Tracks of the times

Waiting for the ferry from Larkspur across the bay, a middle-aged woman complains good-naturedly about extra security on the wharf. "I grew up when love and peace was all the rage. I still think it's kinda nice."

A young woman says, "My parents were flower people. They thought it kinda nice. I had to tell them to stop talking about love and sex all the time. I took to wearing gloves and four-inch heels."

The ferry passes San Quentin and Alcatraz jails. Americans rank with the Chinese among the world's most jailed people, a striking example of the extremes in this land of the free. Alexis de Tocqueville, who dissected American society in the classic Democracy in America, began by looking at the penal system in 1831. Charles Dickens visited American prisons a decade later.

Now, a ferry passenger says, "Say hello to Scott Peterson." Peterson, who murdered his pregnant wife, Laci, and threw her in this beautiful bay, became the 615th prisoner on San Quentin's death row. He was also voted America's second-most foolish person, behind Michael Jackson but ahead of Martha Stewart, Paris Hilton and George Bush.

As the California Zephyr leaves hearts in San Francisco and heads east, steward Reginald W. Harris introduces himself to passengers in their "roomettes": "This is your very own condo. I can bring breakfast in bed, lunch in bed if you like. Enjoy! Enjoy! Call me Reggie. You are so-o-o-o-o welcome!"

Reggie is more entertaining than the view outside Emeryville, where rubbish tips, car dumps, tents and shanty homes line the tracks. The US flag flies from many of the homes, patriotism overcoming poverty. The star-spangled banner is omnipresent in this wide land, even more so since September 11, 2001.

And the traveller soon understands just how wide America is. The crow-flies distance from Sydney to Perth is 3923 kilometres; from San Francisco to New York, 4125 kilometres.

John Muir, naturalist and conservationist, lived near Martinez, California. Americans thank him for having convinced President Theodore Roosevelt that "wilderness is a necessity". But the conductor reveals that an unexpected wilderness lies ahead. The Zephyr will be rerouted from Salt Lake City, Utah, through Wyoming because of work on the Moffat Tunnel in the Rockies. The news is not good for those who wanted to follow the Colorado River through the mountain wilderness but the journey through the badlands wilderness will be faster.

Meanwhile, Paul Schacht, a cotton-growing passenger from Texas, has "a bad feeling" about Sacramento, the Californian capital that was the western terminus for the pony express. The bad feeling springs from The Sacramento Bee newspaper, where letters condemn Bush. What's more, a taxi driver had suggested that Fidel Castro would "sort out" America's problems - and a youth wore a T-shirt sporting the hammer and sickle. "At least we are a free people," Schacht says, "and free to be stupid."

The Zephyr passes near Coloma, where California's gold rush began in 1848, and stops at Colfax before beginning the climb through the Sierra Nevada range. The 2160-metre Donner Pass takes its name from George and Jacob Donner, whose team of 87 men, women and children were trapped by a snowstorm at what is now Donner Lake, a tourist resort. Only 46 pioneers survived - by cannibalising the dead.

Across the California-Nevada border the train glides through Verdi, where a Sunday school teacher carried out the wild west's first train robbery in 1870. Next stop is Reno, where people go to gamble, be married and be divorced. Johnny Cash sang of having "shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die". Michael Brown, a dining room steward, plays his favourite jazz tapes; Red, a colleague with a rich baritone voice who is coy about his full name, often breaks into song:

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My, oh my, what a wonderful day!

Next morning the conductor wakes passengers, announcing: "Good morning. You might wonder why we are still in Salt Lake City." The answer is that the engine has broken down.

Vsevolod Kolesnikoff and Nonna Blinoff put such inconveniences into perspective. Their families fled Russia for China after the 1917 revolution, then fled to Australia after Mao's march to power. They married others, were widowed, married one another and live in San Francisco. They love the timelessness of train travel. Nor does the delay concern Mark Lairson, from Houston, Texas, who loves trains. His headphones are tuned to conversations between the driver and the dispatcher in Omaha, Nebraska. "People are in such a hurry today," he says. The Zephyr is in no hurry, leaving Salt Lake five hours late to head through the high plains of south Wyoming, cowboy country.

Oh, give me a home
where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play.

We pass Wilcox, where the Hole in the Wall Gang held up the Overland Flyer train in 1899, as depicted in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Buffalo roam outside Laramie, a town so lawless 130 years ago that it was placed under federal jurisdiction.

The man from Laramie ...
The west will never see
A man with so many notches on his gun ...

The Zephyr heads south before Cheyenne, the capital of Wyoming, where 88 per cent of families own a firearm and legislators check in their handguns before entering the state house. The preferred approach to the Rocky Mountains is from the east, across the flat prairie land of the mid-west around Omaha, and St Louis and the Great Plains of the west. Katharine Lee Bates, a schoolteacher, travelled by rail from Boston in 1893, finally finding the Rockies looming ahead. She wrote: "Some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 4300-metre Pikes Peak .¿.¿. when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse."

Bates sat down and composed the words to America the Beautiful:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Denver is not in the Rockies, as outsiders imagine, but beneath the Front Range. More extremes greet the visitor: healthy Americans obsessed with the outdoors and unhealthy Americans so obese they can't walk.

If Wyoming is cowboy country, the Colorado History Museum shows how the state was once Indian territory. Denver's Civil War monument is a symbol of the struggle by Coloradans to understand their past. What was once called the Sand Creek battle of 1864, when cavalry troops slaughtered 150 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho, is now the Sand Creek massacre. Buffalo Bill's grave is at Golden, in the foothills, and the adjacent museum reveals some of the wild west's savagery: a pistol with a handle fashioned from human bone.

On the bus back to Denver, a white man from Maine tells a black passenger how he was confronted by two men with switch knives on his first night in Golden. Black man: "Denver is a law-abiding town, sir."

The train crosses the Mississippi, America's greatest river, between Iowa and Illinois, on the way to Galesburg. Carl Sandburg, poet and historian, was born there, as was George Ferris, who invented the Ferris wheel. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated the question of slavery at Knox College, the "Harvard of the mid-west". Mike Bond takes passengers to the Fahnestock B&B he runs with Johan Ewalt. They also run the coffee shop and delicatessen, selling possibly the US's finest coffee.

We catch a Greyhound coach to Peoria, thrice elected the All-America city. Producers of vaudeville tried their shows here before taking them to New York. Richard Nixon famously asked his aides of the merit of certain policies: "Will it play in Peoria?"

As in many other US cities, no one lives downtown in Peoria. People work there before fleeing home to the often affluent suburbs, bringing to mind John Kenneth Galbraith's description of much of America - "private opulence and public squalor".

The city once had 50 distilleries and breweries and, says a local historian, Bill Adams, gamblers were held to ransom during prohibition. "These days it's conservative, law-abiding and a good place to raise families."

Jackie Hogan, a professor of sociology at Bradley University, says mid-westerners are wary of extremes but it's a "terrific" town undergoing urban renewal. Her Australian-born husband, Leo Edwardsson, criticises the urban wasteland but likes the people's politeness. He is struck by the number of churches and the debate over "intelligent design".

Several people had read bibles on the Zephyr. Now a passenger reads it on the Greyhound to Bloomington-Normal. About 67,000 people live in Bloomington and 46,000 in Normal. The 2005 visitors' guide notes 117 churches in the twin towns.

Public squalor and private opulence is striking, not least at Vrooman Mansion, where Abraham Lincoln spoke under an oak tree, Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson dined, John F. Kennedy came to tea in exchange for $US500,000 towards his campaign fund, and where the evangelist Billy Graham received $US250,000 for his campaigns.

A woman at the bus depot says she is saving to take her family out of town. "The east side used to be good but now there's a drug dealer in every neighbouring building." Two men dislike the African-American driver's blunt manner. "In the South we still hang people like that," one says. We head to Chicago.

Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin' town
Chicago, Chicago, I'll show you
around, I love it
Bet your bottom dollar you'll
lose the blues in Chicago.

Carl Sandburg said: "Show me another city so glad to be alive." But Chicago is another story. Most Australian travellers would head from here to Washington, New York or Boston, but we take the Lake Shore Limited to Springfield, Massachusetts, via Cleveland, Ohio, looking for more of lesser-known America. Springfield is the home of the Springfield rifle, the children's author Dr Seuss and basketball.

The first taxi driver reckons we're staying in an unsafe part of town; the second drives us around near midnight, until the $4 fare becomes $13; the third returns a camera, brandishing a bible and saying: "If you leave anything in my cab it's safe with me." And a fourth, asked if George Bush could fix the problems in New Orleans, says: "He couldn't fix lunch." We head by coach to Vermont.

Pennies in a stream
Falling leaves, a sycamore
Moonlight in Vermont.

Moonlight shines brilliantly on Lake Champlain. Sunsets, too, are spectacular. In October the trees change to brilliant reds, oranges and yellows. Burlington is a lively university town on the lake, with probably the best food since San Francisco, Chicago excepted. The Shelburne Museum is "New England's Smithsonian". Recreation parks are among the best in the US. A group hunting black bear in the Green Mountains includes Samantha Marley. She is nine and carries a 20-gauge shotgun. It's all legal.

Helen and George Long runs the Burlington Redstone B&B. A professor of biochemistry, he grows much of their food. He gives us tomatoes for the train journey, on the Vermonter, through New Hampshire and Connecticut to New York. For the first time on this journey across the US, the train arrives on time.

Start spreading the news,
I'm leaving today
I want to be a part of it -
New York, New York.

Destination United States

Getting there: Details and and bookings of passenger rail services in the US can be found on the Amtrak website (www.amtrak.com). An unreserved coach seat on the California Zephyr from Emeryville (San Francisco) to Chicago costs $221. A roomette, which sleeps two, is $766 and a bedroom $1897.