Tracing a 130-Year Journey from New Orleans to Los Angeles Aboard the Sunset Limited Train
This is part of Iconic Passages, a collection of stories celebrating America and the many ways we move through its vast and diverse landscapes.
Source: media.cntraveler.com
I jolted awake as the Sunset Limited barreled west across the Texas desert. It wasn’t yet dawn, and still pitch-black outside. The distant whistle and rumble of the train lulled me back to sleep several times before I finally rose.
Source: media.cntraveler.com
I left my small roomette sleeper compartment just before 7 a.m., and walked to the dining car for breakfast. Outside, first light was beginning to break, the horizon behind us awash in orange and pink. Nearly 24 hours had passed since we departed New Orleans, and as the sky brightened, it became clear that the landscape had changed drastically overnight—the alligator-filled creeks of Louisiana and the green suburban sprawl of eastern Texas replaced by the shrub-dotted mesas of the parched, unforgiving Southwest.
Source: media.cntraveler.com
The People Making the Journey
The people making the entire journey on the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to LA are mostly train tourists and railway fans. The dining car attendant seated me across from a friendly older man who introduced himself as Scott Frisch. He wore a tank top and slippers—he, too, had just stumbled out of bed and into our booth. We ordered French toast and scrambled eggs with potatoes, made to order by a team of Amtrak chefs downstairs, and washed it down with hot coffee and orange juice.
Warmed by the food, Mr. Frisch and I kept talking long after we’d finished eating. There was hardly a rush; those of us staying on board all the way to Los Angeles still had another 24 hours to go.
“I’m moving from Palm Beach to Phoenix,” he said. Frisch had just turned 70, and the following day was to be the first day of his new job. A longtime aerospace engineer, he had worked on cockpit systems for aircraft ranging from military planes to the first space shuttle—but he hated to fly. In an airplane-dependent America, that meant two long Lyft rides, a coach bus, and a multiday train ride for his move.
He didn’t seem to mind the drawn-out journey: “I’ve been out of work for three years, and it just feels good to get going again.”
The Sunset Limited: An Iconic American Railroad
The Sunset Limited is iconic in American railroad lore not for the landscapes it passes by but for how many years people have been riding it. The train has been in operation for over 130 years, making it the oldest continually operated passenger train in the United States. The route, which spans 1,995 miles from New Orleans to Los Angeles, has remained largely unchanged since its inception in 1894.
When Amtrak was created by the federal government in 1971, the Sunset Limited was one of the first trains to be taken over by the new railroad. Despite various changes to its endpoints and route, the core of the train has remained the same for over a century.
Passengers and Their Stories
As I sat in the dining car, I met a variety of passengers who were making the journey from New Orleans to Los Angeles. There were two middle-aged sisters from Mississippi, proud descendants of a French homesteader from the 1860s, traveling to visit their brother in Houston. A Mexican mother and daughter from Ciudad Juárez were heading back home from a family visit in Austin; they got off at El Paso, where I could see the border fence just a few yards from the station platform.
An elderly Black woman with scarlet red fingernails was the only traveler going the whole way out of necessity, even planning to continue on another train past Los Angeles; she told me that her niece had paid her round-trip train fare from Atlanta to Sacramento so that she could visit for a month.
Those who were making the whole trip were mostly train tourists and railway fans. One older man, a retired electrician named Gary, wore a button-down shirt tucked into his slacks and carried a ham radio in his breast pocket to monitor the train crew frequencies. Gary seemed to know everything there was to know about rail travel in North America.
“My mom sang me train songs when I was an infant,” he said, “so maybe that had something to do with it.” He spoke about Amtrak stations across the country with such familiarity—Colfax, Omaha, Hammond—that you would think they were subway stops in his hometown.
Gary said he had taken the Sunset Limited at least twice before; this time he and his wife, Jennifer, were traveling back home to California from an Evangelical camp meeting in Baton Rouge (Jennifer spent most of her waking hours in the lounge car, annotating a large and worn copy of the New Testament).
During the train’s longer stops, Gary paced the platforms, seeking what new information he could glean from the outside.
The Dining Car: Where Passengers Gather and Socialize
The dining car aboard an overnight train is where passengers gather, socialize, and often forge new friendships. As I sat at a table with Gary, I noticed the way the other passengers interacted with one another. They shared stories, laughed, and even exchanged contact information.
As we finished our meal and prepared to leave the dining car, Gary’s eyes barely wavered from the window. “I just don’t want to miss anything,” he said. I told him that I felt the same way, albeit for different reasons.
For me, one of the great joys of taking trains across America comes from the new discoveries—passing slowly through parts of the country that I haven’t seen before—but for Gary, who has spent a lifetime riding the rails, there was now a sense of comfort in reencountering something familiar.
The sky was a deep, dark blue over the desert now; after a long day, the view wouldn’t last for much longer. We would be in LA before dawn. “We’re going to have a nice sunset in a little while,” Gary said. “If you think about it, we’ve just been chasing the sun this whole time.”
Maybe that’s why the train is called the Sunset Limited, I offered.
The old man’s eyes lit up like a child’s, and he smiled. “I hadn’t considered it,” he said. “Why, look at that! I just learned something new.”
