Boarding the Empire Builder: Chicago to the Prairie

There’s a reason people still take trains. Not speed — a flight to Seattle takes five hours, the Empire Builder takes forty-six. Not convenience — departure is at 2:15 PM on a Tuesday, take it or leave it. Something else. Something harder to name. A slowness that feels like a luxury in a world that’s forgotten how to be slow. A window that never stops moving. The specific pleasure of watching a country unfold at ground level, mile by unhurried mile, with nowhere else to be and no other way to get there any faster even if you wanted to.

I’ve wanted to ride the Empire Builder for years. This was finally the trip where it made sense — needed to get from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest, had the time, and the idea of spending two days crossing the northern tier of America by train seemed like exactly the right pace for what this trip was supposed to be about.

I was not wrong about that. Not even close.

Union Station Before Departure

Chicago’s Union Station is a building that takes itself seriously, and it’s earned the right to do that. The Great Hall is all Corinthian columns and barrel-vaulted skylights, the kind of space that was designed to make departure feel significant — a civic ceremony, departure as rite. People used to dress for train journeys. Steamer trunks. Hatboxes. Small dogs in carriers. I showed up in hiking shorts with a backpack and a Ziploc bag of trail mix. Less romantic. More practical. No regrets.

I had time before boarding so I walked the Great Hall slowly, craning my neck at the ceiling, thinking about all the departures this room has held. The wartime ones. The ones that were one-way. The ordinary Tuesday ones where someone was just going home to Minnesota and it wasn’t a big deal but they still looked up at the ceiling because you can’t help it.

The boarding process for a long-distance Amtrak train has a different energy than anything else in transit. Nobody’s rushing. Nobody’s shoving through to get overhead bin space. People are settling in for the long haul — arranging things in roomettes with the careful deliberation of someone setting up a campsite. The sleeping car attendant pointed me to my roomette. Two facing seats by a wide window, which would later fold down into a bed. Compact in the way that boat cabins are compact: everything had a purpose, nothing was wasted, and if you stood in the center you could touch both walls without fully extending your arms.

Loved it immediately. No hesitation.

Life in the Roomette

A roomette on the Empire Builder is a study in design efficiency. You get a window, two seats, a fold-down table, a small closet that fits exactly the things you’d want to access without digging through your main bag, and privacy — a door that slides shut and separates you from the corridor. At night the seats collapse into a lower berth and an upper berth folds down from the ceiling, and you’re in a kind of cocoon, moving at sixty miles an hour through the middle of the country, with curtains drawn and the rail rhythm rocking you like you’re twelve years old again on a camping cot.

The real luxury is the dining car. Meals included with a roomette ticket, served on actual plates with actual silverware at white tablecloth tables. Communal seating — they put you with strangers, old-school style. The conversation that happens over Amtrak steak and green beans at a table for four on a train crossing Wisconsin is unlike any conversation you’ll have anywhere else. Everyone on a long-distance train has a story about why they’re on a long-distance train. A retired teacher taking the train to see her daughter for the first time since COVID. A guy who’d done the Builder seventeen times and was doing it for the eighteenth because he just felt like it. An older couple on what I guessed was maybe their last big trip, though nobody said that out loud.

Those conversations don’t happen on planes. You’re too high up, too sealed off, too aware of how quickly the whole thing is going to be over. The train gives you the time to actually talk.

Into Wisconsin

The train pulled out right on time, which I was told not to take for granted. Chicago’s industrial edges slid past the window — rail yards, warehouses, the backs of buildings that face the other way, never expecting to be someone’s view. Then the suburbs. Then the exurbs, where the houses spread out and the yards get bigger. Then, gradually and then all at once, the prairie opened up.

Wisconsin in July is impossibly green. Rolling farmland, dairy barns, silos catching the late afternoon light at angles that make them look almost beautiful. The occasional small town sliding past: a water tower, a grain elevator, a diner with its sign lit up even though it was only 5 PM. I kept wanting to stop and look around but that’s the thing about a train — you can look all you want, but you don’t get to stop. The moving is the point.

The Mississippi River appeared somewhere south of La Crosse — wide and brown and slow and ancient, the way it always looks. The train followed it for a while before crossing into Minnesota, and I moved to the observation car to watch. The observation car is a double-decker coach with floor-to-ceiling windows wrapping around the top level, and it’s the reason you book a roomette on this train. I was up there when the sun started going down over the prairie, and the sky turned orange, then pink, then a deep bruised purple that hung on for what felt like almost an hour. I kept thinking it was done and then it got more intense.

There were maybe a dozen of us in the observation car. Nobody talking. Nobody on their phone. Just watching. It felt like a shared agreement — unspoken, unanimous — that some things don’t need commentary.

Minneapolis, Then Dark

Pulled into Minneapolis-St. Paul around 10 PM. I didn’t get off — just pressed my face to the glass and watched the platform slide past. A few passengers boarded, a few got off, the ritual of a mid-journey stop. The city’s nighttime skyline was visible briefly through the window, then we were moving again, heading northwest into the dark.

Converting the roomette to sleep mode is a process that would be comically complicated if it weren’t so satisfying. The seats go flat. A mattress materializes. Sheets get tucked with practiced precision by the sleeping car attendant, who makes it look effortless and probably is only effortless because they’ve done it a thousand times. I climbed in, pulled the curtain, and lay there listening to the rhythm of the rails — that steady clack-clack, clack-clack that sounds like a heartbeat slowed down to the pace of the whole country.

Tomorrow I’d wake up in North Dakota.

I’d never been to North Dakota. The thought felt improbable and thrilling in equal measure. The train carried me deeper into the sleeping center of the continent, and I was asleep before Minnesota was done.