broad and beautiful. The route picks up the Colorado River near its source and follows it all the way into Utah, with stops in Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. There was a midnight stop in Salt Lake City, which I barely remember, and I stepped out in the predawn darkness for a breath of chill desert air in Winnemucca, Nevada, about as close to the middle of nowhere as one could want to be. It was daylight in Reno, a pretty city with an ugly train station, down below street level in a concrete ditch.

The Sierra Nevadas are taller, steeper, and, on this March morning, considerably

snowier than the Rockies. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen as much snow. The trees were weighed down with it. Utility buildings were buried up to their rooftops. Only a few animal tracks broke the smooth surface.

There was a couple in the observation car next to me, recently married later in life. The wife had been raised in a missionary family and traveled around the world, but she had never seen snow on the ground. “I’ve never been to Maine,” she told me. “You must be used to this, right?” I could only shake my head and laugh, enjoying the moment as much as she.

In Martinez, at the northern end of San Francisco Bay, I detrained and found a dog-friendly bar a few blocks from the station. It was shirtsleeve warm and felt like California, a far cry from the snowy streets of Truckee, where we’d first crossed into the state that morning. An Amtrak bus would take me from here to Petaluma.

I must report that while the Amtrak trains are comfortable, the buses are not. The seats are too tall and close together, and even a small guitar in its case won’t fit in the overhead rack. Our own Concord Coach buses in New England are much better.

But California’s got good public transportation, a sign that this car-happy state is boldly moving into the 21 st century. Local trains and local buses augment long-distance services. My favorite part of the whole trip may have been the train from Santa Rosa to the ferry landing in Larkspur and the boat ride into San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city, even more so when seen from the water.

On the return trip, I took the Southwest Chief from Los Angeles. The train was delayed for about two hours in the middle of the night near Flagstaff, when an ill passenger had to be taken off. It was the only substantial delay of the trip. The train stops in Albuquerque, where there’s a grocery store near the station, and where, unlike Chicago, it seems to be warm all the time.

I would encourage anyone with the time to take a similar trip. As John Steinbeck noted in 1960, the Interstate Highway System was specifically designed so that you don’t see anything. On a train, you pass through neighborhoods, farms, and unspoiled scenery. You meet people. The Amish take trains. So do a fair number of retirees and families with children, as well as international visitors.

I slept in my coach seat and woke more comfortable than I would have on a bus or an airplane. Even had I stopped along the route, I still would have had to spend nights on the train, because the long-distance routes run but once a day, 24 hours apart. You’re going to be traveling through Kansas and Ohio in the dark. But it still beats driving or flying. Interstates and airports all look the same. A train is different every time.