The USA by Train

In the summer of 2012, I undertook a cross-country journey across the United States by rail, beginning at Penn Station in New York and travelling west over the course of several weeks. The route took me through a shifting collection of cities and landscapes—New Orleans, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, Niagara Falls, El Paso, San Antonio, Austin, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and more. By early July, I had covered nearly 4,000 miles, tracing a line across the country that zigzagged through different climates, accents, histories, and architectures.

At 5:19 a.m. on July 6th, the Amtrak train I had boarded four hours earlier in Kingman, Arizona, pulled into the quiet town of Flagstaff. The conductor moved softly through the carriage to wake those of us due to disembark. The train itself was still hushed—passengers asleep in contorted positions, dim reading lights flickering overhead. As I stepped down onto the platform, the cool desert air struck me. Dawn was just beginning to break, washing the landscape in a pale orange light. A weathered 1950s motel sign near the tracks flickered into view—its tall frame, offering rooms for $5, stood out like a relic from another era.

Flagstaff became my base for a short while. I was there primarily to visit the Grand Canyon—a birthday gift to myself, and one of the quiet motivations behind the trip. The town, with its low-slung buildings, long freight trains, and pine-scented air, felt like a good place to pause and gather my thoughts before heading onward.

The journey up to that point had already been full of contrasts: the saturated humidity of New Orleans, the monumental architecture of Washington DC, the blast-furnace heat of the Texan highways, and the neon-charged strangeness of Las Vegas. Each place left behind its own imprint, however fleeting. There was a feeling of seeing America in fragments, collected mostly through station windows, overheard conversations, and half-sleep moments in motion.

By Flagstaff, I was beginning to feel the cumulative weight of the miles. But I also felt a quiet satisfaction: a sense that the rhythm of the journey—the trains, the time zones, the liminal spaces between departure and arrival—had become a kind of temporary home.

I still had a long way to go. But in that early morning light, with the tracks humming behind me and the day beginning to unfold, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

You can read the full travel journal here.