I used Google’s ‘MyTracks’ app to log the journey from Vancouver to Los Angeles, resulting in the (interactive) map above; blue is the Amtrak Cascades as far as Seattle, and red is the full run of the Coast Starlight to L.A. GPS signal was lost a few times along the way, and my phone crashed entirely near Santa Maria, so it’s not a perfect record and the stats produced weren’t right. But it’s still a pretty neat visualisation, and I was able to crunch the numbers myself…
For the Casacades, we took 4 hours 44 minutes to travel 151 miles. That’s an average speed of just 31.8mph, although if you take out the stops, we had an average moving speed of 34.2mph. On the Starlight, things were slightly brisker: we covered the 1,377 miles in 34 hours and 47 minutes, which is 39.6mph. Knock off the 47 minutes, which neatly corresponds to the time we apparently spent at a dead stop, and that creeps up to a mighty 40.5. But speed was not of the essence here – the journey was very much more important than the destination!
