MarcA tale from the travel archives that I’ve just never quite gotten around to writing up until now.
In August 2023, I decided to abandon the efficient tyranny of airports and planes for something older, slower, and—hopefully—more interesting: a three-day train ride from Tacoma, Washington to Chicago, Illinois aboard Amtrak’s Empire Builder.
As someone who has spent far too many hours in airport lounges and aluminum tubes at 35,000 feet, I thought I understood travel. I was wrong. Planes deliver you quickly to a destination. Trains, I discovered, make you travel—they force you to sit still while the world unspools outside your window at 60 miles per hour. It’s less “getting there” and more “inhabiting the in-between.”
Day 1: Tacoma to Portland, Then Eastward | 47° 14′ 22″ N, 122° 25′ 41 W”
Tacoma’s station is small, yet sleek and glassy. Cross laminated timber columns and beams combined with 20-foot high windows to encase a simple but pleasant passenger…terminal?…boarding gate? I don’t really know if my plane lingo applies to trains too, to be honest. And the boarding process? Gloriously simple. No security checkpoints, no polite demands to remove your shoes, no tiny Ziplocs of contraband shampoo. You just walk up, get the ticket on your phone scanned, and get on. The plane passenger in me felt vaguely guilty and anxious, as if I’d cheated the system or somehow missed an important step in the process. Was I moments away from being berated by the conductor (train attendant?) for totally missing the incredibly-obvious-to-everyone-else boarding process? I guess we’ll see!
My hop to Portland was in business class on the Cascades Line, which was comfortable enough, though the upholstery looked like it belonged in a dentist’s waiting room circa 1997. Business class sounds fancy, but train tickets are, like, 1/3 of the cost of an equivalent plane ticket. The low murmur of passengers was occasionally pierced by headphone violators—sound from a video on someone’s phone tinny and sharp, traveling farther than courtesy allowed. “This would never be tolerated on plane,” I thought to myself with more self-righteous indignity than I care to admit today.
At Portland’s Union Station, the red-brick tower wore its years proudly, like a movie star who’d aged without Botox. I had a bit of a layover until it was time for the Empire Builder line to depart, but thankfully my roomette ticket afforded me access to the Metropolitan Lounge. The lounge was plain but cool, the blast of air conditioning wrapping me like a reward for arriving. On a warm August day in a stuffy train station, I was glad to have it.
Then came the real adventure: boarding my roomette, a private cabin best described as “tiny home living” if your tiny home were built by IKEA with leftover parts…in 1996. Dingy but private. A narrow space (3.5 feet) with two facing seats that folded into a bed, and another bunk perched overhead like an afterthought. It was about the size of an airline business class seat yet slightly expanded to accommodate two people who want to spend several days with their knees touching. According to Amtrak’s website, it’s 22.75 square feet “for customers seeking both privacy and savings,” with the promise of a “big picture window” and “fresh linens.”
The first evening was magic: the Columbia River Gorge, cliffs plunging into water the color of slate, bathed in dusky light. Eventually eastern Washington unfurled: golden grass hills, jagged basalt cliffs, and wind turbines performing a slow ballet against the horizon. Without a doubt, Amtrak’s biggest flex is their viewing car of panoramic windows and outward-facing seats. It’s the perfect perch for watching the world go by, and tonight my world was the Channeled Scablands of our beautiful state’s southeastern corner.
Headphones violations continued to abound throughout the coach and viewing cars. I was quickly learning that train passenger etiquette was a whole other thing unto itself—and the appreciation for my 22.75 sq. ft. of privacy continued to grow. At some point, an ominous PA announcement informed us that we wouldn’t pick up a dining car until tomorrow. This meant that dinner tonight was a boxed meal of cold food, but I countered with peanut M&M’s and a pour of Woodford Reserve from a pocket-sized bottle from the snack bar—Amtrak’s version of fine dining.
At Pasco, WA, we stepped briefly into the humid night. Passengers dashed for cigarettes; I stretched, inhaled, and realized how rarely, when flying, you feel the air of the places you pass through. Back in the roomette, I settled in for a night of “sleep,” which in train terms means being gently (and sometimes less-gently) rocked from side to side like a cocktail shaker that occasionally forgets its rhythm.
Day 2: Montana Mornings and the Dakotas | 48°27’07″N, 115°17’17″W
I woke sharply to another PA announcement, this one less ominous. “Good morning, passengers. Breakfast service will begin in our newly acquired dining car in 30 minutes.” I rolled over and pulled open the curtain on my promised big picture window to a Montana sunrise, pink and gold spilling over a river as we rolled through, the kind of view planes only ever offer from thirty thousand impersonal feet. On a train, you can practically smell the dew, see the fog snagging in the trees, notice the horse that pauses mid-chew to watch you roll by.
Breakfast introduced me to the dining car, a rolling diner where strangers share tables and meals eaten with plastic cutlery wrapped in paper napkins. It’s a peculiarly democratic experience: oil workers, retirees, tourists, all equalized by the tablecloth and the rhythmic sway. We talked about golf trips, oil fields, and family reunions. The eggs were fine. The conversation was better.
Outside, Glacier National Park drifted past: peaks sharp as broken glass, valleys carved deep and green. Then Montana began the transition into the Great Plains, a horizon so flat it looked like the earth had been ironed. Cattle and horsed grazed in the fields beyond as my horizontal viewpoint continued to scroll past. Occasionally, a silo broke the monotony like punctuation in an endless sentence. Inside, I mostly spent the day reading, window gazing, and looking for photo subjects in my limited environment.
Dinner was steak (decent), at a table shared with a bartender fresh from a Glacier summer gig and a retired couple glowing from an Alaskan cruise. Stories flowed, the train swayed, and for a few hours, life felt like the world’s (physically) longest dinner party.
We paused that night in Minot, North Dakota. The platform was concrete and shadows, the air cooler than it had been in Pasco but tinged with diesel and dust. Once again, the smokers smoked. I paced in wide laps, stretching legs stiff from confinement while listening to the low hum of idling engines, grateful for the opportunity to move in way other than a linear path down a train aisle. Back on board, I ended the day with my second “railway cocktail”: Woodford Reserve and a Twix. Gourmet is relative.
Day 3: Minnesota to Chicago | 47° 56′ 52″N, 93° 5′ 7″W
By the third day, I’d learned a key truth: always choose the lower bunk. It’s wider, steadier, and far less like sleeping in a swaying coffin with a weird center of gravity. I woke in Minneapolis refreshed, the city glowing in soft morning light.
Breakfast was French toast, eggy and sweet, syrup clinging to the edges of my fork. Across from me, an Amish family of three ate quietly, their pace deliberate and unhurried, the child staring out the window as the landscape slid by. We chatted about life, where we’re from, where we’re going, and why we’re here.
Then came the novelty of the train shower. Imagine bathing in a phone booth while someone gently rocks it side to side. The water arrived in stingy 30-second bursts, each push of the button producing a hiss like an annoyed cat. Still, stepping out clean on a moving train was oddly triumphant.
Stops like Winona, Minnesota added texture: cracked asphalt, roadwork clatter, glimpses of Winona State’s leafy campus. The Midwest thickened around us—billboards, fast-food signs, endless highways. After days of big skies and open plains, the approach to Chicago, in certain ways, felt like reemerging from a trip abroad.
At last, Union Station. Marble, grandeur, echoing announcements. The kind of place that makes you feel small and significant at the same time. That evening, I met my friend Zach with plans to take in a Cubs game. We pre-gamed at Murphy’s Bleachers, sticky floors and the smell of fried food hanging in the air, then joined the right field crowd in the Wrigley bleachers. After three days cocooned in the slow rhythm of the train, the crack of the bat and roar of the crowd hit me like a jolt back into fast, noisy reality.
Departures
Planes are efficient, yes—but they compress experience. A flight from Seattle to Chicago erases everything in between: the cliffs of the Columbia gorge, the peaks of Glacier, the endless Plains. On a train, you see it all, whether you want to or not. Sometimes it’s breathtaking, sometimes it’s dull, but it’s real.
The train also offers a luxury airlines never will: boredom. Long stretches with no Wi-Fi, no cell signal, no movies to stream on a seatback screen, nowhere to rush off to. You find yourself staring out the window for hours, rediscovering the radical act of doing nothing. You read. You think. You listen to strangers’ stories. You remember what it feels like to inhabit time instead of conquer it.
The Empire Builder isn’t glamorous—it’s shabby in places, unpredictable in motion, and occasionally smells like the ghost of sandwiches past. But it’s also romantic, in the way all human-scaled travel is romantic. You feel the geography pass beneath you. You sense the size of the country. You slow down enough to notice.
Would I do it again? Maybe. I’m glad to have had the experience, but I think I’d seek out another version next time. A bullet train through Japan, perhaps. But train or no train, I’ll carry forward the lesson to take time to really see and experience the world I’m traveling through. Maybe that’s the real gift of the train: not the speed, not the scenery, but the enforced pause. A few days where the world insists you stop, look out the window, and remember that travel isn’t just about covering ground—it’s about letting the ground cover you.
