It's summer vacation time. This year you might want to
consider a train trip.
Train travel in Europe is very commonplace. Whenever I
travel to the UK, I always buy a Brit Rail pass before I go and use it for
traveling all over Britain—day trips out of London to such places as Windsor,
Oxford, Bath, Stratford-Upon-Anon and longer trips such as travel to Northern
England and Scotland.
And in the U.S., with more and more restrictions and
inconveniences put on airplane passengers and airlines constantly adding fees
and surcharges on top of the ticket price, train travel has had quite a resurgence.
And even though gasoline prices are down, not surprisingly the last few years
have been the best in Amtrak's history. With the suggested arrival time at the airport now being two hours prior to
your flight departure and you still have to contend with long security lines,
the reduced number of flights which creates longer wait times when you need to
change planes for a connection, and even a short
flight now takes a lot more of your time than it used to.
The Travel Channel on cable television has a couple of shows
about scenic train travel in America.
One of the nation's best rides is Amtrak's Southwest Chief that goes from Chicago
to Los Angeles and gives the traveler a way to relive America's 1800s expansion
west. The train trip lasts a little over forty hours, traveling through
Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and the famous wild west town of Dodge City, setting
for the long-running television series Gunsmoke.
From there it continues into Colorado and New Mexico. Then across northern
Arizona with the availability of a side trip to the Grand Canyon on a historic
old steam train. And finally into Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.
With only a few exceptions, this ride is on the same tracks
that were once the Santa Fe Railway which was built along the old Santa Fe
wagon train trail, a route that also inspired the highway of the days before
Interstates crisscrossed the country—the famous Route 66.
Here are five more great long-rail journeys to consider.
The West Coast's Coast
Starlight is considered by most travelers to be Amtrak's most scenic
route. It runs along the Pacific Ocean
between Los Angeles, California, and Seattle, Washington, traveling through
some truly spectacular scenery.
From California, the classic route east is the California Zephyr, following the path of
the first transcontinental railway between San Francisco and Chicago. It visits
such places as Sacramento, Reno, Salt Lake City, across the Rockies to Denver,
through Nebraska and Iowa to Chicago.
By taking the Southwest
Chief in one direction and returning on the California Zephyr, you are traveling what the Gilded Age tourists
in the 1880s and 1890s called the Grand Tour of America.
If you want a ride that goes through the heart of the
country, try the Texas Eagle starting
in Chicago. It crosses the Mississippi River at St. Louis, travels down through
the Ozarks, across Arkansas into eastern Texas, and continues through Dallas,
Fort Worth, Austin, and on to San Antonio where it connects with the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles.
The East Coast relies much more on rail service than the
rest of the country, especially the heavily used tracks in the high traffic
corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C.
One of the country's first scenic rail routes is the Empire Service from New York City up
through the Hudson River Valley where Washington Irving's Ichabod Crane
encountered the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hallow.
And if you're on the East Coast and are heading to Florida,
you can take the Auto Train where
your car travels with you. Passengers board just south of Washington, D.C., and
their vehicles are loaded on the train. The trip terminates just outside
Orlando, Florida.
Maybe you're not planning a vacation by train, but would
like the train experience. There are lots of day trips in various parts of the
country, including vintage steam and narrow gauge railroads. My personal favorite is the Napa Valley Wine Train in California,
which includes winery stops. Alaska Railway's White Pass & Yukon Route offers a three hour tour through some
truly dramatic scenery.
Have any of you taken a train vacation? A day trip train
tour?
