Leaving Seattle's King Street Station mid-morning, the Coast Starlight hugs Puget Sound past Tacoma and Olympia before turning inland toward Portland. The Cascades rise to the east - Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood revealing themselves in sequence when weather permits. Portland arrives in the late afternoon, the steel-and-glass city skyline giving way to the Willamette Valley's vineyards and farms. As darkness falls, the train climbs into southern Oregon, passing through Klamath Falls in the small hours. This northern stretch shares tracks with Amtrak Cascades, which runs more frequently between Seattle and Eugene for travelers wanting just a piece of the journey.

Dawn breaks somewhere in Northern California's volcanic plateau, Mount Shasta appearing like a ghost off the starboard windows - 14,000 feet of dormant volcano rising impossibly from the surrounding flatland. The train descends through the Sacramento Valley, passing the state capital in the early morning before continuing south through the Central Valley's endless agriculture. This is the America that feeds the world: orchards, vineyards, row crops stretching to the horizon. The Coast Starlight stops in San Jose and then diverges from the interior route, climbing over the Cuesta Grade toward San Luis Obispo and the coast.

The promised coastline finally appears south of San Luis Obispo. For perhaps two hours, the tracks run close enough to the Pacific to taste the salt air through open vestibule doors. Waves crash against rocks. Sea birds wheel overhead. The sun sets over the water, turning the ocean gold and purple. It's magnificent, though briefer than the train's name suggests - the route turns inland again before Santa Barbara, following the coast from a distance through Ventura before the final approach to Los Angeles. But those coastal hours are worth the 35-hour commitment, a reminder of why passenger rail matters in ways that flights and freeways cannot replicate.

The Coast Starlight offers coach seats and sleeper cabins, dining car meals and cafe snacks, observation cars with panoramic windows designed for exactly this sort of journey. It's inefficient by modern standards - you could fly from Seattle to LA in two and a half hours. But efficiency misses the point. The Coast Starlight exists for people who want to watch the landscape change, who find something valuable in the slow passage from evergreen forests to alpine peaks to golden grasslands to palm-lined avenues. The train connects at either end to other routes: the Empire Builder to Chicago, the California Zephyr to Denver, the Pacific Surfliner to San Diego. You could spend weeks riding Amtrak's western network and never run out of new views.