My wife and I took an Amtrak across the country. It was awesome.
For the holidays, my wife Abby surprised me with a trip to Portland, Oregon, a city and state neither of us had visited. We wanted to check the state off our list of states we hadn’t been to, so this was a great opportunity. The interesting part about the trip is that we were not flying from Washington, DC, we were taking a train. All the way. Across the country.
At first thought, many people think it’s crazy, but wethought it would be fun and probably something of an adventure. The impetus wasmy vast enjoyment of riding trains, something that started with my grandfatherwhen I was a kid when I rode on Amtrak with him to New York Penn Station tovisit his brother. Since then, I always enjoyed riding trains.
While there is a massive difference between a three-hourtrip to New York and a three-day trip across the country, we had someexperience in overnight train travel. After my parents purchased a home in Naples,Florida, we decided to take the train from Washington, DC to Fort Lauderdale,Florida, a 22-hour ride along the east coast via Amtrak’s SilverStar. As it turned out, we loved it. It beat the hassle of flying andprovided a leisurely way to travel to our destination. After another ride ayear later from Florida to DC, we felt comfortable enough to take a trip acrossthe country.
Our itinerary indicated that our trip began at Washington UnionStation on Sunday, 10 March at 4:05 p.m. and arrived in Portland, Oregon on Wednesday,13 March at 10:10 a.m. It would be two and a half days on trains. Our first legwould be on the CapitolLimited, taking us from Washington to Chicago. After a six-hour layover, wewould hop on the EmpireBuilder at 2:15 p.m. on Monday, 11 March, and arrive in Portland about twodays later.
When the day came, we were thrilled to take our adventure,traversing more than 3,000 miles across the United States, including travellingthrough Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin,Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.
On the day of the trip, a close friend dropped us off atUnion Station in perfect timing to walk right on to the train. We found oursleeping compartment, a SuperlinerRoomette, as Amtrak called it. It was a very small compartment, with noroom even for carry-on baggage. We could barely fit a backpack and purse underour seats. It was different than our Viewliner Roomette we had whentravelling on the Silver Star, which had room for two carry-on bags, an in-roomtoilet, and a few more square feet. But at least our Superliner Roomette would allowus to lay flat and sleep our way through the night.
The train departed the moment the clock struck 4:05 p.m. Weheaded north along the train lines that run north and west of Washington,rather than north and east as I had been accustomed to when riding to New York.I had never been on these tracks before, so it was quite exciting for me.Immediately after getting settled in our room, we grabbed seats in the observationcar, an entire train car that had seats facing sideways and had windows fromfloor to ceiling.
As I had already scoped out the train line that would take us to Chicago, I knew it would be important to get good seats, because, with the clocks pushing ahead for one hour just the night before, we’d have an extra hour of sunlight to view the Potomac River valley as the train snaked along the northern bank through Maryland and southern bank through West Virginia. We sat there for about two hours and watched the picturesque views until Abby went back to the room to take a short nap before dinner. We had enough light to view the river as we travelled through Harper’s Ferry and the Cumberland gap and I took excessive amounts of pictures with my mobile phone (thanks to forgetting my DSLR camera at home).
Around 8 p.m., shortly after the sun had set and we departedCumberland, Maryland, we had dinner in the dining car. Passengers in sleepingcompartments are considered “first class” and meals are included in the priceof the tickets. Normally, these meals are in a full-servicedining car, with meals made to order by an actual chef in a kitchen on thetrain. We were informed, for this trip, that we would instead be offered boxed mealthat would be served hot. Abby and I didn’t care either way, so we would takewhat we could get.
We were quite impressed with what we received: a small sidesalad, chicken alfredo, and a warm roll with butter. Even better, because wewere “snubbed” by Amtrak and given a boxed meal, an alcoholic beverage wasincluded in our meal. As Abby wasn’t interested, the attendant gave me twobeers, one of which I gave to another traveler. We were very pleased with the meals,especially the chicken alfredo, which had tasty pasta and real chicken, notboiled chicken like you find at a Subway.
After dinner, with full bellies, we retired to ourcompartment and awaited our beds to be made the by room attendant, Bill. Aftertwo calls to Bill via the intercom and still no sight of him, I made our beds,something I learned how to do by watching the attendants on our first twoovernight trips. We went to sleep around 9:30, somewhere in Pennsylvania southeastof Pittsburgh.
When we woke up around 6 a.m., we found ourselves in northern Indiana, just east of South Bend, having just passed through northern Ohio overnight, strangely enough passing with about a half mile from where I used to live in a suburb of Cleveland. We received another hot boxed meal for breakfast, which was also quite lovely, and we ate as we watched the passing rustbelt cities of northern Indiana through the dining car windows. Around 7:45 a.m., we passed through Gary, Indiana, getting a view of the incredible industrial centers that now looked decrepit, on our way to Chicago for an on-time arrival.
We stepped off the train and made our way into Chicago UnionStation, where we were to meet Joe, our friend who lived in a suburb, whograciously took off a day of work to spend the morning and early afternoon withus. Just inside the station, we found the Great Hall, which featured a refurbished first-classlounge where we could store our bags during the layover. After droppingthem off in the luggage room, we met Joe about five minutes later. It was perfecttiming.
We spent the next few hours walking through the cold Chicago morning, entranced by the 50-, 60-, and 70-story buildings that cast shadows across the streets. It was significantly colder than what we came from in Washington, but far warmer than Chicago had experienced recently. Abby and I, even with our winter coats, were freezing. Joe, wearing what seemed like a light jacket, was feeling great. We walked, and walked, and walked, stopping for coffee, taking pictures at the silver bean in Millennium Park and Navy Pier before stopping at Geno’s East for deep dish pizza for lunch. We went back to the station around 1 p.m. and said goodbye to Joe who took a commuter train back to the suburbs.
Our train boarded just about on schedule, and we wereextremely excited to get on. For this two-day adventure, we had our own Superliner Bedroom on thetrain. Rather than a Superliner Roomette, which had the two bunk beds and noin-room toilet, a bedroom allowed us lots of space. While the room was onlyabout seven by six feet total, it had a large bench seat that folded down atnight to allow Abby and me to sleep side-by-side. The opposite side of the roomhad a chair, vanity, and our own personal shower and toilet. We didn’t havehigh expectations for the shower, but we felt it was a necessity considering westill had two more days on a train. We had plenty of room for our luggage andbackpacks, too. We were grateful to have the bedroom, as Abby originally bookeda roomette, but we upgraded our ticket about a week in advance of the trip. Wewere glad we did.
At first glance, the room seemed fine, but after a second glance, it had some issues. The first thing we noticed was a long piece of duct tape that was placed over the door jamb of a sliding door that adjoined our room to the next bedroom. Our guess was that the door jostled too much with the shaking of the train and the tape helped keep the door from making noise. We also noticed a large piece of aluminum foil that was jammed between the top of the shower compartment and ceiling, presumably for the same reason the duct tape was the door.
Shortly after our departure, our room attendant Carl stopped by our room to give us the lowdown on how the ride would go, and he informed us that he would be with us all the way to Portland. About 15 minutes later, as we made our way into Wisconsin, one of the dining car attendants secured our dinner reservation from 7:15 p.m. With nothing else to do, Abby and I sat in our compartment and took in the sights of Milwaukee and central Wisconsin.
Our first adventure on this train was to try out the shower.We didn’t have high hopes and were fully expecting the water to be lukewarm atbest and have minimal water pressure. Much to our surprise, it was far better.The water pressure was strong, and the temperature was more than enough for me.The shower had bars to help maintain your balance, and if you needed to sitdown, you could sit on top of the toilet seat. The water kept its temperatureduring my shower, and I was finally clean. Abby went next and had more thanenough hot water as well. While the room may have been a bit subpar, the showerwas fantastic.
Our dinner that night was familiar, as it was the same menu that we enjoyed on the train back from Florida in January. Considering the meal was included with our fare, I ordered the most expensive item, the “Surf and Sea,” a sirloin steak and crab cake with a baked potato and green beans.
As dusk turned to night, we found ourselves snaking anotherriver, this time the Mississippi River between Wisconsin and Minnesota. As wewere ready to go to sleep, instead of asking Carl, I made our bed. In doing so,I found that one of the seat cushions had ripped and been held in place with moreduct tape, but it wasn’t doing much.
As we laid down to go to sleep, we put on a movie onNetflix, which I hooked up on Abby’s iPad via a mobile hotspot from my phone.As we laid there, we noticed that something else was shaking in the room. Itwas the connection between our vanity and the shower compartment. Doing my bestMacGyver move, I wadded several tissues together and jammed them into thecrevice. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. About halfway through ourmovie, we both dozed off as the train rocked us to sleep.
On Tuesday morning, having spent our second night in a row on the train, we awoke to a frozen tundra. A freezing, seemingly barren place called Minot, North Dakota.
Neither Abby nor I had been to North Dakota before, so we were happy to check off this state from our list of places we had visited, but were sure it would be our one and only visit. We were told that we had about 30 minutes in Minot, so disembarked and stepped onto solid ground.
Wrapped up in our heavy jackets, we were freezing as welooked around at the rail yard and Amtrak station. One of the rail workers, aportly man with a thick mustache who reminded me of Wilford Brimley, walked upto us as he inspected the train.
“Holy shit,” I yelled out. “This place is freezing!”
“Oh, no, it’s not that bad,” the man responded in a thick Dakotanaccent. “This is nothing.”
Still amazed at the desolation of the area, I began to laughin disbelief. “Do you live here?” I asked him.
“Oh, yah!”
I laughed more.
“Why?!”
“Listen, you guys like coffee?” he asked as he pointedacross the roadway in front of the station. “That’s the best cup of coffee inall of Narth Dahkohtah.”
Abby needed coffee, as she would get a headache if she didn’t have any caffeine, so we decided to take the walk. After almost slipping on ice several times, we made it across to the coffee shop, which wasn’t much of a shop. It was more of a tiny trailer, set up on blocks, in the middle of a small parking lot. Undeterred, we waited in the freezing wind for “the best cup of coffee in all of Narth Dahkohtah.” And when we got it, Abby took a sip and was quite happy.
“That guy was right, this is really good.” With a happy wifewith her coffee, we made it the 100 yards back to the train without losing anylimbs to frostbite and boarded. Now making our way through North Dakota, all wecould see were fields of snow. There wasn’t much interest topography, exceptfor the occasional hill, but this was the northern part of the great plains, sothis was expected.
As we sat in our bedroom and looked out the window, westopped about every hour for an occasional stop. I wondered who was getting onand who was getting off and for what reasons. Our reason was simple, we wantedto travel the country by train, but we were going coast to coast. Why wouldsomeone get on in a place like Williston, North Dakota, a place we had never heardof, and get off in Devil’s Lake, Montana, another place we had never heard of?Family? Work? Something else?
As we had lunch, we sat with two men who would help us answer that question. One was an oil worker at a rig in North Dakota, but he lived in Idaho. Sometimes he drove between the two locations, but this time, he said, he didn’t feel like driving, so he took the train.
“Lots of us oil guys are here on the train,” he said. “It’sjust easy for us.” The younger guy sitting next to him was a mechanic on therig. He was going all the way to Portland, just like us.
“Do you get a sleeper?” I asked.
“Nah, I can sleep anywhere, so I just curl up on two seats,”he responded.
It was pretty fascinating to us as we had never consideredthat oil workers wouldn’t live in the state but rather commute in fromneighboring ones. As we walked through the train, we also encountered a fewother reasons why people were on these trains. Some were college students, whocould be identified by their clothing, age, and stops they got on and off.Others were people who feared flying or just didn’t feel welcome on flights. “Yeah,flying doesn’t take too kindly to me, so that’s why I take the train,” Abby andI overheard a man say.
As we made our way through Montana, we started to notice the topographical changes. In the distance we could see mountains, though they looked to be several hundred miles away, so we waited and just looked out the window. In the beginning, we thought we would be productive on the train. I would work on my next book, Abby would read a book, and we’d talk about future plans for the rest of the year. Unfortunately, none of that was getting done. It wasn’t like a plane where you were locked in a bubble for a few hours with really nothing to see. We were traveling by train, so we had the ground view of the scenery, the roads, houses, farms, ranches, and everything else. We were overtaken by the views, even though they weren’t of much.
As the afternoon rolled in and out, we showered and tooknaps, waking in time for us to get views of the Rocky Mountains that we enteredfrom the east. It was a slower ascent than I imagined, but one that providedincredible views of mountain peaks, rivers, streams, and some tiny mountain towns.
We had dinner together later that night. Again, I orderedthe most expensive item, the “Surf and Sea,” as I was going to get the most moneyout of this trip, whether anyone liked it or not. We dropped eaves to the tablenext to us, which had our companion from lunch, another oil worker, and a ladywho seemed a bit too crazy. We enjoyed our meal and the entertainment from thenext table. The banter between us and the dining car staff, particularly ourwaiter Chris, was a blast, and we gave him a $20 tip for providing such greatservice.
After dinner, we went back to our bedroom, and I made thebed. We dozed off fairly quickly, as we were now spending our third night in a rowon a train. While it wasn’t particularly comfortable, we knew what we weregetting into and had gotten used to it. We fell asleep somewhere in westernMontana, knowing we’d be asleep through Idaho and eastern Washington before wewoke.
About eight hours later, we awoke to incredible views of Washington state. By this time, our train was snaking along the Columbia River and provided views of terrain we hadn’t seen yet on our trip. The views were filled with cliffs of brown rock with large pine-needled trees that shot into the sky. We had an early breakfast, a hot boxed breakfast similar to our first breakfast on our first train. As we ate, we took in the sights, taking pictures when and where we could. Occasionally, we’d roll through a quick tunnel before turning around a bend in the river. The farther west we went, the greener the state seemed to be.
It was now about 7 a.m. and had less than three hours to go. We went back to our room and packed our bags to ensure we had an easy out. We enjoyed the rest of the journey along southern Washington before crossing the Columbia River into Oregon and heading south into Portland’s Union Station. We arrived about 20 minutes late, far within our expectations, considering the almost two-day train trip. We thanked Carl and took a picture with him, tipping him for the service and entertainment he provided, despite not making our bed.
We stepped off the train in a new state and a new city, seeingground-level views of states we’d never been to: North Dakota, Montana, andOregon. We met interesting people, heard interesting stories, tasted “NarthDahkohta’s best coffee,” and ate steak and crab cakes. And we did it all on atrain.
It was an adventure of a lifetime, one we might not ever doagain. It was a truly unique experience, one I’m very grateful Abby booked forus. I probably wouldn’t have done it on my own, so I was very glad she was withme.