Amtrak trains leave New York from the Moynihan Train Hall, a vast Beaux Arts building that used to house the city’s main post office. Like its equivalents in London – Paddington or St Pancras – it is designed to give travellers a sense of soaring possibility, the first stage in a journey that might take them anywhere. Last week, over Easter, my two seven-year-olds and I boarded a train at Moynihan for the 19-hour journey to Chicago. We could barely have been more excited if we’d been setting out in covered wagons.
The romance of train travel is an anachronism that climate activists are keen to revive, but it’s a tough sell. In the US, the national train network is slow, patchy and underfunded. Amtrak teeters, apparently indefinitely, on the brink of bankruptcy, requiring multiple government subsidies – the latest, in November last year, totalled $66bn. In Britain, the issue is cost, too, although it’s one largely borne by the consumer. Andy Burnham’s recent Twitter fury about the cost of rail fares between London and Manchester – £369 for a last-minute return, which, as the mayor of Manchester pointed out, might buy you a return flight to Brazil – highlighted an exorbitant system so riven with fare rules as to make it unusable beyond the narrowest of circumstances.
All of which is a shame, given the potential of travelling by rail. It is vastly safer than driving. You can get stuff done on the way. If you can bear to look up from your phone for a moment, it can induce a dreamlike state that a veteran Amtrak steward once described to me as the “zen of train travel”. Commuter rail hell is one thing, but for journeys of two or more hours, there should be a level of comfort, cost and availability on trains that cars can’t begin to compete with.
Outside of the north-east corridor, I hadn’t been on a long Amtrak journey for almost 18 years. A lifetime ago, I took the sleeper up the west coast from LA to Seattle, via Oregon. It was a tourist route, and the train was full of people with time on their hands: retirees and foreign visitors, plus people with complicated phobias around flying. Even then, the service felt like a relic, but in a good way: an antiquated experience with a public service vibe. When Amtrak isn’t shedding workers to save costs, it is known to retain stewards for extraordinarily long periods of service and, on those epic routes, there was a sense of encountering characters in Amtrak livery who sprang from American folk history.
Some things have changed since then. Covid finished off the old-fashioned dining car where food was made to order, to be replaced with reheated airline trays. On the other hand, the Amtrak wifi has improved immeasurably. The coffee isn’t bad. In our tiny cabin with bunk beds, the toilet doubled as a footstool to the top bunk and was exactly at window height. This meant that when the train ran alongside the highway, you could potentially be sitting on the loo while cars drove 20ft away from you peering in, a fact that kept us entertained through most of Ohio. And although everyone felt vaguely sick from the motion at night, when we woke up in Indiana it was to glance out of the window at a large contingent of Mennonites in bonnets, disembarking in a town called Elkhart. You don’t get that kind of charm with air travel.
It was expensive. If I’d been organised, I could have shaved a couple of hundred dollars off the price by booking earlier, but it would still have cost more than travelling by plane. For the three of us occupying a single cabin, I was out $900 one way; a return air fare to Chicago for three people that week was nearer $600. So it’s luxury travel, something only to be contemplated very occasionally as a treat, not a default.
Which is a shame. Trains follow along the back roads, cleaving close to small towns and through endless rolling scenery. We passed alongside the rusting skeletons of abandoned industries and the tiny farming communities around them. We were forced, for 20 hours, to slow down, exhale and look outside our own bubbles, with a restored sense of scale at the vastness of the country, and a feeling one very rarely encounters: wonder.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
