All Aboard! ReDiscover the Romance of Train Travel

I harbor an affection for trains that has nothing to do with velocity or mechanical efficiency, everything to do with the way they move through the world like meditation in motion: unhurried, deliberate, earning attention through presence rather than demanding it through noise. There exists a particular romance in this restraint, something that whispers against our cultural obsession with conquest and acceleration. You settle by the window and watch the land reshape itself in real time, passing through places that exist only in the periphery of someone else’s destination. If you’re fortunate, you catch glimpses of yourself reflected in the glass: half-formed, familiar yet strange, like memories surfacing from depths you’d forgotten you contained.

For a season of my life, I worked on an excursion train in New Mexico, riding the rails between Santa Fe’s weathered railyard and the ghost town of Lamy along tracks that felt abandoned by progress, forgotten by everything except the trains themselves. We served food and stories in equal measure. In Lamy, passengers could disembark, wander the skeletal remains of what had once been a vital junction, stretch legs that had grown accustomed to the train’s particular rhythm, then return for the reverse journey. Lamy existed in that liminal space between purpose and abandonment, a town that had learned to orbit around a train station like a planet around a dying star.

Our liturgy unfolded in three daily movements: morning brought brunch passengers seeking weekend ritual, afternoon delivered lunch crowds hungry for midday escape, and evening carried dinner guests into something more transcendent. Our evening trip was of a different quality entirely. We would pause in the Galisteo Basin, our flatcar becoming an observatory beneath stars that felt close enough to pluck from the velvet darkness. The land flattened into vastness, and passengers gathered against the rails, voices dropping to whispers as if the immensity demanded reverence. The stillness of such moments adheres to memory like pressed flowers, perfect in their impermanence.

The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Co. first laid tracks across this landscape in the late 19th century. Steam engines couldn’t negotiate the incline to Santa Fe itself, so the railroad terminated in Lamy. Cargo continued its journey by horse and carriage, a mechanical pilgrimage requiring multiple forms of devotion. Eventually, tracks were laid connecting Lamy and Santa Fe—until progress rendered them obsolete and they were abandoned altogether.

I served as host and tour guide, weaving fragments of history into the journey’s fabric, sharing bits of trivia and stories that seemed to emerge from the land itself rather than from any guidebook. I’ve always been captivated by the aesthetic of late 19th and early 20th-century architecture and mechanics. That era when function and beauty hadn’t yet divorced, when craftsmanship was still considered a form of prayer. The cars we inhabited were either built in that golden age or lovingly inspired by it: old, worn, beautiful in the way that only things touched by decades of human hands can be. I would walk the train’s length like a peripatetic philosopher, moving between passenger cars and flatcars equipped with arm rails and built-in benches. When we returned to the railyard, I was granted permission to explore, to play among these mechanical relics like a child in a cathedral.

Fred Harvey was an English entrepreneur who understood that travel required more than transportation—it demanded hospitality, comfort, stories worth telling. He constructed hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, establishments that became known as Harvey Houses. The women who worked for him were known as Harvey Girls—a name that eventually inspired a Judy Garland film. At the time of Harvey’s death, he had cultivated 47 restaurants, 15 hotels, and 30 dining cars along the ATSF, creating a network of human connections across the vastness of the American West.

I cherished that work not merely for its subject matter—the railroad’s history, the land’s stories, the way past and present conversed through steel and steam—but because it allowed me to inhabit something larger than myself: romance, imitation, art, the breathing space between what was and what might be. Life possesses more romance than we typically acknowledge, more mystery than our pragmatic minds allow. We pretend existence is purely utilitarian, but that’s a fiction we maintain to avoid the vertigo of wonder. The truth whispers that very little separates sentimentality from stoicism; the more we insist on their distinction, the further we drift from authentic living. The more relentlessly practical we become, the more pointless life begins to feel.

Recently, I found myself pulled between opposing gravitational forces, struggling to balance pragmatic necessity with dwelling inside what I can only call the breathing opus. Those moments when you can feel life’s essential mystery surrounding your small portion of existence. Like sunrise over the ocean. Like riding trains through the countryside that survives primarily to be passed through. Trains possess the peculiar power to reconnect you with versions of yourself you haven’t encountered since childhood, the part that remains suspicious of premature maturity, the part that distrusts earnestness disguised as wisdom.

Despite the company’s Las Vegas headquarters, that job became one of my most treasured experiences. It wasn’t just the trains themselves, but the ritual they enabled, the rhythm they imposed, the way each day unfolded in loops and pauses that felt like meditation in motion. The excursion has since shuttered, replaced by something called Sky Railway. I’ve investigated Amtrak’s Writer’s Residency program, hoping to rediscover some echo of that particular marriage between stillness and movement. Amtrak doesn’t seem to have figured out how to nurture that delicate alchemy. It remains a beautiful idea awaiting proper execution.

I think about that job with surprising frequency, and not because it represented perfection, but because it permitted me to inhabit something unhurried, something deliberate, something that asked nothing of me except presence. I would gladly return to spending my days on trains, not for any destination they might deliver, but for the sacred space between departure and arrival, the particular quality of quiet that emerges when the world moves past you without requiring explanation or conquest, when you can merely be carried forward by something larger than your own ambition, something as patient and persistent as the rails themselves.