The scenery along the Coast Starlight route is unparalleled: snow-covered mountains, dense forests, fertile valleys and long stretches of Pacific Ocean shoreline provide a gorgeous backdrop for your journey.

Amtrak’s “Coast Starlight” route runs from Seattle to Los Angeles. According to the Amtrak website, this journey takes just over thirty-five hours and is a breath-taking tour of the west coast’s most astonishing scenery.

I don’t think myself unduly credulous, but I basically believed this. I’ve had good experiences with Amtrak’s long distance routes in the past. I’ve twice taken the Seattle-Chicago “Empire Builder”: if you head east, you wake up the first morning in Glacier National Park, on a winding track through evergreen-clad mountains; if you are traveling west, you get hours of sunlit farmland. It’s a trip that demonstrates just how enormous the country is, and how various.

I have particularly fond memories of dinners on those trains. The dining car on a long-distance train is one of the few places where you can acceptably be thrown into conversation with complete strangers: all tables are for four, and if you have a party of fewer than four people, the conductor will match you with dining companions at random. Depending on your personality, this may sound charming or it may sound like hell; personally, I enjoy talking to strangers. The whole experience of sitting down to dinner at a white-clothed table, with a glass of wine, while North Dakota rolls by outside, seems to belong to an earlier, more civilized age.

The good news is that Amtrak still have dining cars, and will still give you pot-luck of your companions. The bad news is that they have cut back their service in a variety of ways: the tablecloth is now made of paper, the dishes are plastic, and the food is not freshly cooked, merely warmed over in the microwave. This meal is included if you’re traveling in a sleeping car, but if you’re traveling coach, you may be charged $19 for a plate of “beef ragout” that could plausibly have come from Lean Cuisine. The romance is distinctly dead.

Moreover, the “Coast Starlight” route may be gorgeous in the summer — all those beaches, all those mountains — but by winter its vistas are curtailed by darkness and rain. The most striking image I have to take from the trip is of a snow-covered slope somewhere in Oregon, visible only dimly and only in the sulfurous glare of parking-lot lamps.

Finally, the west coast corridor is especially chancy when it comes to rail maintenance, at least if this trip is anything to go by. We were delayed, then delayed more, then delayed yet more; several times over there turned out to be work being done on the track ahead of us, and several times we were under some kind of federal mandate not to go very fast because the rails were in such bad condition. You can only hear these explanations so many times without beginning to get a little nervous. At Santa Barbara, the track became impassible, and we were bundled out into charter buses, instead, to arrive at our destination three hours late and distinctly cranky.

So for now, I recommend avoiding this route entirely. If only I didn’t have this return ticket…