Fifteen days across America by train: nobody who flies over it understands how big it is

Start on the West Side, on a railway, which sets the tone. The High Line was an elevated freight viaduct built in the 1930s to get goods trains off Tenth Avenue, abandoned in 1980, scheduled for demolition and saved by two neighbours who liked the wild grass growing on it. It reopened as a park in sections between 2009 and 2019 and runs two and a quarter kilometres from the Meatpacking District to Hudson Yards, ten metres up.

Walk it north to south, which puts the light behind you in the afternoon, and get off at the bottom for the Whitney. Renzo Piano's building opened in 2015 at the foot of the park and holds the best collection of twentieth century American art anywhere, with outdoor terraces on four levels that are half the reason to go.

Eat in Chelsea Market, in the old Nabisco factory where the Oreo was invented, and then stop. Jet lag is real and tomorrow is long.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is a single building at 97 Orchard Street, put up in 1863, occupied by something in the order of seven thousand people from twenty countries over seventy years, and then boarded up in 1935 when the landlord found it cheaper to evict everyone than to meet new fire regulations. It stayed sealed until 1988.

What that produced is the most specific museum in New York: several apartments restored to the year a particular family lived in them, entered only on a guided tour of about fifteen people. Book a tour in advance, pick a family rather than a theme, and expect it to be considerably better than the description suggests.

In the afternoon, walk to the Brooklyn Bridge and cross it eastward. It opened in 1883 with a main span of 486 metres, half as long again as anything built before it, and the promenade runs above the traffic. It is also, in a trip about how the country was stitched together, the right thing to look at before you get on a train that goes to the other ocean.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds around two million objects and nobody has ever seen a meaningful fraction of them, so pick two departments and let the rest go. The Egyptian wing with the temple of Dendur in its glass hall and the American period rooms are the two that suit this trip. Note that pay-what-you-wish applies only to residents of New York State and students from the neighbouring three; everybody else pays the full ticket.

Walk out of the back into Central Park, which is 340 hectares that Olmsted and Vaux laid out from 1858 on land cleared of an existing Black settlement, a fact the park spent a century not mentioning. Go south through the Ramble and the Bethesda arcade rather than along the road.

Finish at Grand Central, which is not where your train leaves from and is worth an hour anyway. It opened in 1913, has more platforms than any station on earth, and the zodiac on the ceiling is painted back to front. Eat downstairs in the oyster bar, which has been there since the station opened, and then go and pack, because tomorrow you get on a train and stay on it.

Get to Penn Station early. It is under Madison Square Garden, it is confusing, and the departure gate is announced late enough that the concourse becomes a scrum.

Then the best hour of the leg. The Lake Shore Limited runs north out of the tunnel and up the eastern bank of the Hudson for a hundred and eighty kilometres, close enough to the water for most of it that there is nothing between the window and the river. Sit on the left. West Point goes past on the far bank, then the Catskills, and the light usually goes somewhere around Rhinecliff.

The train divides at Albany, joining a section from Boston, and after that it runs west across New York State in the dark: Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo around midnight. Sleep through Ohio and Indiana. There is nothing out there to miss.

You come into Union Station in the middle of the morning, which is enough of the day to do the Loop properly. Leave the bags and walk east.

Millennium Park sits on what was a railway yard until 2004, which is a suitable place to arrive by train. The polished steel sculpture at the middle of it, officially Cloud Gate and universally the Bean, reflects the whole skyline into a curve and is the single most photographed object in the Midwest.

The Art Institute is across the road behind two bronze lions, is the second largest art museum in the country, and holds American Gothic, Nighthawks and Seurat's Grande Jatte in rooms within a few minutes of each other. Give it three hours. Then walk ten minutes southwest to the Willis Tower, which was the tallest building in the world from 1973 to 1998, and go up to the glass boxes that hang off the side of the 103rd floor with 412 metres of nothing underneath them.

Start at the Chicago Cultural Center, which was built in 1897 as the public library and paid for partly with books donated by Britain after the fire. It is free, almost nobody goes in, and the Preston Bradley Hall upstairs has a Tiffany stained-glass dome nearly twelve metres across, the largest in the world, made of about thirty thousand pieces of glass.

Then south to the Museum Campus on the lakefront. The Field Museum's central hall holds Sue, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton ever found, dug out of South Dakota in 1990 and bought at auction for eight million dollars by this museum with help from a fast food chain and a film studio, which is a very American provenance for a dinosaur.

In the evening go north to Uptown for the Green Mill, which opened in 1907, was part-owned by one of Capone's men, still has the trapdoor behind the bar and has run live jazz nightly for most of a century. Cash only, no talking during the sets, and the last set on a weekend runs past three.

The California Zephyr leaves Chicago Union at two in the afternoon and does not stop being interesting for the next two days, but it starts slowly, which is deliberate: the railroad scheduled the dull part for the dark.

The afternoon crosses Illinois farmland, and around six the train crosses the Mississippi at Burlington, which is worth being awake for. After that it is Iowa in the dusk, corn in every direction, and grain elevators standing up out of it like cathedrals.

Dinner is served in sittings and you will be seated with strangers, which is the single best feature of American long-distance trains and produces conversations you would not otherwise have. Then Omaha somewhere near midnight, and the whole of Nebraska while you are asleep.

You wake on the high plains with the front range on the horizon, which after two days of flat ground is startling, and pull into Denver Union Station a bit after seven. The station was rebuilt in 2014 and the old waiting hall is now a bar, a hotel and a set of restaurants, which is either a betrayal or the reason the building survived, depending on who you ask.

The Golden Triangle is fifteen minutes' walk south and has three museums in four blocks. The Denver Art Museum's Indigenous Arts of North America collection was the first of its kind in an American art museum and remains one of the largest, and the Libeskind building next to the original is another set of tilted titanium planes with almost no vertical walls in it.

Two streets away, the Clyfford Still Museum exists because of a will. Still, who was one of the first abstract expressionists and who fell out with the entire art world, left ninety five per cent of everything he ever made, more than three thousand works, to any American city that would build a museum for all of it and show nothing else. For thirty years no city took it. Denver did, and opened this in 2011.

Golden is twenty kilometres west, at the point where the plains stop, and it is where a rail trip should spend its spare day. The Colorado Railroad Museum has about a hundred narrow-gauge and standard-gauge locomotives and cars on fifteen acres, a working roundhouse, and a narrow-gauge train that runs on the loop on certain days. Most of the stock came off the mountain lines that once ran up every canyon in the state.

In town, Coors has been brewing since 1873 and the plant is the largest single brewing site anywhere, filling more cans in a day than most countries drink. The tour is free, takes an hour, walks you past copper kettles and a bottling line moving faster than the eye follows, and ends with three samples.

Finish up Lookout Mountain. Buffalo Bill Cody was buried on the summit in 1917 at what his widow said was his own request, an assertion the town of Cody in Wyoming has disputed ever since, to the point that his grave was set in concrete. The museum is small and honest about how much of the Wild West was invented by the man buried outside it. The view goes from the plains to the divide.

The train leaves Denver early and starts climbing immediately, up the Front Range on a series of loops that take two hours to gain a thousand metres, with the whole city laid out below and getting smaller each time you come round. There are around thirty tunnels in the first fifty kilometres.

Then the Moffat Tunnel, ten kilometres under the continental divide at 2,816 metres, opened in 1928 after fifteen years and the deaths of nineteen men. You go in on the Atlantic side and come out on the Pacific one, at Winter Park, and from there the line follows the Colorado River west all day: Byers Canyon, Gore Canyon, Glenwood Canyon, through country where there is no road at all and rafters on the river make a traditional and unprintable gesture at the train.

Glenwood Springs in the early afternoon, Grand Junction in the evening, Ruby Canyon and the Utah line at dusk. Then Salt Lake City around midnight, and the Nevada desert in the dark. Do not go to bed early. This is the day you paid for.

The second morning is the Nevada basin: sagebrush, dry lake beds, and Winnemucca and Elko going past as small clusters of casino signs. Reno is late morning and the train fills up with people going over the hill.

Then the Sierra. The line climbs Donner Pass on the alignment the Central Pacific blasted out with Chinese labour in the 1860s, which is the western half of the first transcontinental railroad and one of the hardest pieces of engineering of the century. It goes through concrete snow sheds, past Donner Lake far below, and over the summit at just over 2,100 metres, and then drops down the American River canyon with the drop on your side of the train and no visible means of support.

Sacramento in the afternoon, then the Carquinez Strait and the bay. The train ends at Emeryville and a connecting coach takes you over the Bay Bridge. Do nothing tonight except walk down to the Ferry Building and eat something with a view of the water.

The cable cars are not a novelty ride bolted onto the city, they are the reason it could be built on these gradients at all, and the Cable Car Museum is the working powerhouse: four sets of enormous horizontal wheels in the basement, pulling the cables that run under the streets of the whole system, free to walk into and startlingly loud.

Take a car up to Russian Hill for Lombard Street, which is not the crookedest street in the city and is the one everybody means: eight hairpin bends laid out in 1922 to cut a twenty seven per cent grade into something a car could manage. Walk down the steps beside it rather than joining the queue of cars.

Then Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower, built in 1933 with money left to the city by a woman who had spent her life chasing fire engines. The murals inside were painted in 1934 by twenty six artists on a federal relief programme and show California at work in the Depression, several of them from a political angle that caused the tower's opening to be delayed. Climb the Filbert Steps down the eastern side afterwards, through gardens and wooden cottages, and the parrots are real.

The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937 with a main span of 1,280 metres, the longest in the world for the next twenty seven years, painted in an orange that was meant to be a primer and stayed because everybody liked it. Walk out onto it from the southern end. It is 2.7 kilometres across, it is usually windy and often in cloud, and the fog blowing through the towers at eye level is better than a clear day.

Below it, the Presidio was an army base for two hundred and nineteen years, Spanish then Mexican then American, and became a national park in 1994. Tunnel Tops opened in 2022 over the buried approach road, by the same landscape practice that did the High Line you walked on the first day of this trip, and it is a hillside of native planting with the bridge, the bay and Alcatraz laid out below it.

Finish at the Palace of Fine Arts, a Beaux Arts rotunda and colonnade built for the 1915 world's fair out of plaster and burlap, meant to be demolished with everything else, and kept because the city refused. It fell apart slowly for fifty years and was recast in concrete in the 1960s, which is why a temporary building from 1915 is still standing beside a lagoon full of swans.

Golden Gate Park is 412 hectares, larger than Central Park, and every bit of it was sand dune until the 1870s, when a twenty four year old engineer worked out how to hold the sand down with barley and lupin long enough to plant on it. It is now one of the great urban parks and the eastern third holds two of the best museums in California.

The de Young was rebuilt by Herzog and de Meuron in 2005 and clad in copper punched with a pattern derived from tree cover, which has oxidised over twenty years exactly as they said it would. The observation tower on top is free even without a ticket to the galleries and gives you the whole western half of the city.

Across the concourse, the California Academy of Sciences is Renzo Piano's, opened in 2008, and has an aquarium, a planetarium, a four storey rainforest in a glass sphere and a 1.7 hectare living roof planted with California natives, all under one lid. Give it three hours and finish by walking west through the park to the sea.

Alamo Square is fifteen minutes from most of the city on the 21 or 22 bus and takes twenty minutes to see: a row of six Victorian houses on Steiner Street with the downtown towers rising behind them, which is the photograph everybody takes and which is, unusually, actually worth taking.

Then the airport. BART runs from downtown to the international terminal in about half an hour for a few dollars and is by a wide margin the sensible way to do it. Allow an hour and a half from the middle of the city with bags.

Or do not fly. Emeryville is where the Zephyr terminates and it is also where the Coast Starlight passes through twice a day, running north to Seattle or south to Los Angeles, and either of those is another two days of railway and a completely different trip.