After a couple of enjoyable days in Denver catching up with friends, it was time for the main event. Malvin and I were completing our journey on the California Zephyr, this leg being 33-hours from Denver to the terminus at Emeryville, just across the bay from San Francisco. Along the way, the train passes through Colorado, Utah and …

We arrived an hour or so before departure at Chicago Union Station for the first leg of our ride on the California Zephyr, a 19 hour journey from Chicago to Denver. The hall was elegant, massive and felt strangely empty. We headed to the gates, only to find a line had already formed for our train. A security guard with a thick local…

After taking the Carolinian from Durham to DC, I spent four lovely days catching up with my friends in the capital, a place I have lived at various points in my life. I finally had the chance to visit the African American museum, which was moving and spectacular. As I tend to do whenever I’m in DC, I stopped at the Lincoln Memorial.…

On the scale of train travel fandom, I’d put myself at about an eight out of ten. I was never one of those kids who built train sets, although I liked watching them whenever we were stuck at a railroad crossing as a boy. My appreciation for traveling on trains came later in life, and is specific to long-distance leisure travel. (Sub…

Amtrak offers something called the “ USA Rail Pass ”, which is what I used for almost all of my train trip. It’s a bit like the Eurail Pass , except not as good. I mean, this is Amtrak we’re talking about: a federally-owned enterprise that is incredibly slow, boasting a sad and aged fleet, and chronically financially unstable. But s…

Welcome to ‘Camino de Amtrak,’ a blog about my month-long tour of the United States by train, which I completed in the fall of 2021. The blog takes its name from the Camino de Santiago, or ‘Way of St. James’, the famous religious pilgrimage in Spain. This journey is my own version of such a pilgrimage, except instead of walking long…