An Irishwoman’s Diary on America by rail

Citizens of the US are not inclined to travel by train, mostly because a train is not a car. They don’t know what they are missing. America’s Amtrak goes boldly where no car has gone before, travelling the wilder stretches of mountain, valley and prairie and, at journey’s end, delivering you into the heart of the nation’s cities, towns or, in my case, a lonely outpost station with the allure and welcome of a lost love.

The train was the Southwest Chief, the journey began in Chicago and ended, some 1,265 miles of prairie, forest, mountain, desert and siren-calling historic towns later, in New Mexico.

I was headed for Lamy, in the desert outside Santa Fe, and en route we would pass through Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado and swathes of New Mexico.

Negotiating the throb of humanity at Chicago’s Union Station was no joke. A travellers’ station, built in 1925, it echoed with past journeys and stunned with grand staircases made notoriously familiar by filmmakers. The Southwest Chief rolled out of there at 3pm, final stop Los Angeles, gliding from the shade of the railroad yards into the sun of the flat, fertile farmlands of Illinois. You know you’re in the Midwest when dirt roads run in straight lines, barns dot the landscape, nothing much moves and a hot, hazy sun shines over it all.

By the time we got to Princeton we’d already passed Naperville (leafy and quiet), Aurora (second largest city in Illinois), and Mendota, which has two lakes. Princeton, said to be “the perfect midwest town”, certainly looked well-behaved, with lines of bushy trees sheltering wrought iron seating.

On we went through Kewanee (Native American word for prairie chicken), through Galva and Galesburg – this last the town where the Marx Brothers got their nicknames during a poker game in 1914.

Prairies

In ever more glorious sunshine we crossed the Mississippi river into Iowa, America’s heartland and a place of tall grass prairies and river valleys.

The Mississippi, 2,215ft wide at this point, tossed careless waves against pleasure boats and lapped uncomfortably close to communities of people settled along its banks. It is, as they say, a mighty river– 2,320 miles long from where it rises in northern Minnesota to it where it enters the sea at the Gulf of Mexico.

Longer still is the Missouri river, visible soon after we crossed the state line into Missouri. A wandering 2,500 miles, it ambled slowly through a landscape more forested than any seen so far.

We made lively time passing La Plata, a one-time trading post at the intersection of north and south stagecoach roads, and Sugar Creek, a once vital link in westward expansion.

It was dark when we arrived in Kansas City; good timing because the dining car called. Reservations were taken by the likes of the tireless Howard who told us he had, and would, “walk through the valleys, to the moon and back, to sleeping cars and coaches in pursuit of orders”. The dining car was comfortable, wine choices first rate, food variable and company excellent.

I slept through Dodge City and the crossing into Colorado and awoke to an aggressively green landscape with brown grazing cattle, small ponds of water, scattered houses and respectable looking hills.

We stopped to allow smokers have a puff at La Junta, but not long enough see the town’s Koshare Museum, one of the world’s finest collections of Native American artefacts. After that the landscape filled with sand dunes, scrubby growth and visible proof that there is nothing so lonely as telegraph poles in an empty landscape.

Trinidad, on the Colorado/New Mexico state line, was notable for the red-brick Trinidad Hotel. Elegant and slightly despairing, it sat with doors open in a tree-lined street where not a soul stirred at 11 in the morning.

Desert

Sand hills became mountains as we travelled through a parched, pale brown land, through the southern Rockies and the valley of the Purgatoire river, through the Raton Pass and, at last, into New Mexico where the vista, at first, was green and forested but soon became scrub and rocks and ochre coloured earth. And so, 24 hours after leaving Chicago, we came to Lamy. Home to some 200 souls, Lamy has a saloon, restaurant, Railroad History Museum and the particular tranquillity found only in the desert.

The Southwest Chief, bigger destinations in mind, moved off down the line to Los Angeles.