If you want to see the most gorgeous vistas and also go between either Seattle or Portland and Chicago, I highly recommend starting on the coast and going east. On the way out of Seattle last September, Day 1 of the trip was all mountains, first the Cascades and then the Rockies, and it was amazing.
Unfortunately, it was also the veeeery beginning of my train life situation, and I didn’t realize yet that you have to take videos and not photos because the train, as it turns out, moves. So I didn’t get any videos and all the pics I tried to take are blurry.
And this time around, taking the Empire Builder from Chicago to Portland, the Rockies happened at night, and because we split off from the rest of the train in Spokane, we went sort of diagonally through Washington and didn’t really hit the Cascades in the same way.
But we did go along the Columbia River, which is always spectacular, if in a little bit of a quieter fashion.
My take-away from this is that if you’re in the PNW, heading east, and you have the time, you’re better off taking the Coast Starlight down to LA and then the California Zephyr to Chicago.
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