Getting Railed: Where to Take Amtrak from Portland

As discussed in the O-Week issue, Reedies are well-positioned to take advantage of Portland’s robust public transportation system and escape the trap of car dependency. But what if your destination lies outside of the Portland metropolitan area? In my experience, Reed students, who largely hail from the capital of Motordom, California, tend to have very limited familiarity with Amtrak. This is no big surprise; outside of the Northeast Corridor, where I come from, Amtrak services that outcompete driving and flying are few and far between. The Northeast Corridor sees 2,100 passenger trains per day, including inter-city service run by Amtrak and commuter service provided by transit agencies in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts. The Pacific Northwest Corridor, which the Federal Railroad Administration defines as stretching from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, British Columbia, is… not like that. Nonetheless, Amtrak is a convenient alternative to driving or flying for certain trips, and remains the most ecologically-friendly regional travel option on a per-passenger basis, which if you have time to spare may be compelling enough reason to ride the rails. This article will briefly explain Portland passenger rail connectivity along the Northwest Corridor and inter-regionally.

Portland Union Station serves three Amtrak routes: Cascades, Coast Starlight, and the Empire Builder. Cascades provides passenger rail service between a southern terminus in Eugene, Oregon, and a northern terminus in Vancouver, British Columbia, with Portland and Seattle as the two major hubs along the way. Cascades has six daily round trips between Portland and Seattle, two between Seattle and Vancouver, and two between Portland and Eugene. One of the Portland-Seattle trains also travels to and from Vancouver. Amtrak supplements its rail service with a number of connecting buses. The timetable suggests that some of these buses are faster than the trains.

Taking the train south from Portland Union Station to Salem takes about an hour and ten minutes and costs $10, making it a viable option for a day trip between Oregon’s largest city and its capitol. This is probably the only city pair on the Cascades route where the train takes the same amount of time as driving. The train schedule gives you about five hours in Salem if you want to spend the afternoon there, which might not sound like much, but in my experience, you can see everything in Salem in about an hour if you don’t get run over on one of its ridiculously wide roads. 

Eugene is two hours and forty minutes away and costs $17, which is longer than driving and too much for a day trip, but it still makes a very reasonable option for a weekend trip or perhaps a conference at the University of Oregon. According to the Oregon Department of Transportation, on-time performance was 75% northbound from Eugene to Portland and 70% from Portland to Eugene, as of the second quarter of 2025. 75% of delays were caused by host railroads, which is a common story in American passenger rail. I vividly recall the conductor on a Salem-bound train I was riding this summer announcing we would be stopping near Oregon City because a crew from the freight railroad refused to answer their radios.

Northbound, the Portland to Seattle route takes three hours and twenty-five minutes and costs $34. This is slightly longer than driving in optimal conditions, but it potentially beats I-5 by an hour or two when travel demand is high (so definitely take the train if you’re going to a concert or sporting event). It also makes a lot more sense to take the train than to fly given the time commitment of arriving at the airport early, dropping off luggage, going through security, picking up luggage, and whatnot. 

The trip from Portland to Vancouver, BC, takes nearly eight hours and costs $114. According to the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), as of 2023, on-time performance is 57.6% on the Portland-Seattle segment and 49.5% on the Seattle-Vancouver segment. This is the point at which you could be excused for flying if you really had to. 

In 2026, Amtrak Cascades will introduce eight new Airo trainsets, relieving longstanding equipment problems with Talgo and Horizon vehicles that have previously reduced service on the corridor. The Airo trainsets will produce 90% fewer CO2 emissions than traditional diesel trains, important on the non-electrified corridor. The new trains have a maximum testing speed of 125 miles per hour, but in practice they will be limited to 79 miles per hour, a requirement imposed on most passenger rail outside of the Northeast Corridor due to sharing aging infrastructure with freight railroads. 

The Coast Starlight, running once a day, provides a long-distance connection from Seattle to Los Angeles via Portland and Sacramento. Clocking in at 31 hours and $138 for a coach seat, the Coast Starlight takes almost 15 times as long to get to LA as most flights, although its price is competitive. This is, admittedly, not a very practical way to get to California from Reed. Reviews of the scenery along the route are very positive but I cannot personally attest to this.

The Empire Builder has two western termini, one in Portland and one in Seattle, with trains combining in Spokane, Washington, before continuing onwards to Chicago. If for some reason you wanted to go to Spokane from Portland, it takes eight hours and costs $83. Portland to Chicago is 46 hours and costs $274. This is nearly 12 times as long as most flights and, unlike the Coast Starlight, more expensive. Despite this, the Empire Builder had 387,953 riders in fiscal year 2024, although some of that traffic comes from closer city pairs like Seattle and Spokane. 

The Cascadia region’s transportation needs are clearly not being met by the existing rail infrastructure. There is no way to get between Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver that is both ecologically conscionable and time-competitive with driving and flying. In recognition of the need for better passenger rail transportation in the region, Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia are partnering to build a new ultra-high speed rail system through the region. The Cascadia High Speed Rail system is currently in the second stage of three in the federal corridor identification program, with WSDOT conducting a four-year, $55 million service planning study before the project proceeds to preliminary engineering. The main obstacle to high-speed rail in the United States has always been political will, and right now the stars appear to be aligned in Cascadia, with every state, province, and municipal government on the prospective corridor strongly in favor of the megaproject. While the federal government is currently extremely hostile to public transportation, the timing of the service planning study means that if the next administration is a Democratic one, the project will likely be able to proceed more or less on schedule. However, even if the Cascadia HSR plan is realized, it will be several decades until construction is finished and revenue service begins.