Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Index Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

7 Amtrak Trains That Make the Slow Way Worth It

The Acela gets the headlines, but these seven slow trains get the country.

Train travel in America has always been something of a dare. The country laid 250,000 miles of track in the 19th century, effectively invented the long-distance passenger train, then spent most of the 20th century backtracking. Something shifted in the last few years. Amtrak moved a record 34.5 million passengers in fiscal year 2025—its second straight year of all-time highs—and on April 15, kicked off the largest long-distance railcar order in its history: 800-plus new carriages bound for the routes that actually show you the country. The Acela gets the magazine covers, but the NextGen Avelia Liberty trainsets now whip Boston to Washington at 160 miles per hour, and good for them. The real network sits elsewhere: on routes measured in days rather than hours; through canyons no interstate reaches; in the kind of silence that only exists when a phone has nothing to say.

The timing has a peg, of course. The United States turns 250 this summer, and the official commemorations have the subtlety of a stadium giveaway—replica Liberty Bells, a canceled Freedom Train, a FIFA World Cup match staged at Lincoln Financial Field on July 4 because nothing says E pluribus unum like ticketed sport with FIFA's markup. 

Amtrak is an official America 250 partner, a term that obscures the real story. Its long-distance network carries the country's founding-era geography more faithfully than any museum program. Saratoga, where the British surrendered in 1777 and the Revolution turned. The Horseshoe Curve, which broke the Alleghenies open in 1854 and made Pittsburgh possible. The old C&O mainline through Appalachia, which built the industrial republic one coal seam at a time. You can visit all three on a ticket that costs less than a flight to Miami.

If this is the year you finally take the slow way, the argument for it is stronger than mere nostalgia. Jet fuel is up, domestic airfares with it, and the experience of American flying has reached a kind of terminal indignity nobody even complains about anymore. Europe's sleeper train renaissance has reminded a generation of travelers that overnight rail still works as both transit and hotel—that a journey can be the point, not the thing you survive to get somewhere. 

Americans are staying stateside at rates unseen since 2020, and the slow-travel instinct, once a European affectation, has crossed the Atlantic with linen........

© Observer