Amtrak’s Southwest Chief is a long-haul overnight train that connects Los Angeles and Chicago, including stops in Albuquerque and Kansas City, and many other smaller cities and towns in between. Ever since I got my ticket to Electric Forest in Michigan, I’d been planning to ride this train to Chicago.

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

The train was scheduled to arrive in Las Vegas, New Mexico at 2:51 pm. Of course, this is Amtrak and not on the east coast, so there would inevitably be a delay. Even so, I made sure to drive to Las Vegas early enough to be there before the scheduled time. Las Vegas, New Mexico, not to be confused with the bigger and more famous city of the same name in Nevada, is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from my home at the time in Clovis.

The Las Vegas train station doubles as the city's Chamber of Commerce, and the two people working at the Amtrak desks within were actually Chamber of Commerce employees. That's not surprising when you consider that the station only sees two trains daily, the eastbound and westbound Southwest Chief. The eastbound train, which I was waiting for, was indeed delayed; I was informed I wouldn't see the Chief roll in until 3:50, almost an hour after the scheduled time.

Southwest Chief at the Las Vegas, New Mexico station. These double-decker cars are called Superliners and are the standard on these long-haul cross-country trains.

After a conductor scanned my ticket, I stepped aboard one of the Superliner cars, stored my suitcase in one of the spaces for storing baggage, and then made my way up the steps to the upper deck to find a seat. The train was packed and few seats were available, so taking any seat meant sitting next to someone. As with my previous train trips on the east coast, I was OK with that, because I want to see people in this country riding trains.

This was going to be a long journey, not only going there but coming back, which is why I brought quite a lot of reading material. First, I had to finish off that book I was reading a month ago in Germany, Sapiens. I’d tried to finish it in the weeks before this trip, but just couldn’t make it by the time I had to leave. I’ve already given it a glowing review once so I won’t say too much more here, except that I gave a similarly glowing review to the man sitting next to me.

Soon I learned that the dining car situation had changed since the pandemic. Back when I rode the Coast Starlight in 2018 and the Texas Eagle in 2019, I could eat in the dining car, after telling a conductor which time slot I wanted. Now things were different, for the worse: one can only eat in the dining car if you're traveling in a sleeping car. I was only sitting in a coach seat in one of the Superliners, so I would have to get my meals from the snack bar in the dome car's lower decks.

The northernmost stop in New Mexico was Raton, the same town where I'd spent Sunday night on the way back from Sonic Bloom. Looking out the window at the Raton station, I saw a large number of Boy Scouts board the train. It seems the Philmont Scout Ranch is close to Raton, and the Southwest Chief is how the Scouts usually get there from all over the country.

This is somewhere between Raton, New Mexico and Trinidad, Colorado.

As the time wore on, I wanted to get something for dinner. The car directly in front of the one where I was sitting, the "dome car" with huge windows taking up most of the walls and the ceiling on the top deck, had a snack bar in its lower deck. This was the only place where I could buy any food since the dining car was not an option. I got a coffee here and a turkey sub which was pretty good, although I'm sure there was something better in the dining car.

The train stopped at Trinidad, Colorado at around 7pm. Since it was scheduled for 5:41, it was now an hour and 20 minutes behind schedule.

Sometime after dark, the train crossed the state line from Colorado into Kansas, and thus skipped forward in time one hour as that state line is also the border between the Mountain and Central time zones. It was also around here when it was getting late enough that soon I would be going to sleep in my seat.

Sleeping on a train without a bed in a room wasn’t bad at all. After brushing my teeth and taking out my contact lenses in the bathroom downstairs, the passenger cabin was pretty dark with the only light coming from a few of the seats’ overhead lights. I reclined my seat, which didn’t bother anyone because seats on a train are spaced much further apart than seats on a plane, and slowly drifted off. Getting some sleep on this train was a lot easier than on any plane; while I did find myself momentarily waking up a few times, usually while stopping at stations in Kansas, I still didn’t have any problems falling back asleep like on that transatlantic flight a month earlier.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

I woke up Wednesday morning somewhere in eastern Kansas. It was pretty early but the sun was out and I'd gotten enough sleep, so this is where my day began. The first station we stopped at while I was fully awake was Lawrence, Kansas, the college town which is the home of the University of Kansas. The time was 6:35am, an hour and 26 minutes after the scheduled arrival of 5:09.

Later that morning, the train approached its next stop, Kansas City, Missouri. This was going to be a longer, 20-minute "fresh air" stop in which passengers could step outside and stretch our legs.

Downtown Kansas City as the train made its way to Union Station.

During the break at Kansas City Union Station. The Southwest Chief is on the left. The train on the right is the Missouri River Runner, which connects Kansas City with St. Louis twice daily.

So, how far behind schedule were we? The train was scheduled to arrive in Kansas City at 6:53, but actually arrived at 8:24, a delay of one hour and 31 minutes. However, the fresh air break was supposed to last 35 minutes and we left after only 22, clawing back a little bit of the time we'd lost and reducing our delay to an hour and 18 minutes, putting us about as behind schedule as where we were last evening in northern New Mexico.

Most of the Boy Scouts left the train in Kansas City. It was not long after that I noticed another contingent had recently joined us: Amish people. I never knew they had spread out this far west.

There was still something like eight and a half hours left on this train ride. With Sapiens finally done, I moved on to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which I’d bought in Savannah during my visit there eight months earlier. This is, as Wikipedia describes it, a “nonfiction novel” which is mostly based on true events, but with some details altered and told out of order for the sake of making the story flow better. The author, John Berendt, spent most of the 1980s living partially in New York City and partially in Savannah, spending more and more time in Savannah as the decade wore on. That day I got through most of the first half, in which each chapter is dedicated to each of the quirky people he got to know in that city, such as the antiques dealer Jim Williams, the slippery lawyer-musician Joe Odom, and most memorably of all, the transgender drag queen, The Lady Chablis. I really enjoyed what I read from this book, and I liked the almost-deadpan tone the author took when describing something ridiculous. It also made me want to return to Savannah and explore more than before.

After all those hours of steadily staying no more than an hour and a half behind schedule, the delays between the scheduled arrival times and our actual arrival times began to widen. Our next stop after Kansas City was La Plata, Missouri. Scheduled for 9:33, got there at 11:27, a delay of one hour and 54 minutes.

An hour later, the train stopped at Fort Madison, Iowa for a fresh air stop. The delay was now down to an hour and 41, so they made up for some lost time. Fort Madison is in the southeast corner of Iowa, right on the Mississippi River and thus the Illinois border.

This is next to the station in Fort Madison. They've got a well-preserved Santa Fe caboose on display here.

And this, here, is the mighty Mississippi River! This means that the train was finally crossing our last state border of this journey. We were now in Illinois, and I wouldn't be leaving that state until the next morning.

I got lunch from the snack bar. They had chicken street tacos there, which were OK.

Galesburg, Illinois has a modestly-sized station house, not unlike most of the other stations this route stops at, which belies how much train traffic it sees every day. Not only does the Southwest Chief stop here, but so does another cross-country route, California Zephyr which runs between Chicago and Oakland. On top of that are the Illinois Zephyr and Carl Sandburg, which each run a short route within Illinois, once daily in both directions. So, this station is a lot busier than the last stop in Fort Madison, and the one where I boarded the train in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

This is Mendota, Illinois, where they've got a vintage Chicago, Burlington and Quincy steam engine outside.

The Galesburg stop was at 1:45pm, but scheduled at 11:48am, so our delay was now just three minutes short of a full two hours. Mendota (2:57 vs. 12:59) was similarly almost two hours. And it was about to get longer; sometime between 3 and 3:30 we had to sit and wait for another train to pass by, the westbound California Zephyr on its way from Chicago to Oakland.

The next-to-last stop was Naperville, which is in the Chicago metro area. And after that, the train began to approach its final destination...

Chicago's familiar skyline was finally in view!

The final approach to Chicago seemed to take forever, as the train slowed down the closer it got. When I finally stepped off the train at Chicago Union Station, the time was 5:14pm. The scheduled arrival time was 2:50, so the final delay was two hours and 24 minutes.

This is the train hall in Chicago Union Station. Definitely impressive, just like any I've seen in the northeast. And it's almost as busy, too; this station is a huge hub for I don't know how many short- and long-distance trains.

The hotel I was staying at was the Travelodge by Wyndham Downtown Chicago, which for me was close enough to Union Station that I could walk there. I got to stay at this place for free, having earned so many Wyndham reward points during that two-month stay at a La Quinta in Maryland the year before. This Travelodge was a hotel I'd recommend, in a high rise building, and in a great location within walking distance of several restaurants and an L-train station.

After leaving my baggage behind in my hotel room, I walked down the street for dinner at the Adams Street Brewery. Along with a Pablo goat cheese salad, I had a couple of the beers they brewed there: a delicious lager called Lewis' Can-O-Corn, and a brown ale named Englishman in Chicago. I'll recommend this place too.

No more time to see anything else in the city, for now. The next morning I'd be riding a bus to the greatest music festival of the year, Electric Forest.