The legendary 19-hour journey between New Orleans and Chicago is one of the world’s great train trips.

First sunlight flooded the vast Illinois plains, picking out the little farmsteads with their white wood houses and groups of corn silos as we thundered through the heart of the United States’ Grain Belt headed for Chicago.

As that fiery sunrise lit up the Till Plain, we were taking breakfast in the dining car of the City of New Orleans, the only train to take its name from a folk song.

I heard that song at a concert by the fabulous Judy Collins in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1975 and I was captivated by the romance of the overnight trip through the heart of America from the Windy City, Chicago, to the Big Easy, New Orleans.

It had been an ambition ever since to experience one of the great American rail routes, especially to ride the City of New Orleans. In the song, originally made famous in 1972 by Arlo Guthrie, the trip is from north to south, but we took the reverse journey starting from the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal on a glorious October afternoon.

We were to travel on the old Illinois Central Railroad, which is intertwined with the development of American music. Along with its road traffic counterpart, Route 61, it is the Blues Highway. It’s the way the African music of the slaves in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, that became the blues, moved north to Memphis and Chicago to inspire jazz, swing music, rock and roll, rhythm and blues and to be the foundation for most modern popular music.

Dawn over the Corn Belt of America

Virtually all of America’s music was born along this route. In New Orleans the meeting of blues and French-influenced Cajun music created Dixieland jazz, and in Tennessee and Kentucky bluegrass and country developed when the blues met traditional Irish, Scottish and English folk music that came to America with British colonists.

The Illinois Central was also the home of the world’s most famous train driver – Casey Jones.

John Luther ‘Casey’ Jones gave his life trying to avoid a train collision. The crash itself occurred on April 30, 1900 when a freight and passenger train – the New Orleans Special – collided at Vaughan, Mississippi. In his efforts to avoid the collision, Jones saved everyone’s lives except his own.

The USA’s most famous president, Abraham Lincoln, acted for the railroad from 1853 to 1860 just before the Civil War as its corporate lawyer. He then had to sue the railroad to get his fee for two of his last successful court appearances on their behalf.

When the Arlo Guthrie record was released, Illinois Central ran a daytime service called the City of New Orleans and the overnight train which was then called the Panama Limited. The success of the song caused them to rename the overnight train.

Now it is run by Amtrak, the national intercity rail operator.  Passengers use a dedicated waiting room at the New Orleans terminal, with coffee and TV playing CNN news, slightly faded but perfect for people-watching and wondering where and why they are going – just like the lyrics of the song.

As the train is announced and we pass the ticket inspector on to the platform, the first sight of the City of New Orleans is impressive. The Superliner double-decker cars shine silver and the locomotive unit at the front is a mighty piece of engineering worthy of the successors of Casey Jones.

Welcomed on board by our sleeping-car attendant, Craig, we are shown to our seats, given a route guide and learn the layout of the car.

We are on the top deck in compartments that convert into sleepers. The view from the huge window at that height is excellent and we settle down to enjoy the scenery. But the first few minutes are sobering as the train pulls out past the gigantic Superdome arena and through some of the areas of the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

Four years on, and although the work to restore the damage is evident, it is chillingly clear to see the results of that terrifying period.

The most poignant sights are the homes that were flooded and still await demolition, their windows broken or boarded up, the paintwork peeling and faded. Often they have holes in the roofs where people broke through to escape the water rising through their homes.

As the train heads north, the line skirts Lake Pontchartrain. The lake is massive some 625 square miles, freshwater where we pass, saltwater at the other end where a narrow channel leads out, eventually, to the Gulf of Mexico. Katrina’s storm surge forced its way into Pontchartrain and its waters breached the defensive levees that should have protected New Orleans, leading to the flooding disaster.

Leaving the lake behind, we are soon travelling through the swamps, islands and creeks of the Louisiana Bayou.

Wooden shacks built on rickety jetties stacked with fish traps and nets are the only sign of human life in the backwaters.

The Bayou teems with natural life. In the summer, acres of the swamp are covered with lilac water lilies, and alligators sun themselves on logs. Now a magnificent bald eagle perches on a dead tree and several pelicans fly in formation alongside the carriage.

With a mournful blast of its horn the City of New Orleans pulls into Hammond, a city founded by Swedish sailor Peter Hammond who turned up in New Orleans after escaping from Dartmoor Prison. In the Civil War Hammond was the shoemaking centre for the Confederacy and later laid claim to being the Strawberry Capital of the US, sending the bulk of its fruit to Chicago by rail aboard a train known as The Crimson Flower. A handful of passengers come aboard here and then with a more jaunty toot we are off again, heading for the state line and a journey through Mississippi.

The next stop is another ‘capital’, this time McComb, which claims to be Camellia City because it has largest number of varieties. The city also celebrates its azaleas by placing thousands of tiny lights behind the flowers.

Chicago’s skyscraper skyline

A few miles further on and our train makes one of several stops during the journey, pulling into a siding to allow goods traffic through. A seemingly endless number of containers flash past.

Commercial traffic is the main customer for US railways so it often takes priority, exactly the opposite for us in the UK, but it is only a short wait.

Johnny Cash sang “We’re going to Jackson” and as the evening sun lights up the city skyline, we actually get there.

Opinion is divided as to whether the Jackson in the song is the Mississippi state capital where we are now stopped, but it looks a beautiful city and the last sunlight catches the golden dome of the capitol building as we pull out into the Mississippi night.

Craig reminds us that we are due in the dining car for dinner. The evening meal and breakfast are included in all sleeper tickets. The choice for dinner includes chicken, flat iron steak, a seafood special and, my selection, crab cakes. It is an unexpectedly good meal and there’s a relaxed atmosphere in the dining car. Breakfast, too, is really tasty, with a freshly cooked omelette and all the trimmings.

Craig has been busy while we ate and the facing seats in our ‘roomette’ cabins have been turned into beds. There’s not a lot of room, especially if you share one and the upper bed comes into play, but there are bigger cabins downstairs with double beds and a single upper bunk or family rooms sleeping four. Each car has a wheelchair-accessible room.  Some of the bigger cabins have en suite facilities. There are also a couple of shower rooms and several toilets on the lower level. If you are not ready to turn in, the Sightseer Lounge with café downstairs is available. A feature film is also shown at night. You can use the lounge during the day for its big picture windows, to meet fellow travellers, even have a game of cards like the characters in the song.

I simply watch Mississippi and then Tennessee slip past from the comfort of my bed. We have stops at Yazoo City and Greenwood in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, the land of cotton. Smokers nip out on to the platform and scurry back on at the toot of the horn and the attendants shouting ‘all aboard!’.

We pass through little towns with the streets quiet and the odd truck waiting at the level crossing barrier, maybe a cruising squad car slowly patrolling Main Street. It’s an almost perfect night for someone who remembers all those road songs, films and books. It’s the comfortable way to imagine you’re John Steinbeck or Paul Simon or that you’re swishing through the location of In The Heat Of The Night. Crossing into Tennessee, we pass through the other Jackson and Vaughan, scene of Casey Jones’s heroism.

Next thrill is midnight in Memphis as the train moves effortlessly from small town America into the big city; quite a few passengers leave the train here.

The city prides itself on being the birthplace of the blues and when we pull out of the main station we pass Beale Street and its blues bars and clubs. However, it isn’t the neon and the mighty skyline of the city that was home to Elvis, the R&B phenomenon or Stax Records, or the site of the shocking assassination of Martin Luther King, that sticks in my memory. Instead, it’s the parking lot of the Memphis Police Department alongside the station that amazes. There are hundreds of patrol cars, trucks, vans, mini-buses and 4x4s parked there, and if these are the ones off duty, there must be a lot more out on the streets – together it looks like enough vehicles to save Ford Motors from the recession.

I doze as the City of New Orleans briefly visits Kentucky and enters the State of Illinois at Cairo, where the mighty Mississippi and Ohio Rivers join and travel up through the Shawnee Hills on the eastern edge of the Ozark Mountains region.

I wake a few times as more passengers leave the train at Carbondale, some to take the bus links to Kansas City and St Louis, and at a couple of other brief stops. One of them is Centralia, a town founded by the Illinois Central Railroad in 1854.

By breakfast time we are pounding through the Corn Belt, the vast fields broken only by little communities, lone farms and then Chanute Air Force Base – one of the biggest in the US. Gradually the scenery becomes a little more urban as the train passes through Kankakee, the former home of perhaps the best-known American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and then into the decidedly upmarket suburb of Homewood.

Then the unmistakable skyscraper skyline of downtown Chicago appears in the distance and the train, by now edging through a spaghetti of rails leading into sidings and off on to suburban lines, arcs round to pull into the city centre Union Station after a 19-hour, wonderful journey.

Chicago Union Station is an amazing structure: it’s a gigantic Greek temple on the outside and inside has one of the great venues in the USA – its huge marble, colonnaded Great Hall.

Chicago Union Station’s amazing great hall- stages concerts, gala dinners as well as catering for waiting passengers in grand style

The hall is the scene of concerts, weddings and celebrations of all kinds.

Outside the station is the Chicago River, and a stroll across one of the nearby bridges takes you into the city centre and towards the shore of Lake Michigan.

New Orleans and Chicago are two of the world’s great cities – the train link between them provides one of the world’s great rail journeys.

America’s wide open spaces conjure up evocative images of adventure, excitement and romance thanks to the film output of Hollywood and the rich heritage of US music and literature.

You can capture some of that atmosphere for yourself by taking a road trip – a railroad trip, that is – and see some of the amazing landscapes and legendary places from the comfort of a viewing car.

As well as the Chicago to New Orleans route covered in detail in this feature, Amtrak offers some mouth-watering journeys where you will certainly pass through some of the places in Stephen Benét’s poem, which ends with the famous line “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee,” and a lot more. You can stop off en route and make it a long holiday trip or stay on board for the whole journey.

Four epic trains sweep across the continent, routes blazed by the early pioneers and railroad builders.

The northernmost trip is aboard the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle or Portland, Oregon, on the West Coast.

Following part of the trail used by Lewis and Clark on the first official expedition to the West Coast in the early 1800s, the Empire Builder heads through Minnesota up to the high plains of North Dakota and Montana following the Canadian border through spectacular Rocky Mountain scenery to Spokane, Washington, where you can choose to continue on to Seattle or follow the Columbia River gorge to Portland.

The Californian Zephyr follows a more southern route from Chicago, finishing in San Francisco. It is probably the most scenic railway route anywhere. After rushing across the Corn Belt through Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, the train climbs to 10,000ft to cross the Continental Divide in the Rockies, winding through deep gorges alongside the Colorado River and traversing the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. For Wild West enthusiasts there’s plenty of interest, including Glenwood Springs in Colorado where the gunslinger Doc Holiday is buried and Winnemucca in Nevada, where

Butch Cassidy once robbed the local bank.

The Southwest Chief also starts in Chicago but heads south-west as its name suggests, cutting through Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, then heading west through New Mexico and Arizona into California and Los Angeles.

The train calls at Dodge City, Santa Fé, Albuquerque, Flagstaff and San Bernadino.

There is spectacular scenery in the Rockies and along the Red Cliffs of New Mexico as well as several canyon passages only a few feet wider than the train.

You cross the Rio Grande and the Navajo Indian Reservation. There’s a short connection if you want to stop off for the Grand Canyon and other connections to Denver, El Paso, Las Vegas or Phoenix at points along the way.

The southernmost route is from New Orleans to Los Angeles on board the Sunset Limited. The full route is from Florida on the East Coast, but the line was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and rebuilding has not been decided yet.

From New Orleans the train heads through Texas, calling at Houston, San Antonio and El Paso. The train crosses the Florida Mountains in New Mexico and the Continental Divide at 4500ft.

It snakes through the amazing desert scenery around Tucson, Arizona and continues along the Mexican border before heading up to Los Angeles.

There are plenty of north-south  routes, too. On the East Coast The Maple Leaf heads from New York up to Toronto in Canada, passing close to Niagara Falls. The Adirondack makes the spectacular trip to Montreal in Quebec.

From New York you can head south right down the East Coast aboard either the Silver Meteor, the Silver Star or the Palmetto.

The two Silver Service trains go all the way to Miami in Florida, the Palmetto as far as the unique city of Savannah in Georgia. All three go through Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Richmond and through the Carolinas.

On the opposite coast, The Coast Starlight runs down from Seattle in Washington State through Oregon and northern California to Sacramento and San Francisco, then down the Big Sur coast to Los Angeles.

There are many other routes including linking New York with Chicago, and the New York to New Orleans train. Amtrak’s website (www.Amtrak.com) and brochure give full details of routes and prices. You can plan your trip independently or find a package or specialist rail holiday company.