Category: Sacramento

There are five words that do something to me that no other announcement in travel can match. Not the captain’s voice telling you you’ve reached cruising altitude. Not the gate agent calling your boarding group.

The dining car is now open.

I heard them on the Coast Starlight somewhere south of Portland, the train barely clear of Union Station, the Willamette still visible through the windows, and something in me that had been clenched for months — or maybe years — quietly let go.

I have been thinking about trains lately. About three particular trips, and what they add up to.

The first was the Coast Starlight south — San Jose to Santa Barbara, departing at ten in the morning, seven hours of California unspooling past the window.

There is no faster way to understand the state than from a train at that pace. The Bay gives way to the agricultural flats of the Central Coast, and then somewhere past San Luis Obispo the tracks swing toward the ocean and you are suddenly running along the edge of the continent, the Pacific filling the window, and you realize you have been holding your breath.

Near the end the train passes through Vandenberg — the base stretching out on both sides, the coastline raw and largely empty, the light in late afternoon doing what California light does. I arrived in Santa Barbara at five o’clock feeling like I had traveled through something, not just to somewhere.

That distinction matters more than it used to.

The Portland-to-Seattle leg was different. Shorter — four hours — but charged from the moment we pulled out of Union Station. Portland’s Union Station is the kind of place that makes you believe train travel is a civic act, not just a transaction. The great waiting room, the clock tower, the sense that someone once thought arrival was worth celebrating architecturally.

We were barely moving when the announcement came.

The dining car is now open.

I was traveling alone, which is the only way to truly hear those words. Alone, you are available. You have no one to talk to, which means you might talk to anyone.

I made my way to the dining car and was seated across from two strangers, the way Amtrak still does it — the old practice of filling tables, not preserving privacy. We were somewhere in Washington by the time we finished. I no longer remember their names or even what we talked about, but I remember the quality of the hour: the moving landscape, the food that was fine without being remarkable, the particular ease that comes from conversation with people you will never see again and therefore can be entirely honest with.

There is a word for what the dining car produces. Serendipity is close but not quite right. It is more like availability — the condition of being open to whatever the next hour brings. Air travel has systematically eliminated every version of this. The seat-back screen, the headphones, the tray table as personal bubble. Train travel still creates the conditions for encounter. The dining car announcement is an invitation, and what it is inviting you to is not just food.

The third trip was Richmond to Sacramento — short, almost a commuter run — with my friend Doug Kaye. Where the Coast Starlight rides were solo and expansive, this one was intimate. Two people who have known each other long enough not to need to fill the silence, watching the Bay Area give way to the Sacramento Valley, talking about whatever came up.

Sacramento’s station is the right destination for a train. Old and grand and close to things worth seeing — we walked to the California State Railroad Museum, which is the kind of place that makes train enthusiasm feel entirely reasonable. Steam locomotives the size of houses. The history of the transcontinental laid out in artifacts and photographs. I have been a train person since childhood, since the Union Station in Dayton, since riding the Spirit of St. Louis on the Pennsylvania Railroad with my sister, Mom and Dad, and the museum felt like confirmation of something I had always known but rarely said aloud.

Afterward we walked to the State Capitol. At some point in a hallway we passed Gavin Newsom, moving with purpose in the way governors do, and we nodded in that California way — the implicit acknowledgment that yes, here we are, all of us in the same building, going about our days.

Then lunch at Biba’s.

Biba Caggiano ran her restaurant on L Street for decades. The food was Bolognese in the way that actually means something — rooted in a place, in a person’s memory of that place, translated carefully onto plates in Sacramento, California. I had a tomato onion soup that afternoon that I have spent years trying to duplicate. I have come close. I make it at home now and when I do I am back at the table with Doug, the Capitol visit still warm, the museum still vivid, the train ride from Richmond already receding into the pleasant blur of a good day.

Biba’s closed during Covid. It did not reopen.

I think about what connects these three trips and keep coming back to the same thing.

Train travel insists on a kind of presence that other forms of travel have abandoned. It insists on time — you cannot compress the Coast Starlight into something efficient. It insists on landscape — you will watch California go by whether you planned to or not. And it insists, at least in the dining car, on the possibility of other people.

We have built a travel infrastructure almost perfectly optimized against encounter. Against presence. Against the accidental afternoon that becomes the one you remember.

The dining car is still open, if you know where to find it. The soup I can make at home. The rest requires a ticket and a willingness to sit across from strangers, moving through the world at a speed that still allows you to see it. And time to just talk and share.