California Zephyr

The California Zephyr runs every day between Chicago and Emeryville, on San Francisco Bay: 2,438 miles through seven states in about 52 hours, two nights on board. It is Amtrak train 5 going west and train 6 coming back, a scheduled service that carries people getting off at Omaha, Denver or Reno as well as those riding the whole way, and it runs in January as it does in July.

Plenty of trains cross one mountain range. This one crosses two. On the second day it climbs out of Denver into the Rocky Mountains, passes under the Continental Divide in the Moffat Tunnel — at 9,239 ft the highest point on the Amtrak network — and follows the Colorado River through a chain of canyons into the Utah desert. On the third it climbs again, out of the Nevada desert along the Truckee River, round Donner Lake and over the Sierra Nevada near Donner Pass, on the route the Central Pacific first carved across the range in 1868.

In between are the cornfields of Illinois and Iowa, the Book Cliffs, the salt flats west of Salt Lake City and the Humboldt valley of Nevada — much of it seen from the double-deck Superliner cars and their glass-roofed Sightseer Lounge, and some of it slept through.

Train 5 leaves Chicago Union Station at 14:00 and runs west on the old Burlington main line through Naperville and out across the Illinois prairie. At Burlington, Iowa, it crosses the Mississippi, and through the late afternoon and evening it is cornfields and small-town stations — Mount Pleasant, Ottumwa, Osceola — until it crosses the Missouri into Omaha just before midnight. Nebraska and eastern Colorado pass in the dark.

Denver comes on the morning of day two, and the part of the journey most people come for starts straight after it.

Across the Rockies

Leaving Denver the train turns towards the Front Range and climbs, through the curves above the city and a long series of short tunnels, to the east portal of the Moffat Tunnel. The tunnel is 6.2 miles long and was opened in 1928; its apex, at 9,239 ft, is the highest point anywhere on Amtrak, and the train emerges at Winter Park on the Pacific side of the Continental Divide. From Fraser the line drops into the valley of the Colorado River and stays with it for the rest of the day — through Byers Canyon, the roadless Gore Canyon and, after lunch, the high walls of Glenwood Canyon. Glenwood Springs is the stop for the hot springs; Grand Junction comes in the late afternoon, and beyond it Ruby Canyon takes the train over the state line into Utah.

The last of the daylight westbound is spent under the Book Cliffs, a sandstone escarpment about 250 miles long, before the line crosses the Wasatch Mountains at Soldier Summit and drops to Salt Lake City around midnight. The salt flats and the Nevada border go by in the night.

Over the Sierra Nevada

Day three opens in northern Nevada, where the railway follows the Humboldt River west through sagebrush and dry ranges, then crosses the Forty Mile Desert. At Reno the landscape changes again: the train follows the Truckee River up into the mountains, into California, and through Truckee. Above the town it swings round Donner Lake and climbs to the crest of the Sierra Nevada near Donner Pass, 7,056 ft, the route the Central Pacific's Chinese labourers forced through the granite in 1868 and where the Donner Party was trapped by the snow in the winter of 1846. The long descent that follows runs along a ridge between the American and Yuba rivers, through Emigrant Gap, down to Colfax and the Sacramento Valley.

Sacramento comes in the middle of the afternoon, then Davis and the flat run to the Bay. The train crosses the Carquinez Strait on the Benicia–Martinez bridge into Martinez, runs beside San Pablo Bay, and arrives at Emeryville at about 17:00 on day three. San Francisco is across the water, by Amtrak's connecting bus.

The train itself

The Zephyr is made up of the double-deck Superliner cars Amtrak uses on its western long-distance trains, first put on this route in July 1980 — sleeping cars, a dining car, the Sightseer Lounge with its windows curving up into the roof, and coaches with seats on both decks — behind a single-deck baggage car. It is hauled by a pair of GE P42DC "Genesis" diesels — the silver-and-blue locomotives in most of the photographs on this page — which are being replaced on Amtrak's long-distance trains by Siemens ALC-42 Chargers.

The California Zephyr runs once a day in each direction, all year. Westbound it is train 5, leaving Chicago at 14:00; eastbound it is train 6, leaving Emeryville at 08:25. Either way the trip takes two nights and arrives on the afternoon of day three. Every seat and room is reserved.

All times below are local — the train crosses the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones — and the day is counted from departure.

Good to know:

• Which way round. Westbound, the Rockies and the Colorado canyons fill the daylight of day two and the Sierra the morning of day three. Eastbound reverses it: the Sierra on the first afternoon, the Colorado canyons on the second morning and the Moffat Tunnel in mid-afternoon.
• The times move. Amtrak's timetable is generated for a single date rather than a season, and the times change from one date to the next: on the timetable for 29 September 2026 the westbound took 52 h 57 min, while a booking for 6 January 2027 showed the same train arriving at 17:14. Check your own date.
• Leave slack. The train runs on freight railroads — BNSF east of Denver, Union Pacific west of it — so allow time before any onward connection.
• For San Francisco, Amtrak's Thruway buses run between Emeryville station and the city.

Times as of September 2026, from Amtrak's published timetable for 29 September 2026. Confirm before travelling on amtrak.com (opens in a new tab).

Every seat and room on the Zephyr is reserved, and fares move with demand rather than sitting on a published table. Sampling Amtrak's booking engine in September 2026 for one adult, Chicago to Emeryville, gave Coach from $202 on a Wednesday in January and $296 on a Wednesday in October — when every private room was already sold out. In January a Roomette was $816 and a Bedroom $3,172, each for the room and up to two adults. Book early, and book direct.

Coach is a reclining seat with the Sightseer Lounge and the café. A Roomette or Bedroom adds a bed, an attendant and all meals in the dining car; the Bedroom adds its own washroom and shower. Fares checked September 2026 at amtrak.com (opens in a new tab); US dollars, one way.

Interrail and Eurail do not apply anywhere in the United States. The pass that does is Amtrak's own USA Rail Pass: $499 for 10 segments over 30 days, in Coach only — upgrades to a Roomette or Bedroom are not available on it. A segment is one boarding and one alighting, so riding Chicago to Emeryville straight through uses one of the ten. The pass works only on Amtrak's cheaper Sale and Value fares, limits you to two round trips between the same pair of stations, and has a limited number of seats on each train, so each segment has to be reserved through Amtrak before you board.

For the Zephyr alone it is not worth buying. Coach from Chicago to Emeryville sampled at $202 to $296, well under $499. The pass pays when the Zephyr is one leg of a bigger loop — breaking the ride at Denver and Glenwood Springs, say, and then going on to the Coast Starlight or the Southwest Chief — and only if you are happy to sit up for two nights. Amtrak's California Rail Pass stopped selling on 26 August 2026.

Checked September 2026 against amtrak.com/usa-rail-pass (opens in a new tab) and amtrak.com/rail-passes (opens in a new tab).

The Zephyr runs once a day, so breaking the journey means a night off the train and a new reservation for the next day's departure — easy to arrange, since every stop has a train in each direction every day. Omaha, Salt Lake City and Elko are passed in the dark both ways; the places below are the ones the timetable lets you see, from east to west.

Three of these four are historic hotels in the cities at each end and at Denver, and one is a small-town inn in the Sierra — the obvious place to stop if Donner Lake is the reason you came. The Crawford is inside Denver Union Station itself, so it is also the easiest possible way to break the journey in the middle: step off the train, sleep in the station, and catch the next day's Zephyr from the same place.

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