First Class sleeping car passengers really are treated well in the US - whisked straight onto the train past all the coach passengers waiting in the terminal. And dinner in the dining car before they've even boarded. It's dark as the train pulls out an hour late, passing through little suburban towns of Illinois, with increasingly empty streets as the night progresses.

In the morning the sky is an endless grey, so uniform that it's tempting to think there's something wrong with the window. Breakfast with Betsy from New Orleans. She has been trying to buy back some of her parents' possessions at an auction in Illinois. She's met an English couple on the train and thinks we might know each other. Best not to tell her there are 60 million people in the UK; bump into them later - we've never met. In Tennessee the land gradually becomes greener and the sky bluer. The train stops at Memphis, home of Elvis Presley and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets. It looks interesting, with historic buildings.

A small child walks into my room and throws up. She looks at me for a while and leaves. A new experience. The carriage attendant, Manny, takes it all in his stride as he disinfects the area. I left my door open to meet all the people who walked past - this wasn't what I had in mind.

Mississippi has lush vegetation and plenty of farms and fields. The train stops at Yazoo; there's a little wooden church with a tiny steeple made out of what looks like wrought iron. Buildings are very rundown; paint chipped and cracked, signs faded and graffiti everywhere. Betsy from New Orleans says it's a very poor area, but it's obvious just from looking at it. On the journey so far it's noticeable that there is a sincere rich-poor divide in the USA. There are a lot more homeless people than in the UK, or at least there seem to be – particularly in Chicago. The Yazoo River – despite its name - turns out not to be made of chocolate milk. Forests of trees go past - it must be a haven for wildlife. There are no roads at all, no signs of human activity, just unspoilt nature at its best. Suddenly there's an artificial clearing created by loggers; it's hard not to feel jaded.

The train passes through dense marshland, like the Florida Everglades - about as far removed from the Nevada Desert as possible. Lunch with a lady from Texas who has just been to Memphis. She is concerned that Canada, the USA and Mexico are going to become one country. Not sure what this is founded on. Last year she had to fix her roof three times because of hail, so she doesn't feel she needs to go and see the devastation from Hurricane Katrina - 'We have storms too'. There's a lake surrounded by expensive houses, probably holiday homes. In the middle of a forest there's a phantom car park: absolutely full of cars, but no sign of people, buildings or any reason at all for having a car park. People hiking in the woods? It's 2pm on a Monday afternoon, probably not. More marshland, more trees, more nature. It's easy to imagine dinosaurs stomping through the undergrowth - it's a brief glimpse of a time before man. With a train track.

Coming into Louisiana, there is a cemetery where all the bodies are stored in crypts above ground. Early settlers found out the hard way what happens when a corpse is buried in marshy ground – it resurfaces a few days later. There's a trailer park called The Promised Land - irony or desperate optimism? Next stop is Hammond, one of the strawberry capitals of America and the place that made shoes for the Confederates during the Civil War. The train passes down into the Louisiana Bayou. If the previous ground was marshy, this is something else. It's no wonder New Orleans has flooding problems; this is clearly below the water level. Then suddenly the train is on water, water as far as the eye can see. Little buildings, no more than shacks, are built on stilts, with people going between them on boats. Most of them are ruins, probably abandoned after Katrina. The trees are strange, thin affairs with sparse, droopy foliage - as if they are wilting from heat.

The train crosses a huge mass of water. There are trees in the distance. Beyond them, factory chimneys belch smoke. Disturbingly, in the middle of the marshy lake there are children's toys, floating and forgotten, caught in algae. Coming into New Orleans there are very derelict areas full of abandoned, broken homes. The train is close up to the levees - this area must have been one of the worst hit during Katrina. Debris is still piled up at the edge of roads, four years afterwards.

The station is right next to the infamous Superdome, with repairs from the hurricane only finishing this month. Getting off the train there's a blast of humid heat, strong enough to knock someone over. No wonder it takes so long to get things done - it's far too hot to be quick.

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3 – Salt Lake City to Chicago - 29-30 April 09 (36 hours)

The only train from Salt Lake City to Chicago leaves at 4 am, so once on board it's straight to bed. The conductor wakes everyone up 7 am by announcing 'Good morning America'. He uses variations of this every time he speaks to the train. Outside are the Utah plains - and easy to imagine buffalo roaming wild. The red rocks are heavily layered, like the rings of an oak tree; craggy and uneven because of water freezing and breaking up the rock. It's odd to think that such a dry landscape could once have been covered in water. It seems as if nothing should be able to live here, but there are shrubs and strange red plants in the dusty ground.

Breakfast with two film-buffs from Australia who are also travelling the US by train. In the middle of the East Utah Desert is the greenest possible golf course. There's a little coal-mining town, so remote that it must take the people who live there ages to get to the next town: the high-speed train doesn't pass another one for at least an hour. There's one, lone tree, withered and gnarled. It's not surprising that it's dead, more that it could ever live. The train comes into Colorado and into the Ruby Canyons. They're not particularly big - certainly not on the scale of the Grand Canyon, but they're impressive. It's striking how green they are, pretty close to the natural spring - perhaps goats or cattle could graze there; the floor is mostly a sort of coarse desert plant, rather than grass. Suddenly the landscape turns much greener - there's a river. The canyons have a gentle slope at the top, usually covered in plants, before becoming a sheer vertical drop to the ground. There are occasional lone turrets of rock, natural sculptures jutting from the earth with an odd, fixating beauty.

There's a town which grew around a natural spring, and prospered when coal was found - Thelma and Louise was filmed here. Across the desert plains there are snow-topped peaks - a strange country. Getting out of the train and walking around, the town is sadly derelict. Clearly it was once a magnificent tribute to the glorious age of the train; all that's left is a shop selling ice cream and hats saying 'Colorado'.

Lunch with Richard and Paula from Colorado, and proper canyons - breathtakingly huge. They're originally from England and Paula went to the first-ever Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They point out where people go kayaking over the rapids in the river that runs along the bed of the canyon. The water bubbles and seeths - a tumultuous explosion of white - as it crashes against rocks. At Glenwood Springs the water is so hot that people are actually swimming. The Colorado hills give way to the plains, occasionally passing a snowy peak. It's farming country; there's a cow with her calves sat next to the train tracks. The ruins of an old wooden bridge lie forgotten in the water. Horses gallop alongside the train.

Coming towards Denver there's the edge of the Rocky Mountains. There's a ski resort just before a 6 mile tunnel. Fir trees cover every inch of ground. As the train climbs into the mountains, it's so high that ears pop. The snow stops - nothing but fields. Dinner with Jerry from Colorado, Rosemerry from Sacramento and Becky from Kentucky, who tell about their childhoods growing crops and tending cattle. As a child, Rosemerry was so poor that once a month her mother would have to exchange eggs with a travelling salesman for a candy bar. In the morning the train crosses the border into Iowa - thick fog, and terrain, flora and climate like England. There's a train depot with a coal train with close to 100 trucks full of coal. Breakfast with some people making their first-ever train journey, which is the same with many of the passengers - perhaps a wind of change is blowing in America.

The train stops at the sleepy town of Ottumwa. It feels a pleasant, if quiet, place to live, a factory town - one of many in the USA - perhaps processing crops grown in the surrounding abundance of fields. The train crosses the Mississippi River - wide and brown, with trees along each bank; in the distance it forks round an island. A single swan skims the surface. Beyond the river the ground is marshy; the water level must have been very high - it has spilt over into the floodplains, with trees growing straight out of the water. The railroad remains elevated off the ground for quite a while - its engineers clearly knew what they were doing. There are farms and fertile land. For miles after crossing the Mississippi, the ground is covered in large puddles - surface water, because it hasn't been raining. They look like rice paddies, deep enough to swim through. Some of the farms are modern with big stainless steel vats; others older with decrepit wooden outhouses. One has a traditional red-painted barn, as if drawn in a cartoon.

Coming into the grey skies of Chicago, there are closing-down factories, early victims of a different kind of storm. In the suburbs, pretty, large, wood-clad houses pass; their owners evidently take pride in their upkeep. Some of them fly the American flag - quite common here. As the train draws into the station, the clouds are so low that the tops of the skyscrapers are invisible.

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2 – Sacramento to Salt Lake City - 25-26 April 09 (16 hours)

California State Railroad Museum volunteers join the train and talk about the area: this part of the railroad opened in 1865, built by 10,000 Chinese workers using hand tools. The train goes through Auburn - where gold was discovered, triggering the California Gold Rush - with its amazing domed courthouse. All around is bright green; entire forests of shrubs and Mediterranean trees clinging to the red sand floor. Diana from Chester UK is a prolific train-user; she's travelled the whole country by train. Why is the soil so red? Diana thinks it might be high in iron.

Suddenly there are little clumps of snow on the ground. The train's high up in the mountains and the view down into the valley is breathtaking - swathes of trees as far as the eye can see. Through the mountains the snow covers the land thickly, unspoilt - in winter it reach 35 feet deep. In the centre of the valley there's a huge lake where snow-water has gathered. Quite a few of the trees seem to be burnt - fire and snow together. A 2-mile tunnel - The Big Hole - leads to magnificent views across the mountains. There are big wooden big wooden holiday homes dotted along the lake, and bald eagles nesting. The train teeters along a cliff edge - terrifying and exhilarating at the same time - and down into the valley. The ground is intercut with tiny streams trickling melted snow to the lake.

Truckee looks like a town from the Wild West, with buildings which look 150 years old or more - the shop-fronts have painted signs with old-fashioned lettering. It's like a movie set, but with nowhere to tie up the horses. Nearby is the site of this railroad's first-ever train robbery - with another one a day later. Suddenly the snow, water and trees simply stop.

There's nothing but rocks, then a quarry - nothing could live out here, and all that's missing are vultures. Here's the vast, desolate Nevada Desert - miles of flat, arid nothingness and a shrub or two, with rough hills in the distance, the Rocky Mountains. There's a small town in the middle of the desert with a saloon - a real, old-fashioned saloon. There's an ex-marine from Texas in the observation car, who chats about politics as the world passes by. Some differences of opinion predictably arise, discreetly kept unvoiced. There's a shallow river alongside, its water transparent, its bed clear to see - soothing to watch it wind and splash over the rocks.

Over dinner, Diana from Chester UK and Pat and Richard from Roseville US marvel at the wide Nevada plains of Nevada. Diana has USA by Rail, a great book about everything the train passes. Here's Winnemucca, a small town renamed after a Paiute Indian chief in 1900 - before that it was French Ford. It's not just the spectacular views that make this all so special, but the people on the journey - they enrich it. Time to sleep, before being woken at 4am by Jabari to leave at Salt Lake City. It's pitch black outside, and the train heads for the mountains.

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1 – Los Angeles to Sacramento - 24 April 09 - (14 hours)

Panic. The computer has cancelled all my ticket bookings. One friendly ticket lady later, and it's all sorted out. It's a very spacious train, easy to stretch the legs out completely, and the seat's extra-wide. From the observation deck, with its comfortable, window-facing seats and panoramic views, the California scenery is almost unrealistically gorgeous - jagged, sandy-brown boulders and mountains straight from Disney.

The Pacific Ocean lasts for almost the whole journey. Sometimes the train goes along the beach, the water lapping its tracks - a lady from Bedfordshire UK says she can see dolphins. There are Brown Pelicans in flocks, diving in and out and piercing the waves as they hunt fish. Richard from Colorado is a train enthusiast and model railway builder - this is his first time riding the train. He says this is a famous stretch of railroad which used to run The Daylight. It's an old steam train which still runs on special occasions. The Bedfordshire lady says the area is known for the missions set up by the Spanish.

Thomas Harders and Neil Baker get on at Santa Barbara. They're volunteers from the South Coast Railroad Museum and they do a presentation: the route opened in 1901, built by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The train passes through a vast military base - 153 square miles. Acres of nothingness pass, then suddenly there's a lone missile silo or rocket pad. Up till the 1960s, the train had to draw its curtains. There's a town called Guadalupe with a tiny one-roomed jail and pretty coloured houses - including one in raspberry pink - which leads into the Santa Maria Valley. There's cattle ranches and a rodeo, utterly remote, no main roads - most of the coastline has no road access at all. Richard has photos of the model railway he built for his son, it's fantastic. Strangers talk to each other here, in this huge country. Huge? Texas is five times the size of England (but the fare isn't five times the price - it's cheap at 650 US Dollars). Greg from Sacramento used to be in a biker gang, shows his tattoos, and tells about historic Old Sacramento. It would be great to be staying - sadly it'll just be a stopover.

There's a snack car with lots of different kinds of food, and a more expensive dining car. Crackers and cheese it is, though it has to be said that American cheese does taste like nasty plastic. It's easy to run out of things to do. The laptop battery runs out, no more magazines, Richard from Colorado is asleep, the lady from Bedfordshire has vanished. And then the realisation that maybe doing nothing is the beauty of travelling by train. A little solitary cloud travels across the sky. There's a valley, improbably green with the lack of rain. There are vineyards and fields growing crops. The sun sets, silhouetting the mountains.

END

(c) Matthew Rose 2009

Matthew Rose is a writer and producer living in London UK

Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012

www.fringereport.com