Sharing Stories, and a View, Aboard the California Zephyr

I woke up around 5 a.m. to a low but incessant rumbling. Faint hints of daylight had appeared over my fellow passengers’ heads, most of which were still bent in rest. Some people yawned; others stared intently out the window at the valley. I had been aboard the train for about 40 hours, and there was still a long way to go before our scheduled arrival in the San Francisco Bay area.

Riding westbound, I walked to the back of the train to see the rising sun reflected on the tracks. We were passing through Nevada. A few minutes later we stopped in the city of Winnemucca, Nev., right in front of the Martin Hotel, which, at the end of the 19th century, catered to the Basque immigrants who’d moved there to work as shepherds.

Amtrak’s California Zephyr, considered by many rail enthusiasts to be among the most scenic long-distance train routes in the United States, operates between Chicago and Emeryville, Calif., near Oakland. The entire route takes some 52 hours and includes 33 stops. In 2018, while traveling through the United States on a three-month photography project, I completed a majority of the trip, departing from Mount Pleasant, Iowa, on a sweltering mid-August day.

I boarded the train at 5:59 p.m. in the golden light of a perfectly clear day, glancing outward at the first of a long series of soy and corn fields, and small-town backyards that are so often overlooked.

At 10:55 p.m. the 12 silver carriages of the Zephyr slowed and stopped in Omaha. Connie, another passenger, got on and sat next to me. At 72, she had short gray hair, a sun-kissed face and kind eyes. It was too late to start a conversation, so we both just tried to get some sleep. (Neither of us fully succeeded.)

In the early morning, while the yellow hills of Nebraska and Colorado rolled all around us, Connie told me she’d been visiting her daughter in Omaha and would be getting off that afternoon at Glenwood Springs, Colo., to meet her husband.

Eventually I started wandering through the cars, shyly but restlessly, wanting to meet and talk to everyone. It felt like the first day of summer camp. Small groups of people were mingling here and there, exchanging a few words. Others preferred to keep to themselves in their roomettes, or sat alone in their coach seats reading or napping.

The present-day California Zephyr began service in 1983, though an earlier iteration of the train — sharing the same name, but operated privately on a slightly different route — ran between 1949 and 1970.

In…