Night train route
Empire Builder
Chicago → Seattle · United States
Empire Builder in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 3,550 km
- Fastest time
- ≈ 46 h
- Average speed
- 77 km/h
- Top speed
- 127 km/h
- Operator
- Amtrak
- Train
- Amtrak Superliner
- Countries
- United States
- In service since
- 1929
- Runs
- 1× daily each way
- Highest point
- 1,589 m
- Riders per year
- ≈ 400k
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Two nights tracing the Great Northern’s empire: skirting Glacier National Park along the Montana Rockies.
Named for James J. Hill, the magnate who drove the Great Northern through to Puget Sound, the train has carried his nickname since 1929. It hugs the upper Mississippi below Wisconsin’s bluffs, crosses the North Dakota prairie in darkness, then gives a whole afternoon to the mountains, topping the Continental Divide at Marias Pass: at 1,589 m the lowest crossing between Canada and New Mexico. At Spokane a Portland section drops away to run the Columbia River Gorge.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 1809794 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within 113 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 25 m from it
- Checked against the running timetable via Transitous: our line sits 0.1 km from the shape of 7
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Upper Mississippi bluffs
- North Dakota prairie
- Marias Pass — 1,589 m
- Glacier National Park’s southern edge
- Cascade Tunnel descent to Puget Sound
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Wikipedia ↗
All sleepers serving these cities: night trains from Chicago · all 108 night trains.
More train routes in United States.