Another highlight is the California Coastal National
Monument, a stretch of coastline on which bluffs play peekaboo with the sea and oceanfront mansions try to outmuscle each other for beach space. The train waltzes through awestruck coastal villages, like a celebrity on the red carpet. In a country dominated by trucks and turnpikes, trains are still such a novelty that, as the towns get smaller, the waves from wide-eyed children and families get more committed. I feel transported to another age. Away from the scenery, the Coast Starlight is a living
community of rituals and shared stories, with staff and passengers coming together in near-communion. Among them is Patrick, who calls over the loudspeaker that the dining car is open for lunch. He rides the rails all the way to Seattle and back once a week and admits the odyssey is not without its challenges. One fear, he tells me, is passengers missing the journey’s most memorable parts because they’ve been lulled to sleep by the cradle-rock of the carriages. “Don’t miss my beautiful Cascades,” says Patrick, handing
me a menu as he rhapsodises about the mountain range that stretches south from British Columbia in a glorious vision of serrated peaks. “California’s beaches are great, sure, but those forests, volcanoes and mountains? Wow.” I decide it’s best not to mention my pre-lunch nap, and focus
instead on my bacon chilli bowl. I missed the olive groves and striped vineyards of Paso Robles, and my introduction to Central California — north of San Diego, south of Frisco — was more a blurry, broken dream.
Union Station in downtown Los Angeles was built in 1939
Solar farms, steel and San Francisco The colours shift the closer we travel to San Francisco Bay. Leaving the winelands behind, we begin to wind through the dusty brown hills and fruit farms of Monterey County, before creeping along the Salinas Valley. People know this area because its most famous resident, John Steinbeck, wrote of the valley’s no-fuss ranches of mules and migrant workers in Of Mice and Men. But I see a very different vision of America spooling past.
Sprawling solar farms bring to mind the desert sci-fi scenes of the blockbuster film Dune. Fields are filled with oil wells whose pumpjacks tip back and forth like toy drinking birds. Even with the train’s engine going, I can hear bushtits warbling on wires and cicadas coming out to score the dusk. Around me, the air smells of fresh pizza — we’ve pulled into Salinas and a delivery ordered by a passenger is passed Frisbee-style into the carriage. Later, San Jose is aglow by sunset. No one does cities like
America and the national obsession with steel and construction rewards those of us on the Coast Starlight as we swing slowly north around San Francisco Bay. In quick succession, San Jose bleeds into Oakland in twilight, with San Francisco a beacon of crackling light across the water. I find myself taking picture after picture of the reflections as we ride. Just before midnight, the train makes its last stop of my
journey at Sacramento Valley Station, the terminus of America’s first transcontinental railroad in 1863. I gaze at a sky blanketed in stars, waiting for the moment the train departs: away from Sacramento’s Old Town, with its boardwalk saloons and historic state railroad museum, into the dark, and towards the end of the line. For now, the night will rob those aboard of views of northern California, but the sun will rise over Mount Shasta before the train reaches Oregon, Washington and the Cascades. Walking from the depot, Sacramento is asleep. I wonder if the
railroad barons who raised this gold-rush-era city during its mid-18th-century heyday might have felt the same about the journey as I do now: that railroad travel in America is to be cherished, not forgotten, as it has been by so many millions. Much of the United States is preserved along these lines. I love what I have seen — the history, the spectacle, the colour — and, tomorrow, others might find themselves inspired to climb aboard as I have. I hope so, anyway.
HOW TO DO IT: Tickets on the Coast Starlight from Los Angeles Union Station to Seattle King Street Station cost from around £358 for a private room, with a private bathroom and shower in your car or cabin.
amtrak.com/coast-starlight-train
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER – LUXURY COLLECTION 47
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