The Coast Starlight: Seattle Through Oregon

After a week in the Seattle-Tacoma orbit — Rainier, the dogs, Capitol Hill, Pike Place — it was time to get back on a train. The Coast Starlight is Amtrak’s other legendary long-distance route. It runs the whole West Coast, Seattle to Los Angeles, and I’d been looking forward to this leg almost as much as the Empire Builder. Different train, different geography, same general idea: sit in a chair and let the country move past the window.

The Empire Builder had given me the plains and the Rockies. The Coast Starlight was going to give me the Cascades, the Willamette Valley, and southern Oregon in the dark. I was ready.

Boarding in Seattle

King Street Station is the kind of train station that makes you feel like you made the right choice. High ceilings, warm wood, a clock tower visible from the street. It has that sense of occasion that airports quietly abandoned decades ago in favor of more retail square footage. You walk into King Street and you feel like you’re actually departing somewhere, not just entering a holding area with a Starbucks.

I checked my bag, found my seat, and the Coast Starlight pulled out right on time, which — if you’ve spent any time following Amtrak’s on-time performance statistics — is not something you take for granted. The first stretch south from Seattle runs along the Puget Sound shoreline. Water on one side, the city receding on the other. Then the suburbs start, and the suburbs thin out, and then the smaller towns go by: Tacoma, where I’d spent a week; Olympia; Centralia. Each one a brief stop and then the train pushes on.

Through Washington

Traveling by train through Washington state is a different view than the highway gives you. The tracks run through river valleys and pass through small towns that the interstate bypasses entirely. You see backyards and boat launches and the occasional person at a grade crossing who waves. It’s the intimate version of the landscape, the one that only comes at thirty miles per hour instead of sixty-five.

The Cascades were visible to the east through breaks in the trees. Mt. Rainier had been a constant presence all week in Tacoma — you could see it from the city on clear days, this enormous thing just sitting there in the sky — and watching it recede behind me as the train headed south felt like a proper goodbye. Then Mt. St. Helens appeared for a few minutes, its blown-out crater visible even at distance. Two volcanoes in one view. The Pacific Northwest really does not do understatement.

I had my laptop out but I wasn’t doing much with it. Mostly I was in the observation car, watching the landscape. I’d brought things to do on this train ride and I did approximately none of them. That tracks, if you’ll forgive the expression.

Portland and the Willamette Valley

The stop in Portland was maybe twenty minutes. Long enough to watch people get on and off, not long enough to get off myself. The train crossed the Willamette River leaving Portland and then we were in the valley — rolling hills, vineyards, old barns, that particular Oregon green that looks like it was mixed by someone who had too many options on the palette. The Willamette Valley produces some genuinely excellent pinot noir. From a train window in late afternoon, it looked exactly like wine country is supposed to look.

Salem, Albany, Eugene — the valley towns went by as the sun got lower. The observation car was filling up again. People doing what people always do on scenic trains: pressing their faces to the glass, taking photos they know won’t quite capture it, saying “look at that” to no one in particular. There’s a specific kind of camaraderie in a train observation car that I don’t think exists anywhere else. Strangers pointing things out to each other. Nobody staring at their phones. Everyone briefly in agreement that what’s outside the window is worth paying attention to.

Into Southern Oregon

South of Eugene, the terrain changed pretty quickly. The flat valley floor gave way to the foothills and then the Cascades proper, and the train started climbing. The forests got denser. The stops got further apart. The towns down here have names like Chemult and Klamath Falls and the landscape between them feels like it hasn’t changed much in a long time. Wild Oregon, if there’s such a designation.

By the time the sun set, we were deep in the mountains. I stayed in the observation car as long as I could, watching the last light turn the forest canopy from gold to purple to black. The stars came out over the Cascades. The train rocked on, carrying everyone south through the dark, toward California, which at this point felt like both the next state and a different concept entirely.

I fell asleep somewhere in southern Oregon, the same way I’d fallen asleep on the Empire Builder weeks earlier — rails under me, dark out the window, the gentle swaying that does something to your nervous system that I don’t fully understand but fully appreciate. Somewhere ahead was Mt. Shasta. Somewhere ahead was the Bay Area. Somewhere ahead was wine country.

Just not yet. First, sleep.