For train aficionados, the very mention of Amtrak’s California Zephyr, a 2,438-mile route connecting Emeryville and Chicago, is likely to send lightning strikes of joy coursing through their bodies. Tell them you have snagged a ticket on this train ride and you can almost see their inner eyes lingering over the landscape, through epic mountain ranges and sea-like deserts. It is an unparalleled smorgasbord of beauty — and for Capital Region residents, it can begin or end right in downtown Sacramento.

My wife and I chose the latter route in late May of this year, when we flew to Denver and caught the 8:46 a.m. Zephyr west to Sacramento after spending a few days in and around the city with friends. At the beautiful Union Station, which combines late 19th-century Romanesque flanking wings with a Beaux-Arts Great Hall built in 1914, we sat in comfortable, plush armchairs for an hour before lining up on Platform 4 to await the arrival of the train. As it slowly pulled into the station, one could sense the frisson among the waiting passengers.

We had booked a Roomette, a tiny two-person sleeper with seats that convert into a bunk bed. On the top level were straps to keep the person up there so he or she wouldn’t jolt out and onto the floor should the train jerk suddenly during the high-speed overnight jag through the desert flats. The ticket included our five meals over the course of the 33 hours that it would take to get us over the Rockies.

The train reaches an altitude of nearly 10,000 feet and traverses 26 tunnels cut through a 10-mile stretch of particularly intransigent mountains; through the red rock canyons pinning the Colorado River into its route on the western side of the Continental Divide; along hundreds of miles of orange and red cliffs, many of an astounding height, and scrublands in Utah; out into the duller-orange and brown desert expanses of Nevada; through Reno and over the lush Sierra Nevada north of Lake Tahoe. Finally, it picks up speed to begin the journey down the foothills and into the Sacramento Valley. 

What makes the Zephyr journey so overwhelming, from a sensory point of view, is the fabled glass observation car: a long carriage lined with tall windows curving upward toward the ceiling. Fans of train travel the world over wax rhapsodic about this carriage. Sitting in the car, wherever you look, there is scenery. Turn your head, and you see rivers and horses, herds of free-range cattle or bison, the backyards of houses that the train passes, fishermen and rafters — some of whom have ritualized the practice of standing up and mooning the passing Zephyr — trees and stark rocks. Look upwards through the curved top-level windows, and you see soaring cliffs and vast Western skies. You are both on the ground and aloft, simultaneously. 

It’s a form of cinema vérité that is particularly slow-moving, vivid and, at times, intimate. The train moves slowly enough that you can see into bedroom windows as it passes small wooden houses and dilapidated trailer parks along the tracks. You can see individual pieces of garbage discarded in garbage dumps. You can see fishermen throwing out their lines on calmer stretches of the Colorado River and families waiting patiently at rail track crossings for the Zephyr to pass by.

As a passenger, you experience a sort of enforced relaxation, made possible by the extraordinary hard work of the conductors, engineers, attendants, chefs and other members of the crew that keep the whole operation running smoothly. The world goes by at a thoroughly human pace, and unlike airports and airplanes, where one generally dreads enforced interactions with other stressed passengers, crews and security officials, on the train you meet happy people. 

These people lean in not just to the destination but to the journey along the way. They want to talk and have interesting stories to tell. There’s a sort of instant-mix camaraderie. You meet the same people again and again — after all, there’s only so many social permutations possible on a train, only so many places you can end up; you walk up the train or down the train, into the dining car or into the observation car, and that’s about it. And when you meet them, you talk.

At meals, the tables seat four people, and so, if you’re traveling as a couple, you’re immediately sat down with two others — and, in the normal course of things, you chat with those two others, find out their stories and share travel anecdotes. What you find is that whether this is a person’s first long-distance Amtrak ride or their 20th, they have a sense of awe of both the landscape and the engineering feats that put in place the cross-country tracks over such rugged, challenging scenery.

Over the course of Saturday and the first half of Sunday, we met retired teachers, a public relations person, a couple on the way to Portland, Oregon, to take part in a cross-country bike expedition, a retired couple on the way back from a granddaughter’s high school graduation in the Midwest, several train aficionados who just enjoyed the romance of long distance travel on the rails, and an older lady traveling back, solo, from an academic gathering in Chicago.

On one level, each of these conversations was deliberately, studiously, casual. On the other hand, you can find out an awful lot about a person over the course of a two-hour dinner conversation. During one of the more improbable interactions, I discovered that I shared several friends in common with the person I was chatting with. Sacramento is, apparently, at heart still a small town.

It’s easy to mock the American passenger train network. Compared to those in Europe or Asia, there aren’t enough trains, and those that there are are impossibly slow, prone to delays and ludicrously overpriced. All of that is true. Yet at the same time, there are still moments of magic to be had on the Amtrak routes. And, luckily for Sacramento, the most wondrous of all of those Amtrak moments, riding the California Zephyr, leads into and out of California’s state capital.

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