There’s something almost cinematic about watching the American landscape blur past a train window. The rhythmic clatter of the wheels, the slow unfurling of mountain ranges, desert flats, and ancient river valleys. No airplane window can do that. No interstate highway comes close. Train travel is one of those slow, wonderfully unhurried experiences that forces you to actually look at this country, not just pass through it.
America has a complicated, glorious, sometimes brutal relationship with its railroads. Entire cities were built around train depots. Wars were supplied by rail lines. Indigenous land was carved up to lay tracks across the continent. That history is embedded in every route listed below. These aren’t just pretty rides. They’re moving museums.
So buckle up. Or rather, sit back and let the continent do the work. Here are 11 epic train journeys across America that deliver a grand view of history.
1. California Zephyr: Chicago to the San Francisco Bay Area
The California Zephyr is operated by Amtrak between Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area at Emeryville, and at 2,438 miles it is Amtrak’s longest daily route, with travel time between the two termini taking approximately 52 and a half hours. That’s two full nights and three days aboard a rolling panorama, which honestly sounds like the best possible way to cross a continent. The train’s schedule is timed so that passengers move through the most scenic parts of the route in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada during daylight hours, which is a small detail that reveals just how seriously this journey takes its own spectacle…