Michael Portillo travels coast-to-coast across the United States clutching the 1879 Appleton's Guidebook to the railroads, a battered Victorian volume that dictates his route and supplies historical yardsticks for every stop. Each 30-minute episode follows a single line—whether the California Zephyr, the Sunset Limited or the Lakeshore Limited—while Portillo steps off to pan for gold in Sacramento, tours Civil War battlefields in Virginia, or tastes lobster rolls in Maine. The programme never pretends the railway map still rules the nation, instead using the train as a convenient spine for a brisk lecture on how steel rails once stitched the republic together.
The first series landed on BBC Two on 1 February 2016 and ran for 15 consecutive weekday evenings; three more seasons followed, the last finishing on 28 March 2020, giving 55 episodes in total. Producer Alison Kreps and executive producer John Comerford keep the tone brisk, cutting archival photographs and tinted engravings into Portillo's to-camera pieces as he compares yesterday's depots with today's Amtrak platforms. The signature flourish remains the moment he flourishes the antique timetable, brandishing it like a cudgel at conductors who politely inform him the schedule has changed since 1879.
The show belongs to the same rail-travel franchise that earlier dispatched Portillo to Britain, Europe and India, and later sent him to Canada, Australia and Alaska. Boundless, the production company, reuses its tried-and-tested formula: bright blazers, chirky drone shots of freight trains snaking through desert, and local historians invited to explain how a whistle-stop once made Chicago or Denver boom.
Production Details
BBC Two / 4 Seasons / 75 Episodes / 2016
Showrunner(s): John Comerford
Producer(s): Alison Kreps
Main Cast
Michael Portillo as Self - Presenter
