Amtrak Texas train travel - Written aboard the train, west of San Antonio around 3 a.m. - day two a 60-day journey across the country by rail.
Departing San Antonio, 2 a.m.
Somewhere past Uvalde, the darkness takes over completely. There’s nothing to see except the red lights of distant wind farms, blinking like Christmas decorations strung across the horizon. You cannot make out the turbine blades themselves, only the lights — and this goes on for hours. Pull up a map and look at the stretch between Uvalde and Del Rio. You’ll see what I mean. There is not much out there.
I am wide awake in the observation car with a handful of other night owls, watching nothing and everything at the same time.
A Highway Less Traveled
If you have ever driven Highway 90 southwest of Uvalde, you know the feeling — you can go an hour without seeing another car, save for the occasional Border Patrol vehicle. The train does not follow that road, though. Its headlight cuts through some vast, unseen field, and I find myself wishing I could see what the engineer sees: a single stream of light slicing through total darkness.
Picture yourself in a pitch-dark room during a storm or camping under a clouded-over sky. You have got a flashlight in your hand. You switch it on, and it carves a path through the dark — but everything outside that path stays hidden. That is what it is like passing through this stretch of Texas around 3 a.m. My insomnia, the kind that follows me at home, had followed me onto the train too. And that is how I discovered something important about overnight coach travel.
Overnight Coach Travel
I eventually made my way back to my seat, only to find the passenger next to me sprawled across both seats, dead asleep. An immovable object, as it turned out. I couldn’t wake him, so I spent the rest of the night in the observation car, staring into a darkness that didn’t have much to offer.
Is this what the next two months will be like? That was the question running through my head at 3 a.m. on day one — standing in a blacked-out passenger car, trying and failing to reclaim my seat, while the rest of the car snored like some strange orchestra. I had my doubts. In hindsight, though, it was a valuable lesson: it taught me the worth of a sleeping-car room for overnight legs of a trip like this.
The Amistad Reservoir
I managed some sleep eventually, and woke at dawn just in time to catch the first real sight of the trip — the train crossing the narrow bridge over the Amistad Reservoir as the sun came up. The Amistad might be the largest body of water you’ve never heard of. Look at it on a map and you’ll see it stretches into Mexico. Built in the 1960s, it covers roughly 89,000 acres with a capacity of 5.6 million acre-feet, and it’s jointly managed by the U.S. and Mexico for flood control, conservation, irrigation, power, and recreation.
Amtrak Texas Train Travel - Hugging the Border
After a rough first night, this was the scenery that reminded me why I’d signed up for all of this. The sunrise made it spectacular. At points, the track runs so close to the border that Mexico fills the view out the left side of the train, and Texas fills the right. Nothing was going to keep me from my morning podcast, so at 6 a.m. I pressed play, and my phone flickered between T-Mobile US and T-Mobile Mexico as the train skirted the line between two countries.
Pecos River High Bridge
This is land on a scale the mind doesn’t quite process — and somehow, we’re still hugging the border of the country next to us. Continuing southwest, we cross the Pecos River High Bridge (pictured above) just after sunrise, spanning the Pecos River Gorge high above the water. Spectacular doesn’t quite cover it. Clearly a highlight of Amtrak Texas train travel. Nearby is Langtry, another piece of Texas history — a town built by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the late 1800s and forever tied to Judge Roy Bean, who ran a justice-of-the-peace court out of a saloon.
Constructing the Bridge
Getting a rail line across the Pecos River was no small feat when the Southern Pacific was building its line from New Orleans to Los Angeles. In The North American Railroad, historian James E. Vance Jr. describes how engineers east of Sierra Blanca ran into deeply cut river valleys, especially where the Pecos meets the Rio Grande. It wasn’t until 1892 that a permanent solution arrived: a 321-foot-high span — at the time, the tallest railroad bridge in the country — built to keep the line up on the plateau instead of down in the valley. The original low-level crossing had been finished years earlier, on January 23, 1883, the day the last spike joined the New Orleans–to–Los Angeles line.
Texas is a Whole Other Country
From here to Alpine, I’m not sure I can do the landscape justice. There’s an old line — “Texas is a whole other country,” author unknown — that we Texans love to trot out, half tongue-in-cheek, mostly to annoy people who aren’t from here. But this stretch, from sunrise over Amistad Lake to the approach into Alpine, makes a real case for it. Texas isn’t flat. Not even close. The Guadalupe Mountains alone have several peaks above 8,000 feet, including Guadalupe Peak at 8,751 feet. I’m a native Texan who has lived here most of my life, and I was seeing all of this for the first time.
The View From the Train
What makes the view from the train different is that the tracks rarely follow the highways. It’s rougher, narrower, less groomed than the cleared right-of-way of a road. At one point we passed through what looked like a rock tunnel with no ceiling — a slice cut through solid stone, just wide enough for the train to fit. The stretch from Amistad to Alpine set a high bar for the rest of the trip. I’d survived my first overnight in coach, even if I hadn’t managed to sleep through it, and my quest to actually experience the geography of this country — not just pass through it — was off to a strong start.
I didn’t know it yet, but that early-morning ride through the emptiness of southwest Texas would stay with me for the rest of the journey. Long after the big cities, the grand boulevards, the museums, and the cathedrals, one of the first things I’ll remember about this trip is the second day — riding through the pitch-black darkness of west Texas before dawn.
The Wild West
Long after this trip ends, I’ll keep coming back to this feeling of vastness, and the way it resets your sense of scale. Later down the road, I’d feel it again watching a solar eclipse — that same sense of distance too large to fully hold in your mind. It’s the same feeling as looking up at a clear night sky far from city lights, where the stars blur into a single blanket, too many to count individually.
Stepping outside the routine I’d spent years inside of changed how I see things. More and more, I’ve come to think of vastness not as emptiness, but as possibility — as options, as pathways not yet taken.
What’s the last landscape that made you feel truly small — in the best way?
Travel Series Part 2 – El Paso
Amtrak Sunset Limited – for details on Amtrak Texas Train Travel.
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