We had been properly into our journey from Los Angeles to Chicago, surrounded by cornfields and grain elevators, when the prepare halted and a voice rang out.
“All proper, of us,” mentioned a person on the PA system. “We’ve come to a cease in what seems to be the center of nowhere.”
To a traveler in a rush, that is the stuff of nightmares. To a seasoned passenger on the L.A.-Chicago prepare often called Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, it’s simply one other day.
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Once you board an American long-distance prepare in 2025, you might be buying and selling the airport routine for entry right into a locomotive-driven realm the place there’s neither TSA nor WiFi. And AI may as properly stand for aged infrastructure.
There shall be delays, usually due to passing freight trains. However within the discount, you might be releasing your self from fear about aerodynamics or the continual scarcity of U.S. air site visitors controllers and having access to ground-level surroundings and idle hours.
You’re additionally becoming a member of a modest pattern. Even earlier than this fall’s bout of flight cancellations throughout the federal government shutdown, Amtrak had set data for passengers and income in fiscal 2024, then once more in 2025. Ridership on the Southwest Chief rose 12.6% within the final 12 months. Amtrak’s long-distance trains haven’t caught up with their pre-pandemic numbers but, however we appear to love them somewhat extra recently.
Passengers board the Southwest Chief at Los Angeles Union Station.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
To study why, I boarded the Southwest Chief at Los Angeles Union Station on a latest Monday afternoon. I used to be able to see just a few desert sunsets from the Sightseer Lounge and listen to what folks say once they have the time to talk with a stranger IRL.
Earlier than lengthy, I had been social gathering to conversations about worry of flying, docs in Tijuana, methods to make beef jerky and methods to sleep in a shifting steel field. I’d additionally heard these sentences:
- “I like watching the nation go by. I draw and I paint,” mentioned passenger Nancy Roeder.
- “I’m a fourth-generation mannequin railroader,” mentioned William Angus.
- “I’m not going to misinform you. I took his life.”
This final remark got here from a fellow traveler, ruefully disclosing an act of self-defense a few years in the past. No proof was supplied, however I believed it. I additionally discovered the teller of the story (whom I received’t title) to be good firm, considerate and beneficiant.
In different phrases, on a two-day prepare, you meet folks and listen to issues that you just won’t on a four-hour flight.
What Paul Theroux wrote 50 years in the past in “The Nice Railway Bazaar” continues to be true: “Something is feasible on a prepare: a terrific meal, a binge, a go to from card gamers, an intrigue, a superb evening’s sleep, and strangers’ monologues framed like Russian quick tales.”
Flagstaff by daybreak
Passengers loosen up within the Sightseer Lounge on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
There’s one Southwest Chief departure from Los Angeles on daily basis (and one from Chicago). If every little thing goes proper, the two,265-mile, 32-stop journey takes about 43 hours.
However solely a rookie would depend on that. About 60% of the time, the Southwest Chief arrives not less than quarter-hour late.
For a lot of its route via Arizona, the route is flanked by previous Route 66 and different lonely desert roads.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
Again in 1936, when the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway launched Southwest Tremendous Chief service between Los Angeles and Chicago, this was a roughly 40-hour journey. The passenger checklist included loads of show-biz folks and the primary cease was in Pasadena.
These days, the Southwest Chief is run by Amtrak (which will get authorities funding however operates independently sufficient to be unaffected by latest authorities shutdowns). There will not be so many show-biz folks now, not as many frills. As an alternative of Pasadena, its first cease after Los Angeles is Fullerton, adopted by a bend to the northeast. By the point I arrived within the eating automotive for my first dinner aboard, we had been nearing Barstow.
“This fashion, younger man,” lied the server winningly as he steered me to a desk. (I’m 65. Within the eating automotive, each traveler, irrespective of how aged, will get greeted as a younger man or younger girl.)
Since cubicles maintain 4 folks, eating automotive stewards like Chuck Jones handle the fragile job of placing vacationers collectively. By PA bulletins and whispers within the aisles, he inspired us to introduce ourselves and preserve telephones off tables.
He additionally prompt we avoid politics — a tall order when touring via a authorities shutdown from a metropolis the president had simply referred to as “lawless” to 1 he had simply referred to as “the worst and most harmful metropolis on the planet.”
Shock: Nearly everybody complied.
Over the course of six eating automotive meals as a solo traveler, I heard no political disagreements and met vacationers from their 20s to their 80s.
Claudette Toth, a senior from Massachusetts, estimated that she’d solely flown three or 4 occasions in her life. William Angus, a 24-year-old returning to Chicago from a pilgrimage to the San Diego Mannequin Railroad Museum instructed of how a lot he beloved operating a 1/87 scale mannequin of the Bakersfield-Mojave rail system, re-enacting operations from February 1953.
Ernie Haecker, of Sante Fe and New York, is a daily on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief prepare between Los Angeles and Chicago.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
As Angus spoke, Ernie Haecker, a longtime prepare lover, nodded in understanding, grinning beneath a handlebar mustache. Haecker, 77, an audiologist, instructed us he takes the prepare each six weeks, splitting time between Santa Fe and New York. After so many journeys, he is aware of the crew, is aware of the place the prepare will pause lengthy sufficient for him to shave, is aware of he can depend on chatting with “an entire panoply of parents each time.” He even knew the spot in Illinois the place the prepare would change from one previous firm’s tracks to a different’s.
“We simply left the previous Santa Fe,” he would say when the second got here. “Now we’re on Burlington.”
My dinner on the primary evening was one other completely happy shock — a reasonably tender and flavorful flat iron steak. There was a vase holding flowers at each desk, together with white tablecloth.
A meal is served within the eating automotive.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
Nonetheless, no one ought to anticipate a Michelin-star meal in an Amtrak eating automotive. It’s widespread for servers to deliver out dessert earlier than the primary dish (to keep away from operating behind later) and at one meal, somebody forgot my order and I needed to begin over half an hour later.
By the point we crossed into Arizona that first evening, I used to be again in my roomette nodding off, lulled like a child atop a washer.
We had been close to Flagstaff after I blinked awake, glad to catch sight of the dawn and grateful to have a sleeping space of my very own.
Arizona sprawl and the Amtrak class system
Roomettes measure about 23 sq. ft.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
Of the 3 ways you possibly can journey long-distance on Amtrak, the fanciest possibility is a personal room that’s about 50 sq. ft (together with personal bathtub). The associated fee — about $3,200 for a pair, a technique, after I booked — consists of meals within the eating automobiles. (Household rooms, which maintain 4 folks however share bogs, price about the identical. All charges fluctuate by season and demand.)
That was too expensive for me and my expense account, so I booked a roomette. The roomettes are about half the scale of a personal room, with dining-car entry and higher and decrease berths that permit two vacationers to lie flat (or one to unfold out). These share bathrooms and showers. This price me $809. (For a pair, the tab would have been $1,112.)
The third possibility was coach class, which implies sleeping in your seat. It’s a good choice when you’re touring solely a portion of the route, and it’s what I did when touring this route as a university pupil 45 years in the past.
I used to be intrigued to see that coach fares begin at $198 — solely a bit greater than the beginning value for a flight. However no, not intrigued sufficient.
As a coach passenger, you don’t get entry to the eating automotive (except there’s room and also you’re prepared to pay $20-$45 for a meal). As an alternative, you deliver meals, purchase snacks within the cafe automotive beneath the Sightseer Lounge or, if really determined, attempt to prepare a restaurant supply to an upcoming fresh-air cease.
Fortuitously, all lessons get entry to the Sightseer Lounge, the place armchairs and couches face large home windows. I’ve heard of lounges getting fairly crowded and ripe on closely booked journeys, however our educated appeared lower than half-full. A number of coach passengers dozed within the lounge in a single day (which is formally forbidden) and no one appeared bothered.
That first morning, with espresso in hand, I tiptoed into the lounge, sank into an armchair and watched the desert sprawl whereas wispy clouds clung to the horizon beneath a brightening sky.
This postcard (or moderately Instagram) second got here someplace between Winslow and Holbrook. I’m instructed the surroundings is extra dramatic on the Coast Starlight (from Los Angeles to Seattle) and the California Zephyr (from Emeryville via the Rockies to Chicago). However this comes all the way down to style. In the event you like deserts, the Chief is difficult to beat. (Although irrespective of the route, when you like images, the prepare is a problem: no open home windows, so that you’re at all times capturing exteriors via glass.)
As Arizona yielded to New Mexico, the grime appeared to get redder and the ridges rose to type buttes. Alongside rivers and creeks, vibrant yellow cottonwood timber congregated in bursts of yellow. Often we’d glimpse small cities and timeworn roadside sights — a reminder that Previous Route 66 principally follows Southwest Chief’s path between the West Coast and Albuquerque, N.M.
Amish in transit, elk at sundown
Vacationers head towards seats at Chicago Union Station.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
“Dwelling in L.A., you neglect all this area,” mentioned Kim Rinauro, a nurse from Los Feliz. “Once you come out and see how huge that is, it actually offers you a unique perspective.”
“America is so ginormous,” mentioned Jeanine Bass, a softball coach from Costa Mesa who was on her solution to see household in upstate New York.
In the meantime, one finish of the statement automotive had been crammed by a number of girls in white bonnets, joined by males with straw hats, footlong beards and no mustaches. Often I’d hear a type of clapping sound. Amish households. Enjoying dominoes.
Amish vacationers have been utilizing this route for many years, one of many males instructed me, on their solution to and from docs in Tijuana. In search of medical therapy that’s extra inexpensive and simpler to schedule than within the U.S., they take trains to Southern California, then proceed overland throughout the border.
Simply earlier than we made a 45-minute cease on the station, which is surrounded by a grim neighborhood, an Amtrak staffer took the microphone to sternly handle the coach-class vacationers.
“Coaches: No alcohol,” she mentioned. “In the event you deliver alcohol, you possibly can keep and spend all evening right here with the transients.” For these in rooms and roomettes, she continued, booze in personal rooms is OK, however not in public areas.
Farther into New Mexico, we handed the opposite Southwest Chief prepare, carrying passengers west.
Between Raton, N.M., and Trinidad, Colo., amid a gaudy sundown, we crept previous a herd of elk, then plunged right into a tunnel. Rising, we caught a final little bit of sundown, a few of the most beautiful miles of the journey.
But this, I realized later, is the a part of the journey that Amtrak’s chief government tried to interchange with bus service in 2018. The hassle failed and that government is now not within the job. However the battles in Washington over Amtrak funding and mission by no means finish, which is why so many automobiles, just like the Superliners on the Southwest Chief, had been constructed between 1979 and 1996. Amtrak leaders have set a objective of changing their older long-distance automobiles by 2032.
Talking of {hardware}: Ultimately I attempted the bathe. It didn’t go properly. First, I noticed that somebody had stolen the shampoo dispenser. Then I couldn’t discover a solution to cool the scalding-hot water. I stood way back to I may within the cosy compartment and grimaced my manner via it.
Missouri, Iowa and Illinois: The ultimate miles
The concourse at Chicago Union Station is grand however quiet.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
On arrival day, I woke simply as we reached the station in Kansas Metropolis, one other gritty neighborhood alongside the tracks. Our information feeds had been crammed with contemporary studies of nationwide flight delays due to the federal government shutdown.
Quickly we had been crossing the Missouri River, roaring via forest and skirting bare farmland the place this 12 months’s corn crop had simply been lower. Then got here Fort Madison, Iowa; the Mississippi River and the beginnings of Illinois. Water towers and grain elevators.
I zipped my luggage shut, tipped the roomette attendant and eating automotive staff. Quickly I’d be stretching my legs on the Artwork Institute of Chicago, strolling Millennium Park and alongside the Chicago River, trying out the skyline from Navy Pier.
We pulled into Union Station inside an hour of our goal time.
Was it an ideal journey? No. Nevertheless it was filled with humanity, surroundings and comforting clangs and rumbles. I even favored the lurching manner you needed to stroll down the corridors, adjusting stability because the prepare shifts. After which, to step off the prepare after two days right into a brisk Chicago afternoon, 2,265 miles from dwelling, having by no means left the bottom? That’s virtually magic.
Tracks dominate the view from the final automotive on the prepare.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Occasions)
