No one is cheering for Amtrak’s 43 Pennsylvanian. I’m waiting for the train at Moynihan Train Hall in New York City, having been dispatched by The Nation to report on the national rail service by traveling its span across the country, and the trip is beginning without ceremony. When America’s first steam locomotive with regular passenger service set out in 1830, it was cause for celebration. The engine, nicknamed the Best Friend, traveled six miles along the Charleston-Hamburg Railroad in South Carolina and back again on Christmas Day. “We flew on the wings of the wind,” the Charleston Daily Courier remarked in its account of the trip, “before any of us had time to determine whether or not it was prudent to be scared.” On one notable run a few weeks later, two “pleasure cars” were attached to the four-wheeled iron horse for the railroad’s stockholders and other guests. At each stop, troops fired a cannon to the delight of spectators, who watched as the four-and-a-half-ton machine reached a breakneck speed of 25 miles per hour. Children tossed flowers onto the tracks and a band played, the Courier reported, as “great hilarity and good humour prevailed throughout the day.”

No cannons are fired inside Moynihan Hall. No flowers descend on Track 13. No newspapers document the Pennsylvanian’s journey (though there’s at least one magazine reporter). But like that first passenger service, this train is fully booked. “Scoot over. Make a friend,” the conductor urges. “You might meet your future ex-spouse.”

If you want to travel from New York City to Los Angeles, flying is usually a no-brainer: The trip is only six hours long, and the price is often half that of the train. Amtrak, on the other hand, is known mostly for short trips in the Northeast—in 2024, it carried three times more passengers between Washington, DC, and New York City than every airline combined. So why take a cross-country train? One reason is the perspective (what Amtrak’s marketing calls “see level”): a better view of the nation than the one at 30,000 feet. Over the next few days, I’ll be separated by a windowpane from warehouses, factories, water treatment plants, state parks, trailer parks, bridges, beaches, cemeteries, mountains, deserts, fields, and farms. But access to that panorama will come with certain costs on my side of the glass: spotty Wi-Fi, out-of-order bathrooms, crying toddlers, $6 microwaved hot dogs, $45 steak dinners, and, of course, delays.

The 43 Pennsylvanian leaves every day at 10:52 am, at least on paper, from an extension of Penn Station that still feels new. In 2021, the former mail-sorting room at the James A. Farley Post Office reopened as Moynihan Train Hall, named for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Nixon White House adviser turned Democratic senator, who spent years championing the expansion until his death in 2003. The $1.6 billion makeover is certainly glamorous, but it’s not clear how much of that funding went toward practical considerations for passengers. In the main concourse, beneath a vaulted glass roof supported by arched steel trusses and a 12-foot-tall Art Deco–inspired clock, there are no chairs. Instead, dozens of people in the busiest Amtrak station in the country wait for their trains while sitting on the gray marble tile floor, their backs against the glass panes enclosing the platform entrances. The hall’s façade still bears the Postal Service’s unofficial creed: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Of the eight trains scheduled to leave within the next hour, according to one of the small-screen displays scattered throughout the station, three are already running behind.

“Amtrak is a sad situation,” said then–special government employee and noted hater of mass transit Elon Musk at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in March, where he called for the privatization of “anything that can be privatized.” Along with the US Postal Service, Musk named Amtrak as a target, contrasting it with high-speed rail development in China. “If you’re coming from another country,” he said, “please don’t use our national rail. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America.” But privatization wouldn’t solve Amtrak’s problems, and every major passenger rail system in the world relies on public funding. The Chinese government, for instance, has reportedly spent more than $1.5 trillion on high-speed trains since the early 2000s.

“What China has done is not even remotely connected to privatized enterprise, but instead is the result of intense, sustained, policy-driven state involvement,” said Jim Matthews, the president of the Rail Passengers Association, an advocacy organization founded in 1967, speaking shortly after Musk’s comments. If the United States had likewise invested in Amtrak over the past two decades, Matthews argued, it would likely have “a world-class high-speed rail network reaching every corner of our country.”

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“This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways…and we don’t want to subsidize a national rail system,” then-Senator Joe Biden said in February 2005, after President George W. Bush threatened to eliminate federal funding for Amtrak. Once he became president himself, “Amtrak Joe”—who had earned the nickname by commuting from Delaware to DC by train for decades—signed the Investment in Infrastructure and Jobs Act, which provided billions in funding for upgrades and expansions for both Amtrak and commercial freight trains. But with Donald Trump back in office, that progress has been erased.

During his first term, Trump called for slashing Amtrak’s budget by half. In May, as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was slashing and burning its way through the federal bureaucracy, Amtrak cut around 10 percent of its management jobs and closed hundreds of open positions. Two months after Trump’s second inauguration, Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner, under pressure from the White House, abruptly resigned. Stepping down, he said, would help ensure that the company “continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this administration.” In July, Trump moved to cancel $4 billion in federal funds allocated for California’s high-speed rail project, gloating on Truth Social: “I am thrilled to announce that I have officially freed you from funding California’s disastrously overpriced ‘HIGH SPEED TRAIN TO NOWHERE.’”

The 43 Pennsylvanian covers around 440 miles, with service to 18 stations in three states. I’ll be getting off in Pittsburgh, the last stop. Our electric locomotive will be swapped out for a diesel-powered one in Philadelphia. Shortly after the train starts moving, a conductor checks our tickets, writing the abbreviations for the respective stops on slips of paper left above our seats: TRE, HAR, LNC (Trenton, Harrisburg, Lancaster). On mine, she makes a check mark in red ink: end of the line.

A few hours later, an announcement in Altoona directs our attention to the left side of the train. We’re passing along Horseshoe Curve, a bent, 2,375-foot stretch of track carved out over the course of three years by hundreds of former miners from Ireland using pickaxes, shovels, and black powder. Upon completion in 1854, it was hailed as an engineering marvel, easing the slope through the Allegheny Mountains. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966, and a small museum at the base of the curve attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year.

Unfortunately, I’m seated on the Pennsylvanian’s right side, where I’m treated to a view of an eastbound train run by Norfolk Southern, the company behind the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment disaster in 2023 and the owner of this section of the track. As the conductor describes the landmark to our left, my window flashes repeatedly with Norfolk Southern’s logo, a black-and-white silhouette of a horse, stamped on dozens of coal cars. Last year, the Justice Department sued the company for routinely hindering passenger service on Amtrak’s Crescent line from New York to New Orleans, which had an on-time performance rate of just 24 percent in 2023. Under federal law, passenger trains have the right of preference over freight, but it’s rarely enforced; the suit against Norfolk Southern is the first such case against a railroad in more than 40 years, even though host railroads are responsible for around 65 percent of Amtrak’s delays.

Although the United States has more miles of rail than any other nation, Amtrak is forced to share the lines with freight trains—and to pay the companies millions of dollars a year to do so. The freight trains’ relationship with passenger trains resembles that of a horrible roommate: They’re noisy, messy, and take up too much space. “There is no way we can run adequate passenger service on the existing track network designed to accommodate very heavy freight operations,” said Alan S. Boyd, the then-president of Amtrak and a former president of the Illinois Central Railroad, speaking to the Wharton School of Finance’s transportation club in 1980 about the future of passenger rail. That was less than a decade into Amtrak’s existence. Forty-five years later, not much has changed.

I receive the first delay notice of the trip just after we round the Horseshoe Curve: An e-mail states that my next train, the Chicago-bound 40 Floridian, will be late. The Floridian is a temporary route, combining the Capitol Limited and Silver Star while repairs are made to the East River tunnel in New York. No reason is given for the delay, but Amtrak’s online tracker shows the Floridian at a standstill in Washington, more than 200 miles away. Frustrating, but not surprising.

Amtrak was born of a “grand bargain,” a deal between the rail companies and a devil named Richard Nixon. That deal was brokered by Secretary of Transportation John Volpe, the second person to hold the office after Boyd. Before Amtrak, railroads had long neglected their legally required passenger service. Freight trains were getting longer and heavier in order to reduce operating costs and compete with the long-haul trucking industry. Many railroads stopped updating their equipment, rescheduled connections, pulled advertising, and otherwise degraded service for their remaining customers in the hopes of persuading the Interstate Commerce Commission to allow them to discontinue their passenger service and double down on freight operations. Washington worried that without intervention, both passenger and freight trains in the country would cease to exist. “Rail passenger service in the United States is declining so severely in amount and quality that it may soon disappear completely unless action is taken now,” Volpe testified before Congress in 1970.

His solution was the Rail Passenger Service Act, which would create a quasi-public, for-profit National Railroad Passenger Corporation and release participating rail companies from their common-carrier obligations. In return, passenger trains would pay to continue chugging along the privately owned lines—which make up around 95 percent of Amtrak’s route network today. White House officials had reservations, seeing the act as too expensive, but Volpe threatened to resign, reportedly meeting with Nixon directly to emphasize the sense of patriotism and nostalgia in the proposal. The strategy made sense: For better and for worse, the trains symbolized America, and public pressure showed that Americans weren’t ready to give up on them.

Indeed, the story of the railroads is a quintessentially American one, a story of expansion, exploitation, disinvestment, and decay that starts long before Amtrak. In the beginning of the mid-19th century, the construction of railroads fueled white settlement along proposed routes in the West as rail companies and the US government violated treaties with Native Americans, defrauding them of millions of acres of land. At least 1,000 Chinese immigrants, their wages nearly half that of white workers, died building the transcontinental railroad, collapsing in the 120-degree heat or being buried beneath landslides. On the Charleston-Hamburg Railroad, the owners of the Best Friend used slave labor to run the line, including the fireman in charge of powering the engine. Six months after the locomotive’s first trip, an explosion killed the fireman and injured several others, the first such incident recorded on an American railroad. Meanwhile, a handful of robber barons in the industry profited immensely, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie among them.

By 1916, the country was lined with more than a quarter-million miles of rail. But World War II left the system in disrepair, and the rise of newer forms of transportation, aided by federal financial support and modernization programs, heralded the end of the train’s golden age. In the mid-1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, creating the Interstate Highway System, and commercial airplanes became the preferred form of long-distance travel in the United States. By 1968, passenger miles by train had fallen by 85 percent from their peak.

Nixon signed the Rail Passenger Service Act in October 1970. Passenger service from almost two dozen private railroads was taken over by the corporation Railpax, but the copyright for a similar name had already been registered for waste disposal equipment, and Railpax quickly became Amtrak. “The purpose of this bill is to get passenger service off the backs of the railroads, run the wheels off the existing equipment, and then put an end to passenger trains in this country,” said one official at the Department of Transportation at the time. Passenger rail, though thoroughly weakened, had survived, but the stipulation that Amtrak be operated and managed as a for-profit corporation left it open to further attacks from those who saw it as a waste of resources. (Congress would remove the for-profit requirement a few years later.)

The Pennsylvanian pulls into Pittsburgh at 8 pm, right on schedule. Completed at the turn of the 20th century, the city’s Union Station, at 1100 Liberty Avenue, was designed by Daniel Burnham, whose initial, unused sketches would be the basis for Union Station in DC. Today, the 12-story brick and terra-cotta building touts “superior amenities,” “resort inspired services,” “round-the-clock concierge service,” and a “fully equipped fitness center,” but no train service. In 1986, the structure was closed for renovations, reopening later as a luxury apartment complex, with two-bedroom rentals listed this year for upwards of $3,500 a month. An escalator near the tracks takes us down to the real station, a small, plain annex to 1100 Liberty Avenue’s east that serves just two routes, opening every day at 6 pm and closing at 7:45 am. Here, our only amenities are four vending machines, one of which is out of order, and a bathroom.

With the Floridian running late, some in the station start seeking alternative transportation. An Uber driver cancels one passenger’s ride to Cleveland after noticing that the destination is two hours away. A woman pleads with an Amtrak employee to rebook her connection to Missouri for later in the day, as we’ll now be arriving in Chicago after its departure. I sit in one of the blue-and-gray metal chairs that line the Pittsburgh station (admittedly an improvement over Moynihan) and wait. The remaining passengers are finally escorted onto the Floridian shortly after 2 am, its overhead cabin lights glowing. I drape my sweatshirt over my eyes and lean against the window.

Forty-five miles outside of South Bend, Indiana, I’m awakened by the Avengers theme song—the alarm of a cell phone belonging to another passenger who doesn’t hit snooze for another eight minutes, presumably dreaming of superheroes. I’m unsure whether I’ve even slept. A woman in the next row confirms that I have. “You were passed out,” she says (a polite way, I think, of telling me that I was snoring). We’ve received another delay notice during the night, stopping in Toledo, Ohio, because of “an earlier intermittent communication outage and a mechanical assessment of the train’s equipment,” and we arrive at Chicago’s Union Station two hours behind schedule. The building is another Burnham creation, completed over a decade after his death. But unlike the one in Pittsburgh, it’s still a train station—most of the time. The bright, cavernous Great Hall can be rented for private events starting at just $10,000. In 2023, a Great Gatsby–themed party took over the Beaux-Arts station for a night of “opulent, swanky ambiance” in an “ecstatic celebration of excess.” An Amtrak traveler who had also visited the previous weekend tells me that a private wedding reception blocked the entrance to the hall that evening. “You know they’ve got money,” she whispers.

Today is a more ordinary day for the station, which hosts both Amtrak and the city’s commuter rail system, Metra. Tourists snap photos of the hall; couples reunite near the modest central clock; an Amish family in overalls and long-sleeved dresses bow their heads in silent prayer over sandwiches from the food court’s Chick-fil-A. Most seats on the benches are taken.

Around 25 million Americans have aerophobia so severe that they’re unable to fly, leaving Amtrak as their best option. It hasn’t helped that the past few months have been plagued with news stories of planes falling from the sky. In April, a brief communications blackout and a shortage of air traffic controllers at Newark Airport led to hundreds of canceled flights. A few Amtrak passengers tell me that the collision between a Black Hawk helicopter and a jet at Reagan National Airport in January cemented their decision to ride the train. “I’ll take my chances with Amtrak,” one says.

After failing to find an outlet to charge my phone in the Great Hall, I am turned away in shame from the Metropolitan Lounge, which requires both a business-class ticket and a $35 day pass, a sleeper-car reservation, or, the attendant tells me, purchasing “points” on the official Amtrak app. As the imminent death of my phone precludes the possibility of acquiring any, I wander over to an unmarked windowless room filled with sleeping people. Inside, a sign above a set of blocked double doors reads “American-European Express,” a defunct luxury train line from the 1990s with mahogany-paneled walls and a formal dress code, its cars attached to the end of Amtrak’s Capitol Limited. (It did not, in fact, travel to anywhere in Europe; rather, its name was meant to evoke the kind of lavish travel that was synonymous with the continent’s Orient Express.)

In this quiet waiting room, away from the arrival-and-departure boards of the Great Hall, I fail to notice the last call for the Southwest Chief. Missing a train is significantly worse than missing a flight, especially when it’s your fault: There are no refunds, and the route’s once-a-day service means that the earliest booking is for 24 hours later. Before handing me tomorrow’s ticket, a sympathetic Amtrak worker underlines the departure time.

I make the best of my unplanned layover in the Windy City by freshening up at a friend’s apartment in Rogers Park and eating a real meal. Amtrak’s onboard communal showers are not quite communal, accessible only by those with a private room. As a coach passenger, I made other arrangements before the trip, ordering antibacterial wet wipes online. (The writer of a five-star testimonial on the site claimed to have bathed with them for 16 days as a bedridden hospital patient, adding: “I still use them occasionally at home.”) I’ve brought two packs, which sit in the bottom of my camo-patterned duffel bag along with my provisions of beef jerky and smashed Nutri-Grain bars.

I arrive back at the station an hour early. The Southwest Chief is covered with dust from its 2,200-mile journey through canyons, cattle ranches, and red rock; a passenger has smudged “I’M FILTHY” on a lower-level window. Like many of the long-distance routes in the West, the Chief uses double-decker Superliners, which debuted in 1979 to replace the aging, mismatched fleet that Amtrak had received from the railroad companies. At the time, these cars—along with the earlier, single-story “Amfleet” design—were a much-needed technological upgrade. Many of them are still in service, and while Amtrak has promised new long-distance fleet deliveries “in the early 2030s,” more than half of the nearly 500 Superliners are over 40 years old and nearing the end of their lifespan.

“I’m secretly jealous you got the window,” says Gary, a transportation planner from New York assigned to the seat next to mine, as we pass cornfields and wind turbines. A self-proclaimed “train fanatic,” Gary will wear the same outfit—a forest-green puffer jacket, jeans, and boots—for the entire journey. We break the ice by swapping travel stories and bits of train trivia. He tells me that if the train runs late enough, the staff serves complimentary beef stew. There’s some excitement in his voice when he says it, as if he wants it to happen. He was on the Chief for a work trip, having persuaded his company to pay for a 10-leg rail pass rather than the round-trip airfare to California. It was cheaper to buy the pass in January, he says, when Amtrak briefly put it on sale for $299, than to buy an airline ticket, and when he’s done with the current trip he can use the remaining segments for himself before the pass expires after 30 days. It suited him much better than a flight. “You don’t appreciate it,” Gary says of air travel. “You don’t realize how big the country is.”

For those comfortable with discomfort, the train is a vacation in itself. “On some trips, the plane may be more practical,” admits an Amtrak advertisement from 1983. “But, on most trips, there are plenty of good reasons to consider the train.” Shortly after Amtrak’s creation, officials imagined that certain onboard conveniences—live music, beauty parlors, boutiques, and rentable private offices—could help win back passengers from the airlines. “The businessman will be able to have a drink, eat and watch a jazz combo,” an early member of Amtrak’s board told The New York Times. A 1972 brochure for the Silver Meteor, which runs between New York and Miami, offered “complimentary champagne punch and almonds” for those in the recreation car, followed by a game of bingo, an hour of color TV, and a fashion show.

Amtrak passengers today are largely responsible for their own entertainment. One group on the Chief huddles around a Pixar movie playing on an iPad. Others crochet, play card games, or do crossword puzzles. Those who aren’t taking the train for the view scroll TikTok. But in the observation lounge, where Gary spends most of his time, everyone talks—about where they’ve been, where they’re headed, and where they’re going next. Most are pass holders, which makes me an anomaly of sorts; worse still is my plan to fly back rather than take another train. The Sunset Limited is beautiful this time of year, I am told, and so is the California Zephyr. If they’re anything like this line, I don’t doubt it, but even the Chief, they say, doesn’t compare to those. One passenger tells us to look out the window: There’s a dead horse lying near a fence, its flesh rotting off exposed bone. “Did you see it?”

Amtrak’s most frequent—and most overlooked—travelers are the onboard service workers, who often ride the train for its entire journey. Customers trapped in close quarters for long stretches of time can be particularly demanding. In the Chief’s café car, a man berates an employee for being unwilling to pour coffee into a metal cup he’s brought with him. The Amtrak-provided paper cups, the man says, release toxins when exposed to heat. When the employee explains that it is against policy to use any other cup, the passenger curses and shouts at her until he’s asked to leave the café car and, eventually, the train. But most interactions are more mundane. “Gotta wear shoes, folks. You have to wear shoes at all times walking about the train,” says the conductor, a straightforward statement that is nonetheless ignored by some. As is this one: “I am asking you, please make sure you flush your toilet.”

As we approach the station in La Plata, Missouri, Gary points to a camera mounted on a wall under the building’s red-tiled roof. Hundreds of people are awaiting the Southwest Chief’s arrival, but not in person: A YouTuber named Virtual Railfan is broadcasting a video of the tracks. Later that night, hours after our train departs, more than 200 people are still watching the empty station on Virtual Railfan’s YouTube channel, hoping to glimpse a freight train operated by BNSF Railway.

Despite what Amtrak’s critics say, plenty of people still care about passenger rail—and not just the self-proclaimed railfans. This is never more apparent than when service is at risk. In 2018, Amtrak proposed replacing the Southwest Chief over part of its route, citing maintenance costs on a section of rail owned by BNSF. Rather than riding from Dodge City, Kansas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, passengers would be kicked off the train and loaded onto a bus for an 11-hour trip. Rail advocates estimated that the change—a potential trial run for gutting the rest of the line and other long-distance routes—would reduce ridership on the Chief by 50 percent.

Legislators and their constituents who rely on the affected segment were livid. “This is the connection for a small, rural, agricultural community to the rest of the world, quite honestly,” a city official in Lamar (population 7,687) told Colorado Public Radio. A meeting about the proposed cuts between a group of senators and Amtrak’s then-president, a former airline executive appointed shortly after Trump’s first election, reportedly turned into a shouting match. Congress and Amtrak eventually released the funds, and seven years later, we’re riding the Chief instead of a bus.

On Gary’s recommendation, I’ve been ordering the Hebrew National beef hot dogs from the café—one of the better offerings compared to the prepackaged sandwiches and cup noodles. But for our last night, we’re celebrating with a trip to the dining car. The three-course meal is included for sleeping-car passengers, but it costs extra for us. The booths on each side of the car are identical, with tables draped with a white cloth and set with roses. Gary and I toast to a successful trip, clinking our rum and Cokes and enjoying the New Mexico landscape. But the best sights, as always, are just out of reach: The sun is setting on the other side.

Four days later and 3,000 miles from Moynihan, we arrive in an uncharacteristically cloudy Los Angeles. Gary’s journey isn’t over: He’ll continue traveling south (on what mode of transportation—bus or train—he’s not yet sure). As we disembark, I suggest that we might run into each other in New York. He laughs. More likely, it seems, we’d meet again on the rails.

On my flight back from California, the pilot announces that John F. Kennedy International Airport isn’t permitting us to land. The storms over the East Coast are too severe; no flights are allowed in. The plane circles over Pennsylvania for more than 90 minutes before we’re finally rerouted upstate. Everyone on the plane seems to be rethinking their travel plans, including me. I, at least, have the window seat again and try to enjoy the view. As we land at Syracuse’s airport, more than 250 miles from our destination, I see a set of railroad tracks trailing off into the distance. I should have taken the train.