Long-Distance Train Travel in the USA

Train travel is a modern, fun, and fast way to travel all across the United States and the world. Here you can learn all about it.

This page links you to information all about the nation’s cross-country passenger railroad, Amtrak.

  • Why Take the Train? Did you know that it can be faster than air travel in some areas, offers one-of-a-kind scenery in others, and is usually surprisingly inexpensive?

  • Amtrak On-Board Experience The experience on the train: what you’ll see, dining options, types of seats or private rooms, etc.

  • How to Travel by Rail Where to catch the train, how to buy tickets, luggage rules, and insider tips to make your first trip a smooth one.

  • Amtrak FAQs With answers, of course.

This site

This page, and the files linked here, used to be in a wiki on railpassenger.org. Due to spam, it has been migrated to this static site. Most of the content was created in 2008-2011 and migrated largely unmodified in 2022.

Years after railpassenger.org was created, the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) renamed themselves as the Rail Passenger Association. If you are looking for them, see https://railpassengers.org/ (plural “passengers”). This site is not affiliated with the RPA.


Note: this page was last updated in 2008. Some of these links are dated but the information they discuss is still online and discoverable via search.

Amtrak is the only cross-country passenger railroad in the United States. Outside a few regions, Amtrak is usually the only way to travel state-to-state by rail, and is the only regular option for cross-country travel by rail. Amtrak operates the trains, and mostly runs on tracks owned by freight railroads. Amtrak is a quasi-governmental corporation, created in 1971 when the passenger railroads at the time wanted to get out of the passenger business. For more information on the history of Amtrak, see the Wikipedia article on Amtrak.

Here are some (potentially) interesting topics you can find here:

These sites are hosted on the complete.org server. Some are hosted with resources donated to non-profit organizations.