Recently, I did something I’ve long dreamed of. I took the train across America.
The views were majestic, particularly as we swayed through the West. The Wi-Fi was bad, and the food not much better. But I wanted to do it partly because trains are cleaner than flying.
But when I got back home and crunched the numbers, I discovered something surprising: it would have been less polluting for me to have flown.
As a climate journalist, I often fly to report my articles, but I’ve always worried about the climate cost. Flying in jets that burn a lot of fuel is probably one of the most polluting things we do. By taking a flight to report on a problem, I’m basically making that problem worse by causing tons of planet-warming emissions that are heating up our planet to dangerous extremes.
So when I started to work on a story that would involve spending time with two climate scientists at Stanford University — one who wants to rid the school of fossil fuel funding, the other fully funded by Exxon — I wondered whether I could try something different.
What if I traveled from New York to Stanford by train, a method of transportation that generally has a far smaller climate footprint?
The most direct route was to take the Lake Shore Limited train to Chicago, then the California Zephyr from Chicago to Emeryville, Calif., just outside San Francisco.
That 3,400-mile journey would take a daunting 72 hours. But I convinced my editors to let me use a work day, plus a few vacation days, to take the trip.
I was set. And I was doing my part to save the planet. Right?
Wrong. In short, I took a train across America and ended up emitting more planet-warming emissions, not less. I’ll explain why in just a bit.
The journey itself was epic. I boarded a packed train at New York Penn Station and was quickly speeding along the Hudson River at sunset. After a train change in Chicago, and traversing Indiana and Nebraska, we reached the Colorado Rockies. Our ascent from the flat plains to the green forests, then through the snow-capped Rockies, the deserts of Utah and the panoramic Sierra Nevada, was nothing short of magical.
It was also a slog. A sleeper cabin would have cost more than $2,000, so I was in an upright seat the entire trip. (Compression socks helped.) That still cost $600, about the same price flying the same route would have cost during the holiday season. I’d heard that the dining car was expensive, so I brought along vegetable sticks, crackers, cheese, hummus, instant noodles and miso soup. I tried to work, but my train’s Wi-Fi was down.
But then I did the math on my emissions.
A nonstop flight from New York to San Francisco emits, on average, about 840 pounds of carbon dioxide per economy class passenger, according to Google Flights, whose data is independently reviewed. That’s equivalent to burning 420 pounds of coal, or more than the annual emissions of someone living in Cameroon. Air travel is wildly polluting.
But what about trains? I tracked down several estimates of carbon emissions per passenger-mile, including Amtrak’s official estimate. What I got back: My cross-country train journey had emitted somewhere from 950 to 1,133 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger.
What!?
There are a few reasons for this result. Amtrak is far cleaner than flying where its tracks are electrified, along the Northeast Corridor, from Washington to Boston. But outside the Northeast, Amtrak trains run on diesel, a highly polluting fuel.
What’s more, Amtrak’s trains are decades old. (Its single-level Amfleet cars were built in the late 1970s.) Add to that generous seat pitches, large old-fashioned private rooms for longer-distance trains, a longer, winding route across the country and “per-passenger-mile emissions go through the roof,” said Justin Roczniak, a co-host of “Well There’s Your Problem,” a podcast about engineering.
Amtrak is still the more climate-friendly option for the vast majority of travelers, who on average travel 300 to 400 miles, said Olivia Irvin, a spokeswoman for the rail company. (That is, not many people are crazy enough to go cross-country by train.) A 2022 Department of Transportation study found that traveling by train from Los Angeles to San Diego generated less than half the emissions, per passenger, of flying, or driving. For Boston to New York, an electrified route, taking the train generated less than a fifth the emissions of flying or driving.
It’s when journeys start getting longer than about 700 miles that planes start to gain an advantage on trains. Planes burn the most fuel when they take off and climb to altitude. That makes short flights very inefficient — you’re burning all that fuel only to travel a short distance. (Some countries, like France and Spain, have tried to ban the shortest flights when rail alternatives are available.)
Longer flights also tend to use larger aircraft, which provide economies of scale. And aircraft have become more fuel-efficient over the years. But choosing non-direct flights, for example, can quickly add to your footprint, because you’re taking off and landing multiple times. Airplanes also emit other pollution like nitrogen and soot, and form contrails, all of which warm the planet further.
And experts agree that aviation is going to be one of the hardest industries to decarbonize. With trains, electrification is already readily available. The technology is there. China, for example, has managed to electrify 70 percent of its train lines over the past decades and made them faster, too. And as the electric grid gets cleaner by adding more solar and wind, so will trains that run on electricity from that grid.
An electric, long-distance passenger plane is much further in our future.
Whether Amtrak will ever electrify outside of the Northeast corridor is another question, however. In America, tracks are owned by freight companies, which have resisted electrification. Amtrak is currently updating its fleet with newer diesel trains, albeit ones that are less polluting and slightly faster.
One thing I did learn during my cross-country train journey: There are still a lot of Americans who love trains. The trains I took were booked solid. Among my fellow travelers were a college student traveling to see her long-distance boyfriend, and grandparents on a family trip (but they didn’t want to travel by car with their grandchildren).
But would I travel cross-country by train again? Probably not, unless Amtrak electrified the route. We can only dream.
