A very different scale, but this reminded of the Green Tortoise which was an American, mostly West Coast affair that once ranged from Alaska to Belize.
> Green Tortoise Adventure Travel is an American long-distance tour bus company
> is
I usually find Wikipedia to be quite accurate when it comes to telling whether something is still operational/active or not, especially when it comes to businesses (among other things).
I actually can't find any evidence that there ever existed a direct Anchorage-Belize trip. The parent comment implies that the company merely offered routes that extended to these destinations, but not necessarily as a single trip.
That is indeed what I was trying to imply. Although, as someone who grew up on the West Coast, I have to say that similarity in distance is still a bit surprising to me.
Across Eurasia. There might be some cultural/imagination thing going on. I have driven from British Columbia to Tijuana. I cannot even imagine how that would be across Eurasia.
Most of Anchorage to Belize would be within two or three countries: USA, Canada and Mexico, and two main official languages English and Spanish. (Obviously numerous indigenous minority languages.) London to Calcutta would have been much more diverse, but even within the Indian leg you would encountered more languages...
I did too - did the SF back to NYC leg that goes the north route as well. Amazing experience. I was only 19 at the time. My favorite memory is that on the westbound leg we met up with the eastbound one in (I think) Yellowstone and while parking the buses they managed to slowly crash in to each other (just a dent, nothing serious). I liked the fact they both started from separate coasts and ending up colliding.
Can I ask what year that was in? Several people in here seem to be intimately familiar with this company, but it's my first time hearing about it, despite me being quite interested in travel and all sorts of weird transit methods. It made me wonder if everyone here used them when they were at their peak many decades ago, or if this varied.
1989. I saw a paper flyer in the New York Public Library and turned up a few days later at the bus station on impulse. It was basically a moving commune, where you slept on flat boards, cooked together and moved glacially slowly towards the destination. The NY -> SF went south via FL, TX etc. It was mainly young people not actually from the US, Europe, Australia etc.
Sorry I was unclear, I mean 50s or 70s air travel compared to present day air travel. (Which on reconsideration might not be particularly relevant haha)
The template references a site which uses the Retail Price Index[1] (even though it says it uses the Consumer Price Index?), Bank of England uses the Consumer Price Index. Over such a long period a difference of 30% doesn't seem that much.
My grandmother took 2 or 3 of her kids, on her own, on the train from London to southern Italy a couple of times a year with the same kind of stoicism as people take the bus into town these days. They were built different
My mother took us(four kids) on the train from CA to FL (and back) a couple times.
It is a fond memory now, but looking back on it, A 3-day (most of it in Texas) 2000 mile journey with four children in coach.... The woman was a saint.
These are photos of the Indiaman service, operated by Garrow-Fisher starting in 1957. The Wikipedia article conflates details of this service with another one, the Albert, operated by Albert Travel, which started in 1968. I noticed the discrepancy because the photos are of a single-decker bus, not a double-decker.
50 days one way? Some research shows it was £85 vs. £200-£400 for a one-way plane ticket. What is the use case for this?
I guess:
- very motivated to go
- plan to stay for a very long time
- absolutely CANNOT afford a plane ticket
- or, afraid of flying
Reminds me of a lot of Amtrack routes in the US. I looked at trips from NYC to Chicago. I thought it would be fun and I needed to get to Chicago. But it was more expensive than flying and like 25 hours. There is just absolutely no reason to travel that way.
Exactly. For many, the idea of being able to see England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in one 50 day trip with many similar minded travelers who aren't in a rush is really quite appealing.
Also, with bus travel you could, if you felt like it, leave the trip to enjoy many more local attractions and resume your travels later in a way not afforded by airplane or rail travel.
Cheers, I thought I was the only person like this :) (also didn’t tie it to my anxiety, but it’s extremely obvious in retrospect. This is too short and elides the own kind of comfort part, but I guess it means I can’t spin out, ruminating on or creating other problems, when I have stuff right here to complain about!)
I have friends that take the long haul Amtrak route. One does it for environmental reasons. He also eats discarded food so as not to waste. Great guy. Just a bit of a nut.
Another travels by train with his wife because they are retired and both have knee problems that make sitting in a plane untenable.
But yeah, traveling by train in the US outside the Northeast corridor doesn't make except for unusual circumstances.
I just took the Amtrak from Southern California to Seattle.
Pros:
- space! wide seats and leg room are awesome (I'm 6'5" so this is everything)
- Freedom to move around and explore. Lounge car, dining car, snack bar
- Spectacular views
- Train stations are much more pleasant than airports
- Opportunity to meet people from all over the place. On a plane everyone is going from A->B, people on the train could be starting/ending anywhere along the route, including small towns you've never heard of.
Cons:
- 32 hours of travel
- Pay an extra ~$500 to get a bed, or sleep in your seat
Overall I have no regrets but I'll probably not do this again until I'm retired or extremely bored.
I’ve traveled in the Coast Starlight I think maybe five times. It was enjoyable.
Some more pros:
- The food served in the dining car is far better than airplane food. If you get a bed, the food is included. Even if you get a seat, you have the option of paying for good food.
- You can bring a bicycle along for the ride. You do not need to disassemble it or put it in a box. Just walk the bike to the luggage car and someone will take it; when you get off the train walk to the luggage car and someone will hand it to you.
I assume they have eliminated the "smoking" car by now? Last time I took Amtrak long distance, walking through the smoking car to get to the dining car basically ruined the experience. Literally blue haze air and you smelled the smoke in your clothes for several hours afterwards. This was the early 1990s.
For long distance trains, sure. But there’s plenty of shorter Amtrak routes outside of the NE Corridor where it could make as much or more sense than flying, to be fair
Los Angeles - San Diego: 2.5hrs downtown to downtown (less if you’re going to one of the many suburbs or beach towns in between), which is on par with driving and sometimes even faster than traffic. Also, a ticket is only $30-50, so about a tank of gas. This is likely why it’s Amtrak’s busiest and most profitable route outside the NEC. If the second phase of the California High Speed Rail ever gets built (lol), this trip is to take somewhere between 30-45 minutes.
I did NY to Miami in 2024, I was working in NY one week and Miami the next, made sense to me to have Sat morning down town in New York, then sit in a private hotel room with great food for 24 hours before arriving in New York Sunday evening in time for work the following day.
Could have flown Saturday evening and had an extra day in a hotel room in Miami instead, but I spend enough time in chain hotels
I see a lot of mentions of great food. On the train from DC to NYC, the dining car is like a little league concession stand. Is it better on longer routes?
Eh, the Portland - Seattle - Vancouver BC Amtrak sector is also pretty usable. In practice I've found it's not substantially faster or slower than driving - at least not enough to make a big difference for me.
On a train I can read a book, eat some food, drink, stare at the scenery, check my phone, no problem because I'm not driving. On most trains a professional is driving, on a few a machine is driving, but either way it's not my problem.
Pretty, yes, but geopolitical issues slow the service. We were at least two hours late thanks to various issues with crossing the border and fitting in with the cargo trains.
You definitely don’t take long distance Amtrak today for cost or convenience. You go for the experience and views. I had a blast sharing a room with a friend on the Seattle to Emeryville route. I’m looking at Chicago to Emeryville next (or starting in Denver along the same route).
The Wikipedia article made it sound like more of a "land cruise". The bus stopped at some tourist and shopping destinations along the way and the description make it sound more like a cabin cruiser than your typical bus. I can see the appeal for people who want to travel and don't have a lot of money. Definitely easier than hitchhiking across the continent.
For the most part, the purpose of the long haul Amtrak services isn't to make it economical go from one end of the line / one major city to the other (e.g. NYC to Chicago); It's to provide a transportation service for all the intermediate, rural stations who might not be near an airport or have any other public transportation options.
Can't believe you tried so hard to list reasons for taking the route, and missed an obvious one that other commenters suggested. Travel is not always just A->B as fast as possible.
This is HN, a place where people see dot A and people see dot B but they fail to connect the dots. Reminds me of HN's underwhelming reaction to Dropbox.
One would think that travelling across so many countries and continents would be quite clearly the point of the bus service.
I've given up on expecting any subtlety or nuance from the painfully literal nerds on here. "Must optimize my route for efficiency because I am an engineer! No fun allowed!" There's a certain depressing lack of joie de vivre.
It's not nerdism. It's the dominant ideology of our times - neoliberalism - which demands that everything be valued only in terms of dollars. A trip that takes 50 days is not dollar efficient because you could fly in one day and spend the remaining 49 days earning dollars, i.e. the value of time is only about dollars, and cannot be other measures, especially subjective ones like human enjoyment and wonder.
Road is the destination, thus you arrive a changed man, ready for the Indian sub-universe to experience and mold you further.
And specifically on this, clashing with a very exotic cultures and mindsets along the way, forming unexpected intense interactions and experiences that you will remember for the rest of your life.
I've done a similar thing to this since this specifically wasn't possible anymore without crossing battlefields and risking kidnapping and death - backpacking around India for 6 months together. No real destination or plan, just 1 thick Lonely planet book covering whole country in the backpack (this was 2008 and 2010), return ticket and fixed budget in cash.
Came back a bit different, dare I say in some ways enlightened person. Experience cannot be explained to others by mere words, but other folks who experienced similar understand without a word.
I took the Amtrak from Chicago to SF and it was the highlight of that year for me and one of the best memories of my life. Eating breakfast as we snaked by the Colorado river with fresh snow on the rocks - that's a travel experience.
The equivalent of this would be interrailing through europe... travel via train to one country, stay for a few days, travel to next, stay a few days, and continue, all with a single ticket: https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass
The same reason why people take month long road trips anywhere, it's to see everything on the way. I'd guess their clients were 20 year olds wanting to go on an adventure. Honestly, if this had been a thing when I was 21 and out of college and a friend asked me to go I probably would have.
I once took Amtrack from Chicago-Seattle-San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Antonio-Chicago. With side-trips to Madison WI, Vancouver and to Yosemite (via Green Tortoise company).
It was a 6 week vacation, the purpose was to travel and see the US. I enjoyed it very much!
I’m surprised you’ve missed the most important reason of all. The very journey and the time spent on it is the point I would imagine for a large majority of the folks. It’s an adventure. What sort of person misses this?
Depends on the type of tourism you prefer, I absolutely love roadtrips because "journey is more important than the destination", it's an adventure and the best memories from trips I have are from the journey itself, the destination is just a cherry on top.
Judging by the facilities mentioned in the Wikipedia article, it was very much planned as a (relatively) modern-day Orient Express. Not everyone back then had the luxury to not work for 50 days (one-way), so it was very much a rich people service.
iirc it was more doing it for the experience than as a convenient mode of travel (and actually if you run the maths/do some estimation, the journey time would be much shorter if they were driving 24/7 - like 5-10 days maybe)
Really, more expensive than flying? The family and I are looking at taking a X-country trip on AMTRAK and it looks to be significantly cheaper than flying. Plus, we will get to see awesome sights.
You lucked out. I periodically have entertained the idea of a long train trip with the family, and it has invariably been a good bit more expensive than just flying. The only time it is even close is on short (say a few hundred miles) trips.
A sidenote about this cross-continental trip. Dervla Murphy's book Full Tilt is really good. It talks about her crazy bicycle journey in the middle of winter from Ireland to India. Rest of her books are great as well, but this one is my favorite.
Last year I took buses from Lima to Rio de Janeiro (not one bus, but a long trip, all by bus). In total, 3,800 miles. I've been meaning to maybe write blog post with the details (exact costs and times, etc).
For me, trains are much preferable to buses and buses much, much preferable to flying. I guess I just like to look about the window and see everything between points A and B.
there is a DW channel documentary about Transoceânica (Rio to Lima ) the longest bus route, which I just watched last week. It is 5 episodes but well made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_ODFlqURxY
You can do Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Beijing by train via the trans-Siberian, or via Ulan-Bataar with the trans-Mongolian.
Quite an iconic route that became much simpler administratively to travel in 2000s but perhaps again trickier now because of the situation with Russia.
I did a similar route for similar money in 1991 with a Dragoman overland truck from Kathmandu to London. They used to do it regularly like a couple of times a year but don't seem to do that route anymore. The political instability was an issue - it was originally supposed to go through Yugoslavia but that was in the messy process of ceasing to exist at the time so they had to use a ferry to Italy. Also half the passengers had to fly over Iran due to the Iranians being difficult with visas. Still some problems there.
If this fascinates you. Im sure you will also be fascinated by maharaja express [1] which is orient express equivalent in India. Fairly expensive and targeted towards foreign tourists but i do find it fascinating.
Not this but Golden Chariot (and Palace on Wheels - not sure this one still runs) was a dream since I was a student. When I could afford it, I was no longer interested. A few people I know took those rides and had nothing extraordinary to say of it. The prices are in USD so I guess it’s literally the “Raj Trip” trap for the foreigners and that’s what I heard from those few Indians I know who travelled in these. For the ultra rich Indian it holds no pull, and the rich Indians - they’d rather go elsewhere in that cost than cross the same tracks and platforms knowing fully well what lies below 2 feet and around it, in fact they can damn picture it in HD
There are quite a few African "Cape-to-Cairo" variations of travel by land tours they have been a thing for a long time and still going by the look of things ... if you have 23-weeks!
A friend of mine took this route in the 70's. It was not only relatively cheap but once you arrived in India you could live off the very generous UK Unemployment Benefit for a very long time as the exchange rate was incredible and the price of basics extremely cheap. He did it for several years before moving on to Japan. So he didn't need to take any time 'off' :)
There were almost no checks - he was, in theory, 'available for work'. The system is very different now - in part because it used to be too easy to take advantage of . . .
Go spend some time on r/onebag. Every day there is a post by someone who is taking 3 months or 6 months to travel a few different countries. Usually younger people, but includes people who are taking a long break from work.
Or to put it another way. There were only a handful of such buses running simultaneously. So there were only a few hundred passengers per year. Is it hard to imagine that in the 3ish Billion people that live on that route today, you couldn't find 500 people who can take a few months off to do an epic journey through 20 countries?
> There were only a handful of such buses running simultaneously
Indeed, the Wikipedia article is written in a way that strongly implies that there was in fact just a single bus, unless there were other companies running the same service.
When I was planning my ~3 months euro trip from India, I just couldn’t connect/identify with those subs at all. I guess it’s for the other way round mostly :)
For a trip of 30000km, would a bus not need any service? My car today wants a service every 10k or year.
I guess if it's only oil change the bus drivers back then where also service men and mechanics.
Well, these days you can catch a Flixbus from London to Sofia for a mere 150 Europounds, and 48 hours of your time. And from there, Calcutta can't be that far, right?
(But, seriously, you can probably do it in another 48 hours...)
"Cyclops has a passenger capacity of 110 and is equipped with a bowling alley, Asian-style cocktail lounge with a piano bar, swimming pool, Bicentennial dining room, private marble-and-gold bathroom with sunken tub, and chef's kitchen."
This was the first thing I thought of when I read the article. I remember making my own nuclear-powered big bus out of legos after watching that movie.
You'd be surprised at how cheap, relatively safe and reliable bus services are in those regions.
Source: me and my wife traveled extensively by public transport in, well, at least Pakistan. The other countries are indeed sort-of hairy, but mostly for job-clearance-related reasons.
Generally the border between Paxistan and India cannot be crossed though. I believe Attari/Wagah is the only place, and it was closed too last I heard.
To my knowledge, no. In the recent past, either you could cross via the the Wagah-Attari border crossing or get on the Thar Express train [1], which connects Karachi with Jodhpur via the Zero Point crossing. But the Thar Express has been closed since 2019.
They should avoid Pakistan if they can, not Afghanistan. It’s in relative peace while the border region of Iran/Pakistan see regular fighting between Pakistani forces and Baluch separatists[1].
Well, I can travel around most of Europe without a passport right now? ID card will do just fine, even though, really, nobody ever asks me for that either.
Meanwhile, my life expectancy is, like at least twice that 'prior to WW1' and my disposable income at least 20 times my take-home pay in 1917.
Apart from medicine, travel speeds, cost of travel, life expectancy, hot showers, central heating, cars, dentistry, sanitation, civil rights, and fewer childbirth deaths... you're absolutely right
A very different scale, but this reminded of the Green Tortoise which was an American, mostly West Coast affair that once ranged from Alaska to Belize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Tortoise
edit: oh wow. It still runs!
http://www.greentortoise.com/
Huh. I've seen that hostel in downtown Seattle for years now but never knew the story behind the brand.
> Green Tortoise Adventure Travel is an American long-distance tour bus company
> is
I usually find Wikipedia to be quite accurate when it comes to telling whether something is still operational/active or not, especially when it comes to businesses (among other things).
> A very different scale
Anchorage to Belize: 5777 miles
London to Kolkata: 5695 miles
I actually can't find any evidence that there ever existed a direct Anchorage-Belize trip. The parent comment implies that the company merely offered routes that extended to these destinations, but not necessarily as a single trip.
That is indeed what I was trying to imply. Although, as someone who grew up on the West Coast, I have to say that similarity in distance is still a bit surprising to me.
Which of the two distances would you have guessed is further?
Across Eurasia. There might be some cultural/imagination thing going on. I have driven from British Columbia to Tijuana. I cannot even imagine how that would be across Eurasia.
Right! In my mind the American feels “obviously” further mainly due to how insanely far Anchorage is from, well, everywhere.
Most of Anchorage to Belize would be within two or three countries: USA, Canada and Mexico, and two main official languages English and Spanish. (Obviously numerous indigenous minority languages.) London to Calcutta would have been much more diverse, but even within the Indian leg you would encountered more languages...
How did you compute the distances? Geodesic?
Google Maps.
One of them is the walking distance, the other the driving distance, because the other estimates hung. But they both follow roads.
Many years ago it was a great service to get to BM cheaply.
2019 was their last year.
BM?
Burning Man, accoridng to the article they switched to "adventure camping trips" in 2001
I took that once from SF to NYC when in my twenties. Definitely recommend.
I did too - did the SF back to NYC leg that goes the north route as well. Amazing experience. I was only 19 at the time. My favorite memory is that on the westbound leg we met up with the eastbound one in (I think) Yellowstone and while parking the buses they managed to slowly crash in to each other (just a dent, nothing serious). I liked the fact they both started from separate coasts and ending up colliding.
Can I ask what year that was in? Several people in here seem to be intimately familiar with this company, but it's my first time hearing about it, despite me being quite interested in travel and all sorts of weird transit methods. It made me wonder if everyone here used them when they were at their peak many decades ago, or if this varied.
1989. I saw a paper flyer in the New York Public Library and turned up a few days later at the bus station on impulse. It was basically a moving commune, where you slept on flat boards, cooked together and moved glacially slowly towards the destination. The NY -> SF went south via FL, TX etc. It was mainly young people not actually from the US, Europe, Australia etc.
I did similar as brit tourist. It was about a week from Boston to SF.
1997 for me.
> In 1957, a one-way ticket cost £85 (equivalent to £2,589 in 2023), rising to £145 by 1973 (equivalent to £2,215 in 2023).
Oof that really puts inflation into perspective doesn’t it?
£2,589 for an all-inclusive 50-day bus-cruise, even today, doesn't seem that overly expensive. (~£50/day).
So it's not just inflation, it's "that used to be cheaper".
I guess on the flipside, travelling by plane in 1957 (or even 1974), would have been much more than £2,589.
About twice as much. https://www.indianairmails.com/ai-bombay-to-london.html 1948 price was £141 one-way. This likely did not change much in the early years.
> travelling by plane in 1957 (or even 1974), would have been much more [expensive]
Not to mention a lot more dangerous.
Hmm. A long trip by a 1957 bus vs. a 1957 airliner? It’s not immediately obvious what would be safer to be honest.
Sorry I was unclear, I mean 50s or 70s air travel compared to present day air travel. (Which on reconsideration might not be particularly relevant haha)
Lot of hijackings still to come in 1950...
Do you really think there are enough hijackings to meaningfully affect safety statistics?
Not very much but there were some years where hijackings were 5% to 10% of air travel deaths.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-fatalities-from-av...
The problem is that the suspension would not be great back then.
That seemed high, so I plugged it into the bank of England's inflation calculator[1] and got:
> What cost £85.00 in 1957 would cost £1,796.12 in November 2025.
Not orders of magnitude off, but makes a little more sense this way. I wonder if there's a bug in wikipedia's inflation calculator.
[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...
The template references a site which uses the Retail Price Index[1] (even though it says it uses the Consumer Price Index?), Bank of England uses the Consumer Price Index. Over such a long period a difference of 30% doesn't seem that much.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Inflation/UK/dataset
There was heavy inflation in the seventies: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
Back in the 60s, my partner's mother drove all the way from London to Afghanistan in a tiny Fiat 500. This was a family of four!
The past really is a foreign country sometimes.
Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, describes a 1930s trip to present-day Afghanistan. But I believe he started the automobile portion in Tehran.
That's impressive!
My grandmother took 2 or 3 of her kids, on her own, on the train from London to southern Italy a couple of times a year with the same kind of stoicism as people take the bus into town these days. They were built different
My mother took us(four kids) on the train from CA to FL (and back) a couple times.
It is a fond memory now, but looking back on it, A 3-day (most of it in Texas) 2000 mile journey with four children in coach.... The woman was a saint.
Taking the train to southern Italy a couple of times a year sounds like both a great adventure and a great privilege.
My grandparents switched to driving as soon as they could afford it haha (my grandfather the begrudging driver). Train was certainly an adventure
Was discussed here a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649091
Someone found some photos on Shutterstock:
https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/search/london-to-calc...
These are photos of the Indiaman service, operated by Garrow-Fisher starting in 1957. The Wikipedia article conflates details of this service with another one, the Albert, operated by Albert Travel, which started in 1968. I noticed the discrepancy because the photos are of a single-decker bus, not a double-decker.
See here for much better Wikipedia article that keeps the details straight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_b...
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
London–Calcutta Bus Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649091 - June 2024 (117 comments)
50 days one way? Some research shows it was £85 vs. £200-£400 for a one-way plane ticket. What is the use case for this?
I guess:
- very motivated to go
- plan to stay for a very long time
- absolutely CANNOT afford a plane ticket
- or, afraid of flying
Reminds me of a lot of Amtrack routes in the US. I looked at trips from NYC to Chicago. I thought it would be fun and I needed to get to Chicago. But it was more expensive than flying and like 25 hours. There is just absolutely no reason to travel that way.
The point is the travel. If you have the time, then this would have been a great way to see a lot of the world. It's a bit of an adventure by itself.
I can't say it would have been very comfortable, so I guess it would be trading time and comfort for money.
Exactly. For many, the idea of being able to see England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in one 50 day trip with many similar minded travelers who aren't in a rush is really quite appealing.
Also, with bus travel you could, if you felt like it, leave the trip to enjoy many more local attractions and resume your travels later in a way not afforded by airplane or rail travel.
I can say as an anxiety sufferer and avoider of planes is that the discomfort helps me feel grounded (literally hah). It's its own kind of comfort.
Cheers, I thought I was the only person like this :) (also didn’t tie it to my anxiety, but it’s extremely obvious in retrospect. This is too short and elides the own kind of comfort part, but I guess it means I can’t spin out, ruminating on or creating other problems, when I have stuff right here to complain about!)
I have friends that take the long haul Amtrak route. One does it for environmental reasons. He also eats discarded food so as not to waste. Great guy. Just a bit of a nut.
Another travels by train with his wife because they are retired and both have knee problems that make sitting in a plane untenable.
But yeah, traveling by train in the US outside the Northeast corridor doesn't make except for unusual circumstances.
I just took the Amtrak from Southern California to Seattle.
Pros:
- space! wide seats and leg room are awesome (I'm 6'5" so this is everything)
- Freedom to move around and explore. Lounge car, dining car, snack bar
- Spectacular views
- Train stations are much more pleasant than airports
- Opportunity to meet people from all over the place. On a plane everyone is going from A->B, people on the train could be starting/ending anywhere along the route, including small towns you've never heard of.
Cons:
- 32 hours of travel
- Pay an extra ~$500 to get a bed, or sleep in your seat
Overall I have no regrets but I'll probably not do this again until I'm retired or extremely bored.
I’ve traveled in the Coast Starlight I think maybe five times. It was enjoyable.
Some more pros:
- The food served in the dining car is far better than airplane food. If you get a bed, the food is included. Even if you get a seat, you have the option of paying for good food.
- You can bring a bicycle along for the ride. You do not need to disassemble it or put it in a box. Just walk the bike to the luggage car and someone will take it; when you get off the train walk to the luggage car and someone will hand it to you.
I assume they have eliminated the "smoking" car by now? Last time I took Amtrak long distance, walking through the smoking car to get to the dining car basically ruined the experience. Literally blue haze air and you smelled the smoke in your clothes for several hours afterwards. This was the early 1990s.
As a European, I was shocked by how slow trains are in the US.
It definitely doesn't encourage people to use them instead of flying.
For long distance trains, sure. But there’s plenty of shorter Amtrak routes outside of the NE Corridor where it could make as much or more sense than flying, to be fair
Los Angeles - San Diego: 2.5hrs downtown to downtown (less if you’re going to one of the many suburbs or beach towns in between), which is on par with driving and sometimes even faster than traffic. Also, a ticket is only $30-50, so about a tank of gas. This is likely why it’s Amtrak’s busiest and most profitable route outside the NEC. If the second phase of the California High Speed Rail ever gets built (lol), this trip is to take somewhere between 30-45 minutes.
I did NY to Miami in 2024, I was working in NY one week and Miami the next, made sense to me to have Sat morning down town in New York, then sit in a private hotel room with great food for 24 hours before arriving in New York Sunday evening in time for work the following day.
Could have flown Saturday evening and had an extra day in a hotel room in Miami instead, but I spend enough time in chain hotels
I see a lot of mentions of great food. On the train from DC to NYC, the dining car is like a little league concession stand. Is it better on longer routes?
Eh, the Portland - Seattle - Vancouver BC Amtrak sector is also pretty usable. In practice I've found it's not substantially faster or slower than driving - at least not enough to make a big difference for me.
On a train I can read a book, eat some food, drink, stare at the scenery, check my phone, no problem because I'm not driving. On most trains a professional is driving, on a few a machine is driving, but either way it's not my problem.
Pretty, yes, but geopolitical issues slow the service. We were at least two hours late thanks to various issues with crossing the border and fitting in with the cargo trains.
I believe you when you explain your experiences. All I can offer is anecdotal experience of having never encountered that myself.
If it's luck then I'm thankful if nothing else.
The conductor bent our ears for a while as we waited. He said it was common.
[dead]
It's slow on the Canadian side, especially around the swing bridge. The US side is actually fairly fast, and the border crossing is quick.
Definitely my preferred way to do Vancouver-Seattle travel.
You definitely don’t take long distance Amtrak today for cost or convenience. You go for the experience and views. I had a blast sharing a room with a friend on the Seattle to Emeryville route. I’m looking at Chicago to Emeryville next (or starting in Denver along the same route).
Also be prepared for delays up to 24 hours on any long distance routes especially west of Chicago.
The Wikipedia article made it sound like more of a "land cruise". The bus stopped at some tourist and shopping destinations along the way and the description make it sound more like a cabin cruiser than your typical bus. I can see the appeal for people who want to travel and don't have a lot of money. Definitely easier than hitchhiking across the continent.
The other motivation would be getting to see - albeit briefly - all of the countries in between.
If I had 50 days to spare I might choose that over a flight too!
For the most part, the purpose of the long haul Amtrak services isn't to make it economical go from one end of the line / one major city to the other (e.g. NYC to Chicago); It's to provide a transportation service for all the intermediate, rural stations who might not be near an airport or have any other public transportation options.
Can't believe you tried so hard to list reasons for taking the route, and missed an obvious one that other commenters suggested. Travel is not always just A->B as fast as possible.
This is HN, a place where people see dot A and people see dot B but they fail to connect the dots. Reminds me of HN's underwhelming reaction to Dropbox.
One would think that travelling across so many countries and continents would be quite clearly the point of the bus service.
I've given up on expecting any subtlety or nuance from the painfully literal nerds on here. "Must optimize my route for efficiency because I am an engineer! No fun allowed!" There's a certain depressing lack of joie de vivre.
It's not nerdism. It's the dominant ideology of our times - neoliberalism - which demands that everything be valued only in terms of dollars. A trip that takes 50 days is not dollar efficient because you could fly in one day and spend the remaining 49 days earning dollars, i.e. the value of time is only about dollars, and cannot be other measures, especially subjective ones like human enjoyment and wonder.
Road is the destination, thus you arrive a changed man, ready for the Indian sub-universe to experience and mold you further.
And specifically on this, clashing with a very exotic cultures and mindsets along the way, forming unexpected intense interactions and experiences that you will remember for the rest of your life.
I've done a similar thing to this since this specifically wasn't possible anymore without crossing battlefields and risking kidnapping and death - backpacking around India for 6 months together. No real destination or plan, just 1 thick Lonely planet book covering whole country in the backpack (this was 2008 and 2010), return ticket and fixed budget in cash.
Came back a bit different, dare I say in some ways enlightened person. Experience cannot be explained to others by mere words, but other folks who experienced similar understand without a word.
It followed the hippie trail, that was the motivation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail
An interactive article from CNN : https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/travel/hippie-trail-hist...
"There is just absolutely no reason to travel that way."
Some people liked to see all these places and meet people. The journey itself would be an adventure. The other alternative would be by sea.
I used to know someone who travelled to India overland long before the Beatles made it fashionable for westerners to visit.
Amtrak is not for someone that simply wants to get from A to B. I suspect a 50-day bus trip would be the same.
When I take Amtrak, it’s because I want to look out of a window for a few dozen hours and see something new (to me) every time I look out the window.
It’s probably the bus trip that they want, and not simply “go to India.”
I took the Amtrak from Chicago to SF and it was the highlight of that year for me and one of the best memories of my life. Eating breakfast as we snaked by the Colorado river with fresh snow on the rocks - that's a travel experience.
You don't need to do it in one trip.
The equivalent of this would be interrailing through europe... travel via train to one country, stay for a few days, travel to next, stay a few days, and continue, all with a single ticket: https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass
There was only one bus, so waiting for it to pick you up again would be at least 100 days wait, so not really an option.
The same reason why people take month long road trips anywhere, it's to see everything on the way. I'd guess their clients were 20 year olds wanting to go on an adventure. Honestly, if this had been a thing when I was 21 and out of college and a friend asked me to go I probably would have.
I once took Amtrack from Chicago-Seattle-San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Antonio-Chicago. With side-trips to Madison WI, Vancouver and to Yosemite (via Green Tortoise company).
It was a 6 week vacation, the purpose was to travel and see the US. I enjoyed it very much!
I’m surprised you’ve missed the most important reason of all. The very journey and the time spent on it is the point I would imagine for a large majority of the folks. It’s an adventure. What sort of person misses this?
By way of comparison, it took pilgrims from England traveling on ships like the Mayflower about 66 days to arrive in New England.
Says so right in the opening paragraphs:
> became famously associated with the overland Hippie Trail of the 1960s and 1970s
Depends on the type of tourism you prefer, I absolutely love roadtrips because "journey is more important than the destination", it's an adventure and the best memories from trips I have are from the journey itself, the destination is just a cherry on top.
Judging by the facilities mentioned in the Wikipedia article, it was very much planned as a (relatively) modern-day Orient Express. Not everyone back then had the luxury to not work for 50 days (one-way), so it was very much a rich people service.
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Or being a "nomad" type who considers the journey itself as an end.
Fits the hippie age quite well.
iirc it was more doing it for the experience than as a convenient mode of travel (and actually if you run the maths/do some estimation, the journey time would be much shorter if they were driving 24/7 - like 5-10 days maybe)
Really, more expensive than flying? The family and I are looking at taking a X-country trip on AMTRAK and it looks to be significantly cheaper than flying. Plus, we will get to see awesome sights.
You lucked out. I periodically have entertained the idea of a long train trip with the family, and it has invariably been a good bit more expensive than just flying. The only time it is even close is on short (say a few hundred miles) trips.
What if you want to enjoy the scenery?
drug and sex tourism
Very impressive! I got curious and found this photo and brochure from the Indian Memory Project [1]
[1] https://xcancel.com/Indianmemory/status/1277521026813882368#...
A sidenote about this cross-continental trip. Dervla Murphy's book Full Tilt is really good. It talks about her crazy bicycle journey in the middle of winter from Ireland to India. Rest of her books are great as well, but this one is my favorite.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/163921.Full_Tilt
Thanks, I love solo travel books.
Sounds amazing.
Last year I took buses from Lima to Rio de Janeiro (not one bus, but a long trip, all by bus). In total, 3,800 miles. I've been meaning to maybe write blog post with the details (exact costs and times, etc).
For me, trains are much preferable to buses and buses much, much preferable to flying. I guess I just like to look about the window and see everything between points A and B.
Please reply back here when you do publish the the blog post. I'd love to read it.
there is a DW channel documentary about Transoceânica (Rio to Lima ) the longest bus route, which I just watched last week. It is 5 episodes but well made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_ODFlqURxY
It's interesting to think how non-linear progress is; geopolitical tensions ended this overland route and it would still be incredibly risky.
Related, the Damascus <-> Baghdad bus from the 1930s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlmpfHuLo14
It's a Calum documentary. He does these in-depth studies of historical curiosities like snow trains and WW2 rescue buoys. One of my favorite channels.
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing!
Related: Berlin-Baghdad railway [1]
Some historian say this might have actually caused the 1st world war since these German activities provoked the British empire.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin%E2%80%93Baghdad_railway
You can do Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Beijing by train via the trans-Siberian, or via Ulan-Bataar with the trans-Mongolian.
Quite an iconic route that became much simpler administratively to travel in 2000s but perhaps again trickier now because of the situation with Russia.
You can't, unfortunately. No trains run between Poland and Belarus.
Oh that's a shame... I believe the whole journey was not an issue during the "warm period" of the 2000s.
Here's a picture of Albert, the double-decker bus:
https://i2-prod.dailyrecord.co.uk/article1124887.ece/ALTERNA...
Similar discussion last year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649091
Nit-pick: The year before :)
You gave me a chuckle :) Thanks!
I did a similar route for similar money in 1991 with a Dragoman overland truck from Kathmandu to London. They used to do it regularly like a couple of times a year but don't seem to do that route anymore. The political instability was an issue - it was originally supposed to go through Yugoslavia but that was in the messy process of ceasing to exist at the time so they had to use a ferry to Italy. Also half the passengers had to fly over Iran due to the Iranians being difficult with visas. Still some problems there.
I had a genuine reason for wanting to travel overland from India to Schengen this year (Pet travel), and came across this and wished it still existed.
What would a non-genuine reason look like?
You can still drive your own private car the entire way. And there are trains you can take.
The India-Pak trains have been stopped since 2019.
You can probably still drive India-China-Central Asian countries-Iran-Turkey-EU.
If this fascinates you. Im sure you will also be fascinated by maharaja express [1] which is orient express equivalent in India. Fairly expensive and targeted towards foreign tourists but i do find it fascinating.
[1] https://www.maharajasexpress.com
Not this but Golden Chariot (and Palace on Wheels - not sure this one still runs) was a dream since I was a student. When I could afford it, I was no longer interested. A few people I know took those rides and had nothing extraordinary to say of it. The prices are in USD so I guess it’s literally the “Raj Trip” trap for the foreigners and that’s what I heard from those few Indians I know who travelled in these. For the ultra rich Indian it holds no pull, and the rich Indians - they’d rather go elsewhere in that cost than cross the same tracks and platforms knowing fully well what lies below 2 feet and around it, in fact they can damn picture it in HD
Interesting. I did a quick search but doesn’t look like there are any personal stories on this.
Can see it having been a unique experience, bonding with people over such a long period of time.
Looks like photos from inside the bus are also not available sadly.
There are quite a few African "Cape-to-Cairo" variations of travel by land tours they have been a thing for a long time and still going by the look of things ... if you have 23-weeks!
https://www.oasisoverland.co.uk/trips/cape-town-to-cairo-23-...
https://compassexpeditions.com/special-tours/major-expeditio...
While money would be in the okay range, few can afford 50 days off.
A friend of mine took this route in the 70's. It was not only relatively cheap but once you arrived in India you could live off the very generous UK Unemployment Benefit for a very long time as the exchange rate was incredible and the price of basics extremely cheap. He did it for several years before moving on to Japan. So he didn't need to take any time 'off' :)
Exchange rates are still incredible and a lot of foreigners do this in India. In places like Goa, HP, UK etc.
> but once you arrived in India you could live off the very generous UK Unemployment Benefit for a very long time
Oh, so your friend is the reason the extremely generous £391/mo unemployment benefit stops if you leave the country even for one day now ! :)
He just collected unemployment while vacationing for months? Was that fraud or just how the system worked?
There were almost no checks - he was, in theory, 'available for work'. The system is very different now - in part because it used to be too easy to take advantage of . . .
Go spend some time on r/onebag. Every day there is a post by someone who is taking 3 months or 6 months to travel a few different countries. Usually younger people, but includes people who are taking a long break from work.
Or to put it another way. There were only a handful of such buses running simultaneously. So there were only a few hundred passengers per year. Is it hard to imagine that in the 3ish Billion people that live on that route today, you couldn't find 500 people who can take a few months off to do an epic journey through 20 countries?
> There were only a handful of such buses running simultaneously
Indeed, the Wikipedia article is written in a way that strongly implies that there was in fact just a single bus, unless there were other companies running the same service.
When I was planning my ~3 months euro trip from India, I just couldn’t connect/identify with those subs at all. I guess it’s for the other way round mostly :)
Well not everyone goes straight from college to coding
I can't imagine spending two months on a bus.
It has a party deck. Now?
No, it sounds horrid
For a trip of 30000km, would a bus not need any service? My car today wants a service every 10k or year. I guess if it's only oil change the bus drivers back then where also service men and mechanics.
Well, these days you can catch a Flixbus from London to Sofia for a mere 150 Europounds, and 48 hours of your time. And from there, Calcutta can't be that far, right?
(But, seriously, you can probably do it in another 48 hours...)
You just need a nuclear-powered Big Bus.
https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w1066_and_h600_bestv2/l5n4h4gmRtj...
https://imcdb.org/i065460.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bus
"Cyclops has a passenger capacity of 110 and is equipped with a bowling alley, Asian-style cocktail lounge with a piano bar, swimming pool, Bicentennial dining room, private marble-and-gold bathroom with sunken tub, and chef's kitchen."
This was the first thing I thought of when I read the article. I remember making my own nuclear-powered big bus out of legos after watching that movie.
> You just need a nuclear-powered Big Bus
Ah, so there is a chance!
From Sofia to the West of Turkey should be relatively easy. After that, travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan will get hairy.
You'd be surprised at how cheap, relatively safe and reliable bus services are in those regions.
Source: me and my wife traveled extensively by public transport in, well, at least Pakistan. The other countries are indeed sort-of hairy, but mostly for job-clearance-related reasons.
10s of thousands of religious pilgrims travel by bus between Pakistan and Iran every year. You can just avoid Afghanistan.
Generally the border between Paxistan and India cannot be crossed though. I believe Attari/Wagah is the only place, and it was closed too last I heard.
Indeed, it has been closed since the aerial clashes last year. But we can hope for peace, and with it cross border tourism.
Can locals still cross at Kasur/Ganda Singh Wala like before 1971?
To my knowledge, no. In the recent past, either you could cross via the the Wagah-Attari border crossing or get on the Thar Express train [1], which connects Karachi with Jodhpur via the Zero Point crossing. But the Thar Express has been closed since 2019.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thar_Express
They should avoid Pakistan if they can, not Afghanistan. It’s in relative peace while the border region of Iran/Pakistan see regular fighting between Pakistani forces and Baluch separatists[1].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balochistan_Liberation_Army
There were some bad roads in the Balkans as well.
My Google Maps algo will be massively confused by my 'Directions' search: Sofia, Bulgaria to Kolkata, India on a Friday afternoon in January
It gives up. Besides these days it’s Kolkata.
A picture would have been a great addition to the article.
There are busses you can take from London to Cape Town and back up to Kenya.
Dragoman is one, still running.
So that's what the people were using before commercial flights were common.
I didnt know this existed. Would be pretty cool if they restart the service.
Why can't Google Maps calculate London/Berlin to Kolkota?
People back then had a lot more spare time evidently ...
Most people never did it.
Wow. Mind-blowing!
All the cold cuts in Calcutta are smelly. Please Mum buy meat at the New Delhi.
operated by albert travel. aptronymy strikes again
Imagine a couple who broke up somewhere in Iran and still had to share a seat for another thousand miles.
Operator was Mr. Travel himself! Maybe he invented long journeys.
hooooooly, that's a long journey
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Reminder that everything was better in the past. Prior to WW1 you could travel around most of Europe without even a passport too.
Well, I can travel around most of Europe without a passport right now? ID card will do just fine, even though, really, nobody ever asks me for that either.
Meanwhile, my life expectancy is, like at least twice that 'prior to WW1' and my disposable income at least 20 times my take-home pay in 1917.
Bloody EU, innit...
Apart from medicine, travel speeds, cost of travel, life expectancy, hot showers, central heating, cars, dentistry, sanitation, civil rights, and fewer childbirth deaths... you're absolutely right
> travel speeds
Based on my experience on L.A.'s "Pacific Surfliner", I'm pretty sure American train speeds have been on the decline since 1926.
I hear planes are pretty fast
And much before that there were no passports. Maybe you have a point. Say Columbus et cetera :D
Everything but lifespan I think. So Expected Value of life remains flat over time.
I think I’d pick a shorter high-quality life over a longer low-quality one given the choice.
uff that's a brave opinion in most circles
There also wasn't socialized healthcare
Bismarck introduced socialised healthcare in 1883.
Is Calcutta India here?
Interesting that I saw this article earlier today on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1q841...
Was the Reddit article the impetus for your post?