I grew up in an airline family, flying United from San Diego to Chicago several times a year to visit my family.

Face pressed against the window, I was mesmerized by the endless squares of land below.

In summer before my last year of college, with plenty of time to spare, I instead took Amtrak from Chicago to San Diego, a two-night trip aboard the Southwest Chief, connecting outside Los Angeles to the Pacific Surfliner.

As I stepped aboard, I let it sink in that this very train was going to cross all those squares of land. And I could watch it all go by.

I had armed myself with a stack of books and magazines, but as the Superliner chugged out of Chicago, through the suburbs and into the farmland, I could not look away from the window.

These were not gorgeous vistas, but Illinois suburbs gradually changing to endless rows of cornfields.

These cornfields would turn into arid plains and then to mountains as we made our way from Illinois, across the Mississippi River at sunset, into Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and the California coast.

Much of the western United States passed me by, at a leisurely 45 mph.

I was transfixed, and hooked — the first step in a lifelong fascination that would include more than 33,000 miles of North American rail travel and this project that explores the psychological and environmental benefits of rail travel.

But what is so alluring about the view from a train window?

The Tourist Gaze

The history of humanity is filled with accounts of travel, from ancient and medieval pilgrimages to the Grand Tour of the 17th-century aristocrats that grew over the next two centuries to include the gentry and professional classes.

But mass travel as we know it was born with the railroad. In 1841, 16 years after the first passenger railroad, Thomas Cook organized what is now considered the first package tour, a 15-mile railroad trip from Leicester to attend a temperance meeting.

This event is not only considered the birth of tourism, but also the beginning of a travel company that served 19 million tourists per year before its collapse in 2019.

In The Tourist Gaze 3.0, John Urry and Jonas Larsen argue that this decade in history also marked the beginning of what they call the tourist gaze:

“This is the moment when the ‘tourist gaze’, that peculiar combining together of the means of collective travel, the desire for travel and the techniques of photographic reproduction, becomes a core component of western modernity.”

By “gaze,” Urry and Larsen refer not just to the raw data our eyes pick up, but how the mind processes that data:

“Gazing is not merely seeing, but involves cognitive work of interpreting, evaluating, drawing comparisons and making mental connections between signs and their referents, and capturing signs photographically. Gazing is a set of practices.”

What makes train travel a preferred mode of transportation for many is that gaze. Depending on the scenery and, more importantly, the mindset of the traveler, the view from a train can be captivating.

And as travel has evolved to include road trips, cruises and airline flights, the view from the train remains a unique one.

Trains are uniquely united with the land

The view from a train is quite unlike a plane that cruises 30,000 feet above the landscape. It is also unlike a car, where a driver has to make decisions every second, constantly navigating not just the road, but other cars in the road.

In a train, you are simply riding a path carved out by others more than a century ago, following the natural contours of the earth.

In Allies of the Earth: Railroads and the Soul of Preservation, historian Al Runte notes that railroads, unlike highways, generally respected the landscape, following the contours of the land and offering travelers more intimacy with nature and place. Highways, on the other hand, can mount steeper grades, so their builders frequently plowed or blasted through obstacles rather than going around them.

This intimacy may be more prevalent in American trains, not just because of their slower speed relative to many European trains, but also because of how they were constructed.

As Wolfgang Schivelbusch noted in The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, railroads in England were built in a time and place where labor was cheap but land was expensive. Thus, they tended to take the time and labor necessary to build “tunnels, embankments and cuttings in order to make the rails proceed in a straight line, at a minimum of land cost.”

American railroads, on the other hand, were built in a time and place where labor was expensive but land was “practically worthless,” so the railroads here are more likely to take curved paths around natural features.

Beyond the gaze: feeling the landscape

While Urry and Larsen focused on the gaze, they acknowledge that travel can be — and should be — more than using the visual sense:

“There can be an acute embarrassment about mere sightseeing. Sight may be viewed as the most superficial of the senses, getting in the way of real experiences that should involve other senses and necessitate long periods of time in order for proper immersion.”

Most travel, especially activities such as hiking, diving or whitewater rafting, involve much more than the sense of sight. And while my focus here on train travel has largely been about the sights, you can also feel the landscape under you in many cases, and hear the train whistle and jostle.

This is especially pronounced at night when trying to sleep. As the train chugs and bends, you can feel the wheels, the tracks, the land.

As Terry Pindell wrote in Making Tracks: An American Rail Odyssey: “I had a sense of being far from home that is backed up by a tactile feel of the landscape I have crossed to get here.”

You don’t just see the landscape from a train, you feel it.

A prime example: The California Zephyr

Friends frequently send me social media reels of scenic train rides, often in the Austrian or Swiss alps. These reels draw thousands of views, often accompanied with a caption that includes “tag someone you would like to ride this with.”

One does not have to travel to Switzerland for this experience.

Close to home for North Americans, many routes in the United States and Canada offer both transportation between destinations and a gaze worthy of a social media reel, at an affordable price if you are willing to ride in coach.

Perhaps the most scenic ride in the United States is the California Zephyr.

When the California Zephyr debuted in 1949 connecting Chicago and Oakland, it captured the nation’s imagination, according to Henry Kisor in Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, even though it was 10 hours slower than the Overland Limited’s connection between the same two cities:

“No other American train traverses such a variety of terrain: the industrial backside of Chicago, the Midwestern breadbasket of Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska over the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to the high plains and towering Rockies of Colorado, the intermountain desert of the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada, the high Sierra of California, the shore of San Francisco Bay.”

More than 70 years later, this route is still considered Amtrak’s most scenic.

I made the 2,438-mile trip in September of 2020 — and it exceeded my already high expectations.

After a 2 p.m. departure from Chicago, city turned to suburbs, followed by small towns and rolling cornfields.

The farmland is interrupted only by a crossing of the half-mile-long Mississippi River.

Dusk falls over western Iowa, and by morning, the train arrives in Denver for an hourlong stop.

After Denver, the Zephyr climbs into the Rockies, entering 29 tunnels, including the 6.2-mile-long Moffat Tunnel. Before the tunnel was completed in 1928, this stretch took hours to traverse, rising to an elevation of 11,000 feet. Today, it takes about 10 minutes to go through the tunnel, at 9,239 feet above sea level.

Before entering the tunnel, the Zephyr runs alongside the South Boulder Creek, which eventually empties to the Atlantic, and afterward, the Zephyr runs parallel to the Fraser River, which eventually empties into the Pacific — marking the crossing of the Continental Divide.

The Zephyr then cuts through a series of steep canyons — Byers, Gore, Red and Glenwood — alongside the Colorado River.

For at least an hour, it runs through a stretch of land that can only be traversed by this train, or by raft. No roads. No WiFi. No phone service. Just soaring red rocks and a winding, rushing Colorado River.

After Glenwood Springs, the Zephyr continues westward along the Colorado River.

A series of delays meant that on my September 2020 journey, the Zephyr crossed Utah under darkness, and did not cross into Nevada until 6:30 a.m., cruising along a mesa over a massive, rocky desert plain, with mountains in the distance. The entire landscape took on the pink hues of the almost-rising sun, as the train navigated switchbacks through this high-altitude desert.

The view was other-worldly, like the surface of Mars.

As twilight turned to daylight, the landscape shifted, more lunar than martian.

For more than 100 miles, the Zephyr parallels the Humboldt River and Interstate 80. Grazing cattle line either side of the river, some eating vegetation, some drinking the water, some wading in the water and others trotting and chasing their calves.

After Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, the Zephyr runs along the Truckee River as it snakes through the Sierra Nevada mountains. For those building the Transcontinental Railroad 150 years ago, this was some of the most difficult track to lay.

The train goes through a series of tunnels and switchbacks some 7,000 feet above sea level, at one point high above the 1.3-square-mile Donner Lake, named after the party of pioneers forced to winter there in 1846.

The Zephyr crawls through the Sierras at around 30 mph, picking up speed after Sacramento for the final run into Emeryville.

The Zephyr crosses so much of America’s grandeur in just 52 hours. And nearly 300,000 passengers per year have a front-row seat to it all, seeing and feeling mountains, canyons, rivers and plains, much of it inaccessible by car.

The California Zephyr is not the only Amtrak route renowned for its scenery. Among my other favorites:

• Amtrak’s Cardinal passes through West Virginia’s New River Gorge

• The Empire Builder runs along Washington Columbia River Gorge and through Montana’s Glacier National Park

• The Coast Starlight cruises past a snow-capped Mount Shasta at sunrise before crossing into Oregon and passing through the Pengra Pass of the Cascade Mountains.

These trains offer more than just a view of the landscape. They offer an intimacy with it.

Majesty vs mundane

Thinking back to my very first long-distance train ride, however, I cannot help but note that I am not just mesmerized by the grandeur of mountains and canyons, or the novelty of running along the bank of a winding river.

The suburbs and exurbs of Chicago also held my gaze, too.

Is the mundane also appealing when viewed from a train car?

In his 2010 book, In Motion: The Experience of Travel, former New Yorker staff writer Tony Hiss writes about “Deep Travel,” the heightened state of awareness we enter into when in unfamiliar places. We notice more, we have more questions, we find more compelling we are in motion or in a new place.

“If you decide to look, the effect is intense because the landscape outside is not just a distant prospect but something you’ve never left, since it seems to come right up to your feet and even to wrap around under the wheels. It’s not a managed landscape—no NatureRail or parkwaying here. It’s not even a landscape that’s paying attention to you, since houses and businesses show their fronts to roads and only their backs to train lines. It’s not always what you want to see, but it’s what’s there to be seen—every scrapyard, every weed, every abandoned tricycle in a backyard, every overgrown stream bank, invisible because there’s a billboard in front of it (although you can’t see what’s being advertised, because the billboard’s facing a highway). Every two seconds you get a new framed picture of what America looks like when no one’s looking.”

I’m thinking here of my May 2022 ride on the Southwest Chief. The scene pulling out of Albuquerque would not be in a scenic guide to railroads: brown adobe, stucco or paneled homes in need of maintenance, and dirt backyards with an incredible amount of trash.

Was it appealing to look at?

No.

But it nonetheless drew my gaze and taught me more about the region here.

An air traveler sees none of this.

A car traveler sees the often-more-presentable front yards, from the ground level.

A high-speed rail traveler sees a blur.

But passengers on a slow train see, as Hiss says, what America looks like when no one else is looking.

Authentic settings provide satisfaction

In short: One can argue that a train ride provides a more authentic view of the passing landscape.

In a 1984 paper, “Environmental Psychology and Tourism,” Joseph D. Fridgen of Michigan State University noted that tourism and the environment are inseparable — and that the study of tourism requires an understanding of how the physical and social environment influence the tourist and host.

He cited research from the 1970s that backs up what many of us would assume to be true today, that authenticity is important to many travelers:

“Satisfaction is diminished if the tourist feels that the settings are ‘faked’ or staged. Authentic settings are successful and provide satisfaction to the tourist when there is environment-behavior congruence, a fit between what happens in the setting and what is expected of the setting (Wicker 1979; Fridgen and Hinkleman 1977).”

Furthermore, he cited research that found negative perceptions of scenic corridors increased as the number of artifacts of human intrusion increased.

Taken together, these findings would support the idea that long-distance train travel would be a satisfying experience.

Unlike a road trip, where one is constantly facing a sign of human intrusion, namely, the road itself in front of you and other vehicles traveling, a long-distance train more often provides the traveler with expansive vistas of miles and miles of nature, with no visible signs of human intrusion.

As an aside, Fridgen also noted that “getting there is half the fun,” though airline passengers 40 years later would likely argue with that point:

“Airlines go to considerable expense to create feelings of spaciousness, privacy, and control in one’s limited seating space (i.e., the individual overhead lights, fans, and a courtesy buzzer for each passenger in modern airlines).”

Airlines’ failure to deliver spaciousness and privacy in exchange for more affordable fares could and should be a gain for contemporary train travel.

Train travel and bioregionalism

Of Amtrak’s four trans-Mississippi routes that ran out from Chicago to the West Coast, the Southwest Chief generally is not listed as the most scenic. The crossing of the Continental Divide is not as dramatic as the crossing on the California Zephyr or the Empire Builder, and the passage through desert is not as awe-inspiring as the endless saguaros of the Sunset Limited.

But the train was showing me something new, and prompting questions in my head. Is this what is called “high desert”? The vegetation was all in the very narrow color spectrum between olive green and brown — but in so many shades. Hills, buttes and mesas lined the landscape. I don’t know how this was formed geologically but sometimes you can see the long horizontal lines running through the rock formation, eons of sediment, I imagine.

In How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy, author Jenny Odell suggests that the best antidote to the attention economy created by social media companies is not deleting social media apps or taking expensive electronic detox retreats — both are luxuries inaccessible to most Americans and, besides, many of us either rely on social media for work or find some value in the social connections it offers.

Instead, Odell recommends that we make a conscious effort to learn more about the physical world around us.

• If there’s a stream in your neighborhood, do you know its source and destination?

• Do you know what kinds of birds visit your home every day?

• Similarly, when you are in a new location, make an effort to learn about the land, flora and fauna to get a better sense of where you really are.

And so, as the Southwest Chief cruised through Arizona and New Mexico, I had more questions than Google Maps could answer. I wanted to know how this land was formed, what this vegetation is, and how hot or cold it gets here. I wished Amtrak still had local guides aboard who might be able to answer these questions.

In any case, my focus was on the physical world, not on any digital distraction.

What about high-speed rail?

There’s no question that an efficient high-speed rail network will be key to solving the climate crisis. Slower rail travel just cannot compete with air travel in moving people around.

Commuters cannot be expected to choose a 19-hour ride from New York City to Chicago that only runs once per day, when between 42 and 66 flights make the journey in roughly 2.5 hours.

Riding high-speed rail in France in 2022, I found the system to be incredibly efficient, taking me from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport (how many major American airports have their own rail station?) to Strasbourg in 2 hours. The same route by car would have taken more than five hours.

While my gaze was split between the window and our progress on Google Maps, I think I was the only one looking out the window. There was no sightseer lounge on this train — and perhaps on any European train.

I sat across from two Frenchmen focused on their phones, and it occurred to me that this journey was just twice the duration of my combined subway and AirTrain ride from my Lower Manhattan office to JFK — but it covered 22 times the distance.

As the train hit 192 mph, I could feel the electric power, pulling us across the landscape.

Unlike American trains, the TGVs passed outside of city centers — and I would love to have seen Rheims and the other towns we passed near.

I can’t say I had a connection with the land here. I did not feel or experience it the way I have on Amtrak.

In her book, Around the World in 80 Trains: A 45,000-Mile Adventure, Monisha Rajesh sums up the differences between Europe’s slower trains and the continent’s now ubiquitous high-speed system:

“France’s TGVs – Trains à Grande Vitesse – have revolutionised train travel across Europe for commuters, but for idlers like us whose sole intention was to spend the afternoon gazing out of windows, the high-speed trains served little purpose, reducing the views to a blur. There were few passengers on the slow trains from Limoges to Clermont-Ferrand, and Clermont-Ferrand to Béziers, most of whom moaned about the heat, fell asleep in the heat, then jumped off within a couple of hours, leaving us to wind down the country alone.”

And in her “Manifesto for Slow Travel,” Hidden Europe Editor Nicky Gardner made a similar case:

Is being shot through the Taunus like a bullet actually better than sticking to the old rail route along the Rhine valley to Cologne? There the train follows the meandering course of the river, affording wonderful views of gabled villages, precipitous vineyards and romantic gorges. True, the old valley route takes twice or thrice as long as the new fast line, but the experience is incomparably better.

Most people just want to get from Point A to Point B, and for them, high-speed rail is the most efficient, climate conscious answer.

But for those who want to see and feel the landscape, slower speed trains offer an intimacy with the landscape unique to all other forms of travel.

⮕ And that intimacy is matched, on slow trains, by the opportunity to forge deeper connections with fellow passengers — the topic of my next section.

• • •

Bibliography

Fridgen, J. D. (1984). Environmental psychology and tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 11(1), 19–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(84)90094-X

Gardner, N. (2009, May 3). A manifesto for slow travel. Hidden Europe. https://www.hiddeneurope.eu/a-manifesto-for-slow-travel

Hiss, T. (2017). In motion: The experience of travel. Routledge.

Kisor, H. (2015). Zephyr: Tracking a dream across America. CreateSpace.

Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.

Pindell, T. (1990). Making tracks: An American rail odyssey. Grove Weidenfeld.

Rajesh, M. (2019). Around the world in 80 trains: A 45,000-mile adventure. Bloomsbury.

Runte, A. (2006). Allies of the earth: Railroads and the soul of preservation. Truman State University Press.

Schivelbusch, W. (2014). The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the nineteenth century. University of California Press.

Urry, J., & Larsen, J. (2011). The tourist gaze 3.0. SAGE.