This sounds like a wonderful way to explore the USA, thank you for sharing this trip with us. I was under the impression that most train routes had been dismantled over the past forty years, but a quick search tells me there are still quite a few interesting routes on the Amtrak network.
I did a lot of train travel in my younger days, in the late 70s and early 80s, inspired by Paul Théroux's The Great Railway Bazaar. I haven't travelled by train since then but my attraction to train travel remains strong. As a teen coming of age in the 70s, I did the obligatory backpacking trips to Europe, crisscrossing the continent by train thanks to the unlimited EurailPass which used to be such a steal at the time. These were fun trips but nothing close to the more interesting trips I took a few years later as part of my first real job which was to interview First Nations groups for a traditional knowledge and land-use occupancy project. The first trip I was sent was from Sept-Iles to Schefferville in Northern Quebec on an old train that passed through very important wintering areas for First Nation families who would get dropped off in the middle of nowhere with all their gear, including canoes and tents, to spend the winter on their traplines. The train was old and slow and smelled of campfire, smoked moose hide, and fresh spruce. It had old wood stoves where families would cook caribou stew and bannock and make tea. My second assignment was to ride the train from Cochrane (Ontario) to Moosonee and Moose Factory, two small Cree communities on the shore of James Bay in northern Canada where the Hudson's Bay Company established the second-oldest trading post in North America sometime in the 1670s. As a young know-it-all environmental scientist, I realized very quickly on my first assignment that I didn't know fuck-all and these people who never went to school knew a lot more than my university professors...A few years later, this time for fun, I travelled by train from Hong Kong to Harbin via Nanjing-Shanghai-Beijing-Shenyang. I had planned to ride to Ulan Bator and then to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian but, as it was the pre-internet era, I found out in Harbin there were no connections from there, and more importantly, I couldn't secure the proper visas to get to Ulan Bator and Russia so I retreated to Beijing. These trains were mostly the original ones built in the early to mid-1900s by the British or the French, and they retained the charm of a longgone era. Now that I am retired and have plenty of time on my hands, my bucket list includes riding the Orient Express -although from the reviews I read it sounds more like an expensive luxury trip than an adventure, and the Trans-Siberian from Ulan Bator or Vladivostok to Moscow (this will of course have to wait until after peace is re-established) but convincing my wife that a train ride with a bunch of Vodka-drinking Russians would be a fun way to spend a couple of weeks is not an easy feat...
