At LA’s magnificent but forlornly empty Union Station we change trains, from a rattling local service to the gleaming chrome luxury of the Coast Starlight, which carries its lucky passengers at a leisurely pace from Los Angeles all the way up to Seattle, on the Canadian border. The plush train finds it necessary to trundle through some of LA’s dingier suburbs, but soon we escape into rocky, desolate hills and, apart from the odd bit of graffiti here and there, you could be in the middle of nowhere. Then we hit the coast again, and pass another, this time seemingly endless string of little beach communities that bask in perpetual sunshine.

I am lucky enough to have a private cabin, but find the pleasure of my own company wearing thin remarkably quickly, and soon adjourn to the first-class observation car where wealthy-looking couples sip coffee and admire the scenery. As we stare out the window, Bob and Barbara, an elderly couple from Pasadena, tell me how much this part of California has changed.

“Only 20 or 30 years ago,” Barbara remembers, “you could drive clear up to Santa Barbara and pass nothing but empty coast. It’s all built up now, there are too many people – it’s not like it was.”

That all changes, though, when we pass the idyllic-looking town of Santa Barbara. Houses and cars begin to disappear, the ground grows greener and the coastline becomes more rugged, rough and unspoilt. Low cliffs plunge into the crashing Pacific. Lucky groups of surfers loll on otherwise deserted beaches. Pelicans glide into the curling, blue-green waves, while seals bob inquisitively further out to sea. On the other side of the train, the rounded yellow mountains of the Coastal Range rise into the sky. It’s a breathtaking scene. A dryly jolly conductor jokes with a family behind me, claiming the train is now operated by satellite. “There’s someone up there all right,” he says, “but he’s just for show – he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He just sits there and watches television.”

A little later, the scenery abruptly changes, turns rocky and foggy, transforming itself into a whole different coastline. We’re heading north. We stop briefly at the pretty, Spanish-looking town of San Luis Obispo, and I descend to stretch the legs.

In another, more graceful age, lines of black limos would meet the train and whisk selected passengers off to nearby San Simeon, the outlandish and gargantuan coastal retreat of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, so memorably lampooned by Orson Welles in Citizen Cane. Hearst is long gone, but his palace remains, a national park now and an enduring monument to one man’s folly. Every year over a million visitors wander through the 100-room mansion, marvel at Hearst’s priceless plunder and try to imagine the huge dining table humming with the conversation of Churchill, Shaw and Chaplin. Hearst’s dinner parties were legendary, but the kitchens are silent now.

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