Southwest Chief

Amtrak’s south-western flagship follows the old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe main line, a route once garnished with Fred Harvey’s civilising trackside hotels. The middle day is the epic: Kansas grain elevators give way to the Sangre de Cristo peaks, adobe New Mexico and the squeeze through Apache Canyon, where the double-deck cars all but brush the rock. On the final morning the train coasts down Cajon Pass into the Los Angeles basin.

Stations

1. 0 kmChicago Union Station +14
2. 46 kmNaperville +2
3. 133 kmMendota +1
4. 167 kmPrinceton +2
5. 260 kmGalesburg +2
6. 351 kmFort Madison
7. Show 21 more stations

   1. 477 kmLa Plata
   2. 699 kmKansas City Union Station +1
   3. 763 kmLawrence
   4. 804 kmTopeka
   5. 1,020 kmNewton
   6. 1,073 kmHutchinson
   7. 1,266 kmDodge City
   8. 1,346 kmGarden City
   9. 1,506 kmLamar
   10. 1,591 kmLa Junta
   11. 1,722 kmTrinidad
   12. 1,758 kmRaton
   13. 1,934 kmLas Vegas
   14. 2,037 kmLamy
   15. 2,144 kmAlbuquerque
   16. 2,401 kmGallup
   17. 2,605 kmWinslow
   18. 2,699 kmFlagstaff
   19. 2,975 kmKingman
   20. 3,073 kmNeedles
   21. 3,338 kmBarstow
8. 3,397 kmVictorville
9. 3,467 kmSan Bernardino
10. 3,484 kmRiverside–Downtown
11. 3,542 kmFullerton +1
12. 3,583 kmLos Angeles Union Station +3

The stations OpenStreetMap lists for this service, in order, with the distance along the line as drawn here. A train may skip some of them. A +N after a station: N other routes on this map stop or end there, and the map draws it as a station where lines meet.

Along the way

• Mississippi crossing at Fort Madison
• Kansas grain elevators
• Raton Pass at 2,388 m
• Apache Canyon squeeze
• Gallup’s red mesas
• Cajon Pass descent

How this line was checked

• Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 4720714: the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within 36 m of them
• Checked against OpenStreetMap: 99.8% of this line lies within 250 m of real track (median 8 m); the longest stretch away from it is 5.5 km
• Checked against the running timetable via Amtrak: our line sits under 100 m from the shape of the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles
• Wikipedia has an article for this line

Questions and answers

Read more on Wikipedia ↗