It is difficult for me to imagine reading any well-written travel book – let alone a trip on a train – that would not excite and please me. George Scheer writes well and his trip by trains was across the USA, through many States and nearly all of the Amtrak route-system and undertaken over six weeks. But it often depressed me.

I saw little reason for a professional travel writer to undertake so much of his well-researched and meticulously planned trip under such onerous conditions and often, self-inflicted privation. Traveling in a battered and un-comfortable coach seat on long multi-day and overnight legs, dossing-down in hard wooden bunks in unheated hostels in freezing conditions, begging a sleeping place on sofas in a friend’s room or even that of a casual acquaintance met on the train – the narrative in parts read to me as depressing as a gulag visit. Yet this was not some sort of Buddhist-like, self-imposed denial in search of enlightenment, for the next leg of the journey would be just as likely undertaken in a gloriously comfortable Superliner-sleeper, having dined in the train’s dining-room on locally caught and freshly prepared salmon, and ending the leg in a famous hotel with an astounding view.

From renting wrecks for $15 a day - in unsafe condition- to being sexually assaulted in the boonies, our intrepid author (a NPR Jazz Program host) travels through both America and his trip in a stagger and a fumble, unsure in his own account, if he will even get his job back at the end of his adventures.

Interspersed with the chapters of fascinating history of the regions he passes through, the characters of the early railroads or the wildlife he sees in the wilderness of the North are – for this reader at least – too many accounts of visits (and free stays) with old friends along the way… or perhaps the ways as this is railroading! (Pun intended).

From accounts of several days visiting with friends and details of side-trips (many as interesting as the main trip) we feel the narrative accelerate, the descriptions foreshortened, as though the author suddenly thought he had outstayed his welcome with his readers and needed to ‘wrap up’ his trip quickly. Almost the entire third of the trip, nearly two of his six weeks and undertaken on eleven different trains and over several of the older, famous routes is truncated into just 30 or so pages!

In his closing postscript Scheer remarks that much of Amtrak is in revival as other passengers grow, like so many of us, to detest the annoyances and idifference of commercial flying. He reasons that there are few finer places …”a sailing yacht in smooth seas, an ocean liner … that can match the cozy sleeping berths”(yet he travelled coach so often!)”the gentle rocking, the window on the country … and, as always, buoying the subconscious even in sleep, the sense of effortless motion.” This surely encapsulates why I still use Amtrak!

Overall, this book is well-worth reading, for the research, for the descriptions of America and Americans, for having an obviously agreeable, musical and interesting companion along for such a long trip – one is never bored.