Classic route
Southwest Chief
Chicago → Los Angeles · United States
Southwest Chief in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 3,645 km
- Fastest time
- 43 h
- Average speed
- 85 km/h
- Top speed
- 145 km/h
- Operator
- Amtrak
- Train
- Superliner
- Countries
- United States
- In service since
- 1936
- Runs
- 1× daily each way
- Highest point
- 2,388 m
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Heir to the Santa Fe Super Chief, “Train of the Stars”: crests 2,388 m Raton Pass on the old Santa Fe Trail.
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.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 4720714 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within 109 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: 99.9% of this line lies within 250 m of real track (median 24 m); the longest stretch away from it is 3 km
- Checked against the running timetable via Transitous: our line sits 0.1 km from the shape of 3
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Mississippi crossing at Fort Madison
- Kansas grain elevators
- Raton Pass — 2,388 m
- Apache Canyon squeeze
- Gallup’s red mesas
- Cajon Pass descent
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