There's time... and then there's Amtrak time.

Welcome, unhurried reader, as this week I introduce you to a new concept of time: Amtrak time.

This week we took on an epic rail journey: from Sacramento, California's state capital, to Denver, in Colorado. This is billed as a 30-hour journey, which would be our longest-ever train trip duration-wise; distance-wise, it's about 1300 miles, so that's likely to be our longest-ever uninterrupted trip too. It also crosses three impressive mountain ranges en route, climbing from roughly sea level to an elevation of over 8000 feet, so without doubt this was going to be something spectacular.

What it's not, of course, is something fast. The arithmetically-minded amongst you will have already worked out that 1300 miles in 30 hours is an average of barely 40 mph, and that's assuming you actually stick to the timetable.

Ah yes, the t-word. In the UK, as in many other countries, we have these pesky things called timetables. Amtrak also has these, but unlike other countries, where timetables either try to predict the future, or are serious commitments, with Amtrak the timetable is nothing more than a funny joke. The trains here don't run to the timetable; they run to Amtrak time.

You're probably wondering how Amtrak time relates to regular wall clock time. It turns out there's a very flexible relationship between those concepts. Our train started its journey in Emeryville, just outside Oakland, a couple of hours West of Sacramento, yet somehow it still managed to be about 10 minutes late on reaching us there. No matter, we deluded ourselves, Amtrak claim that late trains often make up time.

Well not this week they didn't.

There are many things which conspire to result in Amtrak trains not keeping to time. Firstly, there's the fact that American railways are primarily large-scale freight movement mechanisms, and passenger trains must wait for the freight to pass. This often involves relatively long waits given the network consists of a large number of single-line sections. Then there's the fact that track maintenance here can and does take place more or less whenever the owners fancy. Finally, there's the somewhat aging condition of the trains themselves; we were delayed by the train control system turning itself off amongst other niggling technical difficulties.

So a 10-minute delay at Sacramento turned into half an hour by the time we made it to Colfax, at roughly the beginning of the ascent of the Sierra Nevada (summit: 6887 ft above sea level; Dent, famously the highest railway station in England, is at 1150 ft). Salt Lake City should have eluded us, given that the train was scheduled to stop there around 4am, but in fact we got there about 7:30am. The first stop in Colorado, Grand Junction, found us running about 5 hours late. On reaching Fraser-Winter Park, the last stop before Denver, the conductor told us excitedly about the need to get to Denver before midnight, because that's the time the locomotives needed to stop for a mandatory 30-minute inspection. Given that we were supposed to be there at 6:30pm, I've got to say, he was quite a lot more excited about this than me.

So we made it to Denver, just over 6 hours late. It was hard to see who was less happy at this point: those of us that were falling off the train and trying to get to a hotel for the night, or the folks getting on the train that presumably just wanted to get to bed.

But to focus on the lateness would be to ignore the sheer beauty and wonder of the trip itself. Whether you're climbing the Sierras and peering precipitously down to the lakes and I-80 highway below you, skirting the Great Salt Lake, or tumbling down the Ruby Canyon into Colorado, you can't help but be amazed by the geography. If at the same time the railway feels like a relic of a bygone era, that's because it is. Whilst you're no longer following the precise route of the First Transcontinental Railroad throughout, the cutoffs and reroutes that carry the route today date from the 1920s and 1930s at the latest. What's more, to keep the gradients manageable, the railway often clings to the banks of a river or creek, and even then there are long stretches of 1-in-50 inclines. Back in the UK you have to marvel at how amazingly well built our Victorian main lines were, and how relatively easily many of them have been to upgrade for ever-increasing speed; here you have to marvel that the railway was even built in the first place.