With my head out the window, I breathed in the alpine air as the Bernina Express crossed from Italy into Switzerland, climbing the edge of the Valposchiavo on our 37-mile journey to St. Moritz. Over the next two hours, this train, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, would take me through 55 tunnels and across 196 bridges, over Europe’s highest alpine crossing by rail

I stood in Guardiagrele’s medieval town square, under the 13th-century Church of Santa Maria Maggiore with a view of the Adriatic sea, impatiently awaiting the van that would bring my aunt, uncle and cousin.

No sleep ‘till Como. Those words did not cross my mind when I woke up on a Friday morning at home in Staten Island — but that is how the next 35 hours played out. After a full day at the office, I took the A train to JFK, boarded a flight to Paris, and then rode seven different trains before having paccheri and baby octopus in Como, Italy.

More than 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, our Vy train to Narvik climbed an other-worldly landscape of lakes, rivers and waterfalls, dotted with cabins painted in Scandinavia’s iconic Falu red. I was thousands of miles from home, and I felt as if I were on another planet. Population and vegetation were sparse as we climbed both in latitude and altitude, crossing through the Scandinavian Mountain range that forms the border between Sweden and Norway.

I watched from the front of a train car just after midnight as we rolled forward onto the port side of ferry, stopped, detached from the cars in front of us, rolled backward and then forward again, this time veering onto tracks that ran along the starboard side of the ferry.

The one-time flagship of the Great Northern Railway makes the journey from Seattle or Portland to Chicago in 45 hours, running more than 2,200 miles across the far northern United States. I made a portion of this trip in 2001, and completed the entire length of it in 2021, with a two-night stop in Havre, Montana. The stretches along the Columbia River Gorge and through Glacier National Park are, in my opinion, among the most scenic in the Amtrak network. This is my account of my 2021 journey …

Havre, Montana, had been on my mind since Ancestry.com led me to a photo of the grave of my great great grandfather, who, according to my relatives, had died there while working on the Great Northern Railroad. When 2021 presented me with another opportunity for a cross-country train trip, I know I wanted to travel the Great Northern route — the Empire Builder — and I wanted to stop in Havre, not only to visit my great great grandfather’s grave, but also to drive to the town of Harlem, where my grandmother and her brothers grew up during the Great Depression. You can read my account of the Empire Builder here. My 48 hours in Havre are documented below.

After a night of tossing and turning, back and forth, this way and that, I awoke at 5:15 am for good, just after the Coast Starlight pulled out of Dunsmuir. This was the stretch of the trip I was most excited about. A friend’s random mention of Mount Shasta last year reminded me that I was in this very spot 20 years ago — and I couldn’t remember the feeling, but I knew it must have been one of awe, waking up in the forests of Northern California after my first overnight of what would be a three-week trip. This isn’t Bay Area Northern California, but the more than 300 miles of California that lies between the Bay Area and the Oregon border.

Of all the transcontinental Amtrak routes, the Sunset Limited had always interested me the least. It does not offer the mountain grandeur of more northerly routes, but I have found since my very first long-distance train trip that I am fully content gazing at the passing landscape, even if it is monotonous. Louisiana, Texas, Texas and more Texas, followed by the desert of the American Southwest would offer its own beauty, and I would watch all 1,995 miles of it over the course of 45 hours.

I boarded the Cardinal at Newark Penn Station on a Friday morning with a mix of pandemic trepidation and the usual excitement of a train trip. This was a workday for me, so as the train sped down the familiar Northeast corridor to Philadelphia, and onward through Wilmington and Baltimore to Washington, DC, I opened my laptop to get as much work done as possible before the scenery became more interesting.

I was supposed to be 34,000 feet over the North Atlantic, but a tight connection and a forgotten bag in the labyrinth that is Munich airport instead brought me to in a bar in Freising, Germany, where students sang along with decades-old American music.

Fresh bread. Cubes of cooked lamb. Beef sausage. Not what I expected to eat on an overnight Amtrak ride up the Eastern seaboard. Just weeks after Amtrak suspended dining car service on East Coast trains — supposedly a response to Millennials preference to dine alone — I nonetheless enjoyed one of my most unique Amtrak dining experiences: a Central Asian feast with an Uzbek truck driver.

Floorless and roofless, the ground of San Andrés is covered in grass and weeds, and birds fly about and sing in what would have been the nave of the church.

Following the routes of one of the most famous trains of the last century, the Lake Shore Limited makes an overnight trip from New York to Chicago in 18 hours, drawing more than 350,000 riders annually. Though the route via Albany, Buffalo and Cleveland seems circuitous on a map, geographically it makes sense.

As the eastbound Empire Builder chugged across the desert landscape of Eastern Washington and into Idaho, my eyes grew heavy and I finally drifted off to sleep, not an easy feat while sitting in an Amtrak coach. The much-needed sleep was short lived. Within minutes, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

The Canadian is Via Rail’s 3-day, 3-night (now 4-night) journey across the continent. I made the Westbound journey in December of 2000, starting in Vancouver and traveling to Toronto via Jasper, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg. I kept a journal along the way, and below are my entries, as written by my 21-year-old self, and images from my Canon (non-digial) SLR.