Call us old world, but it pains us to see the real stuff of life fading out of existence. We love real letters from the real post office, and we love riding real bikes to real places without Foursquare checkins. One endangered beast we care about championing is the Amtrak passenger train — the inimitable experience of riding the rails through parts of the country you could never see from a car: waterfalls in the outskirts of Chicago, trainyard graffiti in Spokane, and SoCal sunsets from impossible clear acres of desert stretching out around the tracks.

Amtrak is on a mission to re-establish tracks and regular service in some key areas of the country that have had to give way to industrial and shipping trains over the last couple of decades. One of these areas that piques our interest is the route between LA and Palm Springs — some of the best sight-seeing there is, and an experience that’s heads above spending two hours on the highway. When Amtrak invited community and creative leaders in Palm Springs to take a ride to LA on them, meet their maintenance crew and tour the cabins, cinematic hallways and social cars of their trains, we sent our co-hort Sarah Scheideman of The Coachella Valley Art Scene and World Famous to gather some evidence on our behalf. Herein are some shots from her adventure. If you’d like to see the service to Palm Springs increased from thrice weekly to thrice daily, let Amtrak know you’re behind them.

All photos by Sarah Scheideman for TCVAS