Boston to Seattle by Rail

After finishing college in the Boston area, I moved across the country to begin work in the Seattle area. Flying seemed a bit unreal to me — one moment in my old life in Massachusetts, boom! the next moment in my new life in Washington state.

So I took a train. I haven't been on a really long-distance train for ten years, though I remember quite vividly long-distance overnight trips in China in my childhood with my grandfather. In the 1950s he'd taken what was and still is the ultimate overland rail journey, across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. "Don't get off," he warned me before I started on my journey, "I remember seeing two people getting off at Sverdlovsk for a smoke, and we never saw them again."

Figuring that there'd be long periods of inactivity, I took a laptop and a camera. There'd be power on the train, indeed one of the two locomotives is dedicated to generating electricity for passenger use. I got off seven rolls, which by the old rule of thumb means that there are seven good photos. That's not enough to tell a story, though, so I present here 40 decent photos with a travelogue. Occasionally I've had to interpose a page of text to bridge a long gap in photos.