The Union Pacific Railroad opened the immensity of the frontier to Gilded Age adventurers. Tony Perrottet retraces the first transcontinental train trip and recaptures the spirit of 1869

To cross America by land these days is a grandly nostalgic gesture, but almost everyone who attempts it experiences a moment of doubt, a frightening episode when the true enormity of the United States strikes home and the shameful question emerges from the dark recesses of the soul: Maybe I should have flown? Mine occurred on a train in Nebraska. It wasn't provoked by the sight of the never-ending prairie, whose monotony was known to drive pioneer wagon drivers to madness and despair, but an incident in the luxury gymnasium carriage of a Union Pacific Streamliner from the 1950s. I had already traveled a solid 1,100 miles on Amtrak from New York, so the first glimpse of an exercise bicycle promised a Lourdes-like revival for my stiff limbs, while the wafer-thin satellite screen facing me promised to soothe my wandering attention span. So as we purred along the rails at 60 miles an hour, I hopped onto the bicycle seat—only to find that the state-of-the-art machine required me to program in the train's current height above sea level in order to accurately gauge calories burned and the like. Our altitude? For perhaps the first time, the true scale of what lay ahead in the West dawned on me. The train, I realized, would gradually climb toward the Continental Divide, crossing the highest pass at a breathless 8,000 feet. And it wasn't just the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada that we had to negotiate but nearly 2,000 miles of desert plateaus, wild rivers, and yawning gorges. It was enough to make you call JetBlue.

No matter how many twenty-first-century gadgets they boast, long-distance trains in America cannot help but provoke frontier flashbacks, hammering home the realities of the continent's sprawling size—which is, of course, an essential part of their attraction. My own trip, from the East Coast to San Francisco, was really an attempt to recapture a nineteenth-century worldview. A couple of weeks earlier, while doing research in the New York Public Library, I'd come across a rare memoir by one of the tourists on the first transcontinental rail journey, in 1869—a certain William L. Humason, Esq. This vivid document, published under the title From the Atlantic Surf to the Golden Gate, conveyed all the wonder travelers once felt on railways. It also provided a fresh vision of the Wild West—and inspired me to make the trip myself.

A century and a half ago, no traveler needed reminding of how much dramatic terrain lay between the Atlantic and the Pacific, or what an engineering marvel the new rail line was. California could be reached only by a grueling overland stagecoach, a steamer around Cape Horn, or a slog through the Panama jungle. But after May 10, 1869—when the two new rail lines being built from east and west were famously joined with the driving of the "golden spike" in Utah—the journey to San Francisco could be completed in a week. Seven days! The prospect must have been as alluring as commercial flights to Mars.