on board Amtrak’s new 47-hour Chicago-Miami sleeper

Winter had Chicago in its grip. The sidewalks in the Loop were shiny and treacherous with ice, and the frigid wind blowing off Lake Michigan made me hunch my shoulders and curse myself for forgetting to don my long underwear.

I was reminded of the Hollywood screwball classic Some Like It Hot, in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play down-on-their-luck jazz musicians forced to pawn their overcoats in the Windy City at the height of Prohibition. When they become accidental witnesses to a mob hit, they escape by accepting a two-week gig at a resort in Miami. The gag: it’s with an all-girl band, so our heroes have to dress up in drag. Cut to “Josephine” and “Daphne” sashaying down the platform at Union Station in heels and furs, as a platform attendant announces: “The Florida Limited, now leaving on Track 1 for Washington, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, and Miami. All aboard!”

I too had planned my own escape from the Midwestern chill. In November, Amtrak, America’s national passenger rail operator, launched a direct service between Chicago and Miami — the first on the route since 1979. The Floridian, as it is known, is a replacement for two existing Amtrak routes: the Capitol Limited, which ran from Chicago to Washington, and the Silver Star, which went from New York via Washington to Miami. The long-overdue refurbishment of the train tunnels into Manhattan has put the Silver Star out of service for at least the next two years and until it can be reinstated, Amtrak has decided to incorporate the two routes into run one extended daily service, covering more than 2,000 miles.

Checking my ticket as I entered the cavernous Great Hall of Union Station, I saw that my itinerary on the modern Floridian would take me through 10 states, stopping at 44 intermediate stations on its 47-hour journey. That was fine with me. I had no mobsters on my tail; what I was running from was the winter. And the temperature range encountered by the train can be dramatic: on Monday this week it was minus 12C at midday in Chicago, 26C in Miami.

The train offers conventional seats in Coach Class, “Roomettes” — private compartments that sleep one or two people — and “Bedrooms”, also sleeping two but with more space, an en suite toilet and shower. My Roomette ticket also included two days’ worth of meals in the dining car and access to the business-class waiting room. We were scheduled to leave at 6:40pm, but the video screens in the Metropolitan Lounge (on offer: free coffee, cookies, soft drinks and a bowl of green bananas) displayed revised departure times of 7:40pm, and then 8:50pm. When we were finally invited to make our way to the train, through a bewildering maze of “Under Construction” signs, it was 9:30pm.

The fictitious Florida Limited in Some Like It Hot consists of a steam locomotive towing a trio of Pullman wagons, the elegantly appointed rolling hotel rooms of their day. (Jack Lemmon ends up hosting a booze-soaked pyjama party in a fold-down berth with bandmate Marilyn Monroe; hilarity ensues.) Walking down the platform, I saw that our train was made up of a pair of impressive-looking diesel-electric locomotives — 4,200-horsepower Siemens Chargers, to be precise — four regular coaches, two dining cars, two sleeper cars, and a near-empty baggage car.

The Floridian, I would come to realise, was like a cruise ship tethered to a Greyhound bus: there was a functional but no-frills service for passengers in the seats up front, and a more luxurious offering — with regular meal sittings, comfortable bedding and personable attendants — for the passengers in the sleeper cars. The class divide began between the Café Car, an all-day cafeteria and lounge selling snacks and drinks, and the Dining Car, a higher-ceilinged restaurant where sleeper passengers would be served their complimentary meals.

The train pulled out of Union Station, but it wasn’t until after midnight and a long wait in the Café Car, that I was allowed into our Viewliner sleeper car. (A problem with the plumbing, which had caused the delay, meant there would be no water in Car 4111; the conductor finally allowed us to go to our reserved places, as long as we swore to use the bathrooms in Coach Class.) Nevertheless, my Roomette turned out to be a marvel of compact design: two seats that converted into bunks, a fold-down sink and buttons and dials to turn on reading lights and adjust airflow, room temperature and the public address volume.

While lightweight, high-speed trains have their advantages, there’s something about the gentle, side-to-side rocking of a train as substantial as The Floridian that lulls me into the deepest of sleeps. That night, it was only when the train came to a full stop that I would awaken, to pull back the blinds, and note we were marking a pause at the fluorescent-lit platform of a town such as Elkhart, Sandusky or Elyria.

When I did crawl out of bed the next morning, we were 10 minutes short of arriving in Pittsburgh. In the dining car, it was the second call for breakfast, and the attendant invited me to share a table with a retired couple returning from a visit to a sick relative in Indiana.

“We’re from Clemson, South Carolina,” the husband told me. “If you took away the university, there wouldn’t be any town left.” He was casually dressed in a black baseball cap, but his wife was carefully made-up, wearing a rhinestone-bedazzled cashmere sweater. As I made short work of my “Railroad French Toast”, topped with whipped cream and strawberries, she fondly remembered a childhood train trip to Utah, when she’d seen buffalo beside the tracks: “It was much more formal then. People dressed for dinner.” Still, she awarded points to Amtrak for the fresh-cut roses, one red and one white, in the metal vases set on our white linen tablecloth.

As we left the winter behind, the train’s atmosphere became more relaxed. In the dining car, kitchen staff hummed along to a blues recording

I returned to my Roomette, reclining to gaze at a view that, while not spectacular, (The Floridian can’t rival some of Amtrak’s scenic routes out west) was mesmerising nonetheless. South of Pittsburgh, the tracks ran parallel to the Monongahela River, following a valley bottom spanned by stone and iron bridges, spiked at regular intervals with brick smokestacks.

The fact that our sleeper was the one place where the train’s WiFi wasn’t working didn’t bother me. I made excellent progress on a French novel that I’d been trying to finish for the past two years, and passed the time noting the old-fashioned logos of the boxcars on slow-moving freight trains on adjoining tracks: Northern Suffolk, CSX, Kansas City Southern de México, Conrail, CN, Union Pacific. For short stretches, the train reached its maximum permitted speed of 79 miles per hour, but much of the time we rocked along at a methodical 35mph.

At lunch, I was seated with Larry and Irene, an Amish couple from Michigan who’d left behind their four grown-up children for a week-long vacation in Miami. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and braces over his long-sleeved shirt; she wore an ankle-length skirt and a grey, flat-topped bonnet. Larry said that flying wasn’t the problem for members of his community; it was the fact that they were required to show identity cards with their photos to board a plane.

“In the Ten Commandments,” Irene explained, as she worked on her Angus beef burger and potato chips, “we’re taught that you can’t have graven images.” For them, the main attraction of Amtrak was that it allowed passengers to board with just a ticket and a birth certificate.

As the tracks rose into the Allegheny Mountains, the fields and forests were mantled in snow, and the riverbanks were still fringed with ice. But then came a shift: in the short stretch between Oldtown, Maryland, and Paw Paw, West Virginia, I noticed the first green leaves on the aspen and beech trees. A magnificent sunset that painted the needle of the Washington Monument a vivid orange as we pulled out of Washington, DC, hinted that we were crossing an invisible border into sultrier climes.

On my second morning on The Floridian, I opened the blinds to see that we’d just left Savannah, Georgia. Outside, the sun was burning off the morning mist, as oaks draped with Spanish moss filed by, their trunks in swampy ponds, their crowns in full leaf. We’d left the winter behind, and the atmosphere on the train was suddenly far more relaxed. In the dining car, the kitchen staff were humming along to a recording of a soulful blues singer as they plated scrambled eggs, fried potatoes and biscuits (which resemble English scones).

I spent my last full day on the train getting to know my fellow travellers. In the Roomette across the corridor was a mother and her grown son, heading to Fort Lauderdale to visit a relative and killing time by playing penny-a-point canasta. (By the end of the trip, he owed her $60.) I got to know a quartet of Californian train-lovers on a cross-country rail odyssey; they had ridden Amtrak’s Southwest Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago, and were headed to Orlando to ride the monorail and excursion trains in the Disney theme parks.

A distinguished couple who always dressed for dinner told me they were spending their retirement taking trains to cruise ports; after a Caribbean cruise from Miami, they’d be riding Amtrak’s Empire Builder to Seattle, to sail to Alaska. And there was Jimmy, the cheerful attendant for the “Rocky River” — as my sleeper car was named — who knew the location of the levers that allowed my Roomette to morph into a cosy bedroom.

I never quite shook the feeling that The Floridian awkwardly, if endearingly, straddled the line between luxurious and utilitarian. The service in the dining car was unfailingly friendly and professional, and one dinner-menu item in particular — the “Signature Flat Iron Steak” — a cooked-to-order beef filet in a tangy port sauce, served with butter-rich mashed potatoes, was excellent, even if it was plated on plastic. The cruise ship atmosphere in the Sleeper Cars was only occasionally marred by stern announcements, emanating from Coach Class, admonishing that for anyone caught smoking in the bathrooms: “Our next stop will be your last stop.”

Our late departure out of Chicago meant that the final run into Miami, following the historic tracks of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, happened under cover of darkness. Long after 10pm, on the platform outside Miami’s underwhelming bus depot-like railway station, I waved goodbye to Larry and Irene; the Amish couple were the only other passengers who had made the full trip from Chicago.

In Some Like It Hot, the Florida Limited whisks the main characters to a fictional Miami hotel called the Seminole Ritz (played in the movie by San Diego’s real-life Hotel del Coronado.) Tony Curtis’s character proceeds to win Marilyn Monroe’s love by posing as a neurotic, spectacle-wearing millionaire. I’d plotted my own happy ending by booking a room at The Biltmore, a Spanish-style resort hotel in the posh suburb of Coral Gables, built in 1926 to welcome passengers on deluxe express trains who, a century ago, could count on making the trip from New York in just 36 hours. Including the delay leaving Chicago, my journey had taken 52.

The following morning, I reclined on a deck chair by the Biltmore’s sprawling outdoor pool. Mission accomplished: I’d traded the numbed grey pigeons of Chicago for the flocks of screeching green parrots dashing between the crowns of Miami’s palms. Best of all, by opting for the train instead of a plane, and crossing the country at an average speed of just 41 miles per hour, I’d felt the change from winter gloom to semi-tropical lushness on a level deep, in my bones.

Somehow, that made the glass of freshly squeezed orange juice that the waiter brought me taste even sweeter.

Taras Grescoe is the author of the rail newsletter High Speed (highspeed.blog)

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning