That is a wonderful ride. I spent much of it in the tiny open space at the end of our train car. Great place to take photos of remarkable scenery.

We’re looking forward to it. As this is a bucket list sort of trip, we sprung for the first class dome car. Hopefully that’ll prevent me having to get up to take pictures all the time.

We were in the F dome car, which is grand. Nothing compares to taking nature pics while outdoors. Either way, you will enjoy.

[QUOTE=747FC;31856261]That is a wonderful ride. I spent much of it in the tiny open space at the end of our train car. Great place to take photos of remarkable scenery.[/QUOTE]

From this perspective (taking photos), I recall the most enjoyable and spectacular train rides are the following:
1. High speed train from Nanning to Guilin (Guangxi, China)
2. Bernina Express south bound during day time
3. Norway in a Nutshell (the section from Myrdal to Flam)
4. Glacier Express (east and west bound directions)

Top of my list as well.

I'd forgotten about this thread until I saw it come up again today... Needless to say, that trip didn't happen, but we did end up taking an Alaska cruise roundtrip from Seattle in 2022 (which meant we missed Seward, Anchorage, and Denali from our original itinerary).

Next year I've booked the Pacific Surfliner and Coast Starlight from San Diego to Sacramento, and the California Zephyr from Sacramento back to Chicago. We took the CZ from Chicago to Denver a few years ago, so we missed the most scenic segment of that route. I'm really looking forward to that part this time.

China Southern?;) It's flyertalk, after all.

Yes, I've read up on the California Zephyr, but am more curious about those local Colorado lines. Have you been on any of those?

--
Let's see, I guess my most memorable train journeys involve:
- meeting a Swiss woman for extended layover -- yes, that'll do -- on a Kandy Colombo run
- waking up early to appreciate the museum that is the Moscow Metro (it's still a train)
- a small section of El Chepe, right near the Posada Barrancas station? Basically, there's a part of the line that stops in front of one spectacular canyon view
- crossing the Great Seto Bridge in Japan

There have been a number of other beautiful train rides with a subpar experience, so the above stood out for both the sightseeing and the train quality

In Colorado, I've only been on the Pikes Peak Cog Train, though I did get a video of the Durango & Silverton departing the morning we were there two years ago. Hopefully I'll get a chance to do those at some point.

I've ridden the full length of El Chepe and spent a night at Divisadero. That was undoubtedly the most beautiful place I'd never heard of until going there (it was one of my dad's bucket list train rides).

Yes, Divisadero, that was it! Not Posada Barrancas.

What's Los Mochis like? (I took El Chepe from Chihuahua to Posada Barrancas.)

Blast from the past thread, for sure. I thought I might add a "most memorable" train ride even if it wasn't especially enjoyable... Hope a longish story is okay.

Early 1990s, my wife and I plan to take a sleeper from Amsterdam to Menton, on the French/Italian border on the Mediterranean. We need to change trains in Brussels, which goes off without any problems.

Upon settling into our sleeper car in Brussels, the conductor appears shortly after departure and tells us that if we want dinner in the dining car we'd best get a move on, as the dining car will close soon. Leave your stuff, he says, I'll lock the compartment door.

At dinner we share a table with a Canadian man whose been all over, working for some NGO, and we spend a fine time chatting. He's heading to Paris for a meeting. Dinner then coffee and more chatting. I absentmindedly note that the train has stopped briefly out in the middle of nowhere in western Belgium or eastern France. There's some muddled French and Flemish words that come from the speaker, but I can't understand it and we keep on talking.

Finally we make our farewells and head back to our sleeper. We get to the connecting door to our sleeper car, look through the little window, and see nothing but... tracks, receding into the night. Oh dear. Evidently when the train stopped during dinner it was to detach the sleeper cars, which are now headed south on another train, while we're in the part of the original train that's now rocketing across the French countryside toward Paris.

We go back to the dining car, where the only person present is the manager or chief waiter, whatever, who's sorting out various currencies (this is pre-Euro.) We ask him to call a conductor, but he motions for us to head up the train to the passenger cars between the diner and the engines. We do so, but encounter no conductor, but do come upon our Canadian friend, who volunteers to help (his French is infinitely better than ours.) Eventually we find an assistant of some sort who calls the conductor back from the engines where he was schmoozing with the drivers. We explain our problem to him and he shrugs and says you'll have to sort it out in Paris. We'll be there in an hour.

Mind you, our coats, passports, bags, cameras, everything - are all locked up in the sleeping compartment now making its way to the Cote d'Azur. I ask the conductor what happens if the train gets to its destination, the Italian border town ot Ventimiglia, and we're not aboard. Well, he says, your stuff will be stacked on the platform. Oh, cool. See the station manager in Paris. Bon chance.

We get to Paris, to the Gare du Nord I think, and everything seems shut (it's around midnight.) With our Canadian friend we seek out the station management, and are shown to a chain-smoking woman, black on black with a pixy haircut. Our friend/interpreter explains the problem, she looks at us and says, "Oo la la." In my many days and nights in France I have not heard that before.

A couple more Gauloises are consumed, then she picks up a phone and barks rapidly in it. She turns to us and asks if we have any French money (pre-Euro, remember.) No, but my wife has an ATM card in her purse. Okay, get around 500F from the machine when we return to the main floor. Main floor?

Yes. She dismisses our savior/interpreter, who needs to get to bed for his morning meeting. We thank him profusely and he goes. She smokes another cigarette or three, then writes something on a piece of paper which she hands to us. A small North African man appears (Tunisian?) and she has us give the paper to him. On it is an address in someplace called Valenton. Go with this man in his taxi. You'll need around 500F (at the time around $125.) Go, go. Bon Chance. Another Gauloise.

We stop at the ATM then into the man's cab. It's around 1 AM. We hurtle through the (rather empty) streets of Paris, to the Peripherique, around the city and roar down the autoroute to the south. After 30 or 40 minutes he exits the freeway, goes down a couple of smaller roads, then turns onto a dirt road. We go bumping through the night. My wife asks if she should swallow her wedding ring.

We come to a brick house with a light on. The driver (no English) tells us to stay here while he goes to the house's door. Some guy in a wife-beater appears and we think, "Okay, this is is the end." But no, he returns to the car, and we continue down the road. Shortly we come to another building, this one with two stories and more brightly lit. He goes to this door, someone answers, and our driver motions for us to come. We pay him the 300F cab fare and add 100F for not killing us. Then we accompany the new guy upstairs into...the war room.

On all four walls are giant displays of the French railway system for the Paris region. There are colored lines, blinking lights, digital readouts.. On the room's floor are 8 or 10 consoles each one with a railway employee focused on his controls and on the big board. We are told to go sit over there and wait, our teeth chattering. Suddenly there's a loud beeping from one of the wall screens. Everyone looks up and over to one of the console people. Buttons are pushed and the beeping stops. Lives have been saved, we surmise.

After about half an hour (now 2-ish AM) one of the attendants gets up and motions for us to come with him. We go down the stairs where he grabs an old-fashioned railway lantern, then we're walking across lots and lots of tracks and switches, him waving the lantern as if some train traveling at 100 or 150 km/hr is going to be able to stop in time. Whatever. Finally we get to a low cement platform, stand on it for a couple of minutes, and a train approaches slowly then stops. Our sleeping car conductor looks down at us and says, "Oh there you are."

We pull up the shade a few hours later to a sun-drenched Mediterranean sliding by. A night to remember, that's for sure.

That makes any of our travel mishaps pale in comparison! I had to immediately read that to Mrs. Fredd, interrupted by laughter with a couple of gasps of horror thrown in. :D

We've spent a total of nearly two months in Menton over the years. It's a worthwhile destination but you definitely did it the hard way. Thanks for sharing. :tu:

This was back in 2009 (before the capture of El Chapo), and we didn't see much since we arrived in the evening and left at 5:30 the next morning, though our hotel downtown was nice enough. I do remember the first stop in daylight being a shantytown (El Fuerte). Kids and livestock were casually hanging out by the railroad as we passed by. It was like that the whole way from the coast to the start of the mountains.

Looking at Google Maps, there's a sort of theme park at Divisadero now. None of that was there when we visited - there weren't even guardrails along the cliff. It looked more unspoiled that way, IMHO.

My most enjoyable train ride was the Trans-Siberian Express trip from Nakhodka to Moscow (via a layover in Khabarovsk, and overnight stops in Irkutsk and Moscow, and then on to Vienna) back in October of 1976. IIRC, the entire trip took about 13 days.

The train from Nakhodka to Khabarovsk had a gorgeous interior, I thought I had boarded the Orient-Express and could not believe I would travel across the Soviet Union is such luxury. The luxury experience was short-lived as we changed trains in Khabarovsk and boarded the large, heavy green Siberian-Express train that was the same design as the train of today. Foreign passengers were initially segregated to cabins (4 to a cabin) away from Soviet citizens who shared cabins together in a separate carriage. I shared a sleeper cabin with two other young passengers from England and France.

In the dining car, Soviet citizens could not sit at the same table with foreigners, and if they did, the waitresses would shoo them away. However, Red Army soldiers could sit with foreigners. My two cabinmates and I had lunch in the dining car one day and two Red Army soldiers sat down at our table to talk with us. They noticed that my French cabinmate had a cheap $0.10-cent Bic disposable cigarette lighter, which they asked to see. They were captivated by it and offered to trade one of the two bottles of Bulgarian champagne they possessed. The Frenchman said no, he demanded both bottles. The Red Army solidier thought deeply for a moment, and finally, in an act of great sacrifice, handed over the second bottle. He happily accepted the lighter in return and began playing with his new toy.

Later in the journey, as more people got off the train, Soviet citizens and foreigners were allowed to share the same cabin, which was odd, given that we could not share the same table in the dining car. In this mixed cabin, we enjoyed sharing vodka with a very friendly Russian who wanted to know about our lives and where we were from. At each short train stop, babushka were selling vegetables and other food items on the side of the tracks and Russians would get off with pillow cases in hand, and bring them back to the train full of bottles of beer.

I had a one-night layover in the Siberian town of Irkutsk. On the first day, I walked around and visited various shops and enountered a shopkeeper who was terrified at having to deal with a foreigner. She became angry and forcefully hurled a heavy plastic case at the wall, and shouted, demanding that I leave. On the second day, I was taken to a church to see Russians at worship, which felt like a propoganda tour meant to show that the Soviet Union permitted freedom of religion. The worshipers all came across as paid actors intent on making an impression upon us. Several days later, a guide was supposed to meet me at the station in Moscow but failed to show. Fortunately, I knew the name of the hotel I would be staying at (the Minsk Hotel, a short walk from Red Square) and was able to summon a taxi to take me there. My time in Moscow included a guided city tour in English, which I barely remember. The next day, I boarded the train to Vienna via Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Although there is much more to share from this exciting and eventful ride, not to mention its scary aftermath, it would take too long. The entire train ride in the USSR went mostly without hitch, and it was only when I arrived in Vienna and exchanged the Russian Roubles I had bought at the beginning of the trip into the local currency that my problems began. To my horror, I now only had enough money to catch a train to the outskirts of town from where I would have to hitchhike to Marseille, France (from where I was to sail on a tall ship to New York City) amid the snow and cold weather with no more money nor credit card. I went without food for five days and slept at night behind bushes and under overturned row boats in the Old Port of Marseille (the movie French Connection II had been filmed on location here just one year earlier and faithfully depicts the unsavory nighttime port area) until I was finally wired emergency funds from home. But that’s a subject for a different thread.

That was Grrreat! Joe! Anytime you want to put a book together of your travels, I'd love to be among the first to buy it. :tu:

I don't know that this qualifies as my favorite train ride - I've had quite a few - but it certainly was an unplanned adventure in the middle of the ride that made the journey memorable

Back in 1992, while riding Amtrak's Desert Wind between Los Angeles and Denver, I decided to take advantage of the longer station stop in Las Vegas to head into the station and buy a six pack of beer. Although we were just a few minutes behind schedule, Las Vegas was a service stop where garbage was emptied, ice and food restocked, etc. The schedule indicated a fifteen minute stop to accomplish these things.

At that time, the Las Vegas train station was located in the Union Plaza Hotel, and just off the hotel lobby was a small liquor store. The idea here was to save money. With another twenty-six hours of train travel ahead of me, I’d require at least four to six beers, Why pay $4.50 per beer plus tip when I could just buy a six pack for so much less? The potential savings were too good to ignore and so I bought a six pack of Sam Adams for about $8.00.

With a few minutes still to spare, I decided it’d be a good idea to pick up some ice because I can’t abide warm beer. An ice machine was located up on the second floor of the hotel and once I’d filled up my small plastic shopping bag, I headed back down to the train. By my reckoning, I arrived back at the station with about three minutes to spare.

Imagine then my surprise and dismay upon walking out onto the platform to see the end of the train heading down the tracks about one hundred yards away. The big steel mesh gate leading to the tracks was closed and locked, so any fantasies I had of dramatically chasing down the train with my bag of beer were quickly squelched. It was later explained to me that because the train was running behind schedule, the normal fifteen-minute service stop was accelerated a bit. Fair enough. I’d gambled and lost. Both my backpack and my daypack were onboard the train as well, but on a positive note I did have that bag of ice cold Sam Adams with me.

Beer or no beer, I’ve never been one to panic in these kinds of situations. Things are as they are and the only way out is to move forward. Calmly. There had to be a way to catch up with that train somewhere between Vegas and Denver. I had twenty-six hours.

From Las Vegas, the Desert Wind headed northeast up to Salt Lake City, arriving at about 5:00am. I quickly discovered that I wouldn’t be able to use Greyhound to catch it anywhere in between because the train did not parallel the highway but rather took the rural route – out in the middle of the desert.

Next I explored into flying to Denver on one of those air-only specials offered by the package tour companies for Vegas bound gamblers. That's when I stumbled across Morris Air’s ad in the Yellow Pages. I’d totally forgotten about them! Ten minutes later, I was booked on Morris Air’s 10:00pm nonstop to Salt Lake. Total cost: $49.00. A shuttle van to Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport only cost me about $5.00. However, because my flight didn’t arrive in Salt Lake City until a little after midnight, it was too late for any of the scheduled bus or van services offered downtown. As a result, I had to shell out about $20.00 for a taxi. Then, because the train didn’t arrive until 5:00am and the station was closed until about 4:30, I spent about three hours and another $7.00 hanging out in a nearby Denny’s reataurant until the station opened.

When I re-boarded the train at SLC, there were my pack and daypack at my seat - just like I'd left them. When I told the car attendant what happened, he said nobody would have had any idea of my unplanned side trip. He assumed I was probably up hanging out in the lounge car.

Now let’s do the math. Had I bought six premium beers on the train and tipped accordingly, I would have paid about $35.00. Instead, in an effort to save money, I paid the following amounts for my six pack:

Six Pack of Sam Adams: $8.00
​​​Shuttle to the Airport: $5.00
Flight from LAS to SLC: $49.00
​​Taxi to downtown SLC: $20.00
Hanging out in Denny’s: $7.00
The Overall Experience: Priceless

At $89.00, that six-pack of Sam Adams remains by far the most expensive beer purchase I have ever made.