Recently, I did something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time. I took the train across America.
The views were breathtaking, especially as we swung west. The Wi-Fi was bad and the food wasn’t much better. But I wanted to do it partly because trains are cleaner than flying.
But when I got 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 have always been concerned about the cost of climate. Flying in fuel-burning jets is probably one of the most polluting things we do. By taking a flight to report a problem, I’m actually making that problem worse by causing tons of planet-warming emissions that heat our planet to dangerous extremes.
So when I started working on a story that involved spending time with two climate scientists at Stanford University—one who wants to divest the school of fossil fuel funding and the other fully funded by Exxon—I wondered if I could to try something different.
What if I traveled from New York to Stanford by train, a method of transportation that generally has much less climate?
The most direct route was to take the Lake Shore Limited train to Chicago and then the California Zephyr from Chicago to Emeryville, California, just outside of San Francisco.
This 3,400 mile journey would take a terrifying 72 hours. But I convinced my editors to let me use a work day, plus a few vacation days, to make the trip.
I was set up. And I did my part to save the planet. Correctly?
Wrong. Long story short, I took a train across America and ended up broadcasting more global warming emissions, no less. I’ll explain why in a moment.
The trip itself was epic. I boarded a crowded train at New York’s Penn Station and sped along the Hudson River at sunset. After changing trains in Chicago, and crossing Iowa and Nebraska, we reached the Colorado Rockies. Our climb from the flat plains to the lush forests, then through the snow-capped Rockies, the Utah deserts and the panoramic Sierra Nevada, was nothing short of magical.
It was also a slog. A sleeper cabin would cost more than $2,000, so I was standing up the entire trip. (Compression socks helped.) That still costs $600, about the same price it would cost to fly the same route during the holiday season. I had heard the dining room was expensive, so I brought veggie sticks, crackers, cheese, hummus, instant noodles, and miso soup. I tried to work on the Lake Shore Limited but the Wi-Fi was down. There was no Internet at all on the California Zephyr.
But then I did the math for my shows.
A direct flight from New York to San Francisco emits, on average, about 840 kilograms of carbon dioxide per economy passenger, according to Google Flights, whose data is independently reviewed. This is equivalent to burning 420 kg of carbon, or more than the annual emissions of someone living in Cameroon. Air travel is extremely polluting.
But what about trains? I followed several estimates of carbon emissions per passenger-mile, including Amtrak’s official estimate. What I got back: My train trip to the country’s coast had emitted somewhere between 950 and 1,133 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger.
What!?
There are a few reasons for this result. Amtrak is much 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.
Plus, Amtrak’s trains are decades old. (Amfleet’s single-level cars were built in the late 1970s.) Add to this the generous seating positions, the large old-fashioned private rooms for long-distance trains, a longer route with bends across the country and “emissions per passenger go through the roof,” said Justin Roczniak, co-host of “Well There’s Your Problem,” an engineering podcast.
Amtrak is still the most climate-friendly option for the vast majority of travelers, who travel an average of 300 to 400 miles, said Olivia Irvin, a spokeswoman for the rail company. (That is, not that many are crazy enough to go out of the country by train.) A 2022 Department of Transportation study found that traveling by train from Los Angeles to San Diego produced less than half the emissions, per passenger, of flying driving. For Boston to New York, an electrified, train route produced less than one-fifth the emissions of flying or driving.
When trips start to exceed about 700 miles, planes start to gain an advantage over trains. Airplanes burn the most fuel when they take off and climb to altitude. This makes short flights very inefficient — you’re burning all that fuel just to travel a short distance. (Some countries, such as France and Spain, have tried to ban shorter flights when alternative rail services 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 flights with multiple connections, for example, can quickly increase your footprint because you’re taking off and landing multiple times. Airplanes also emit other pollution, such as nitrogen oxides and soot, and form hollows, which further warm the planet.
And experts agree that aviation will 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 railway lines in recent decades and make them faster too. And as the electricity grid becomes cleaner by adding more solar and wind power, so will the trains that run on electricity from that grid.
A long-haul electric passenger plane is much further in our future.
However, whether Amtrak will ever electrify outside the Northeast Corridor is another question. In America, the tracks are owned by freight companies, which have resisted electrification. (Freight trains are also why some Amtrak trains frequently stop to make way. And all that stopping and starting makes America’s passenger trains even less energy efficient.) Amtrak is currently updating its fleet with newer diesel trains, albeit less polluting and less polluting trains and slightly faster.
One thing I learned during my train trip: There are still plenty of Americans who love trains. The trains I took were held firmly. My fellow travelers included a college student traveling to see her long-distance boyfriend and her 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 electrifies the route. We can only dream.
