Travel by Theme

Train Travel

Long-distance routes, sleeping cars, and the particular pleasure of slow travel.

In 2024 I crossed the country by Amtrak—Chicago to Seattle on the Empire Builder, down the California coast on the Coast Starlight, across the desert to New Orleans on the Sunset Limited. The trip took several weeks and covered nearly the entire continental network. What I found was that train travel forces you to actually experience the country at ground level instead of flying over it at 35,000 feet and arriving with no sense of what’s between the airports. The landscape changes slowly enough to register. The sleeping car gives you a specific kind of time—no agenda, nowhere to be—that is increasingly rare. These posts are about those routes: what they look like, how they work, and what you see.

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