In this Nov. 13, 2017 photo, a decrepit but still eye-catching old building, possibly a church or schoolhouse, on the far side of a two-lane road is glimpsed from Amtrak’s Empire Builder in the North Dakota countryside. (AP Photo/Paul Davenport)WESTLAKE, La. – After more than a day of train travel across the desert Southwest, the green woods in Louisiana outside our sleeping compartment’s windows were a pleasant change. But we weren’t moving. For hours.
The Sunset Limited until then had been making good time, even occasionally extending station stops to stick to scheduled departure times.
But then a swing bridge at Lake Charles, Louisiana, got stuck and stayed open, eventually forcing Amtrak to back up the train to Beaumont, Texas. There my wife and I and nearly 60 other passengers were put on a bus for the last 281 miles to New Orleans.
Instead of checking into our New Orleans hotel at 10 p.m., we made it to the check-in counter at 6:30 a.m.
That was the inauspicious start of an 11-day, 6,889-mile train trip circling nearly the entire county, starting in Arizona, heading southeast to New Orleans, north to Washington, D.C., west to Chicago and the Pacific Northwest, ending in Southern California.