Where: around the region
When: year-round
If you like: urban escapes, nostalgia
Why you should go: Cruising at 30,000 feet is fine if you like speed, airport stress, and to see only clouds outside of a tiny porthole. Instead, American travelers are rediscovering the joys of retro rail travel, including watching the small-town South and its creeks and forests unspool outside panoramic windows, not to mention the headache-less process of buying a ticket online and rolling up to the station just minutes before departure. “People are coming back to realizing how civilized it feels to have a train station nearby,” says the Southern food writer Matt Lee. “Recent station upgrades on the coastal route and sensible features like the real-time map of all Amtrak trains means that train travel is more pleasant and less of a crapshoot than it was a decade ago.”
The numbers talk: Amtrak booked 34.5 million trips last year, a more than 5 percent increase over 2024—and a record passenger count for the service, which started in 1970. Popular routes span the East Coast, linking Washington, D.C., to Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and much of Florida. Miami itself has added Brightline, a private train service that in 2023 opened a route between Miami and the Orlando airport. And late last year, Amtrak kicked off its new Mardi Gras Service, a twice-daily route that for the first time in twenty years connects Gulf Coast communities by rail—from Mobile, Alabama, to New Orleans, with stops in Gulfport and Biloxi.
G&G tip: Lee recommends visitors to South Carolina’s Florence Wine & Food Festival in March consider taking the train. “Last year, a gaggle of Charleston friends made an adventure of coming up for the day to the festival’s Grand Tasting,” he says, “landing in the Pee Dee just in time for the event, shopping downtown, and grabbing a beverage at the Hotel Florence bar before getting back on the 5:45 p.m. train headed home.” The journey that would have taken at least two hours by car on I-95 required just ninety minutes of smooth sailing by train, with Wi-Fi, wide seats, and huge windows. And, Lee adds, “The café car serves Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA.”
