Sunset Limited
The Sunset Limited is a long-distance passenger train run by Amtrak, operating on a route between New Orleans and Los Angeles. Major stops include Houston, San Antonio and El Paso in Texas, as well as Tucson, Arizona. Opening in 1894 through the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Sunset Limited is the oldest continuously operating named train in the United States.
With three round-trip journeys per week, the Sunset Limited is tied with the Cardinal for the lowest frequency of any regularly scheduled Amtrak route. Each end-to-end journey takes about two days. West of San Antonio, the train runs combined with the Texas Eagle.
From 1993 to 2005, the Sunset Limited operated an extended service to Florida, terminating in Miami from 1993 to 1996 and in Orlando for most of 1996 through 2005, and becoming Amtrak's longest and only coast-to-coast train route. Major stops between New Orleans and Miami included Mobile, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Orlando. However, the route east of New Orleans was permanently halted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There have been attempts to re-extend the service back to Florida but have stalled mainly due to administrative and political obstacles. Amtrak restored service from New Orleans to Mobile in the form of the Mardi Gras Service in August 2025.
History
Southern Pacific
Before the start of Amtrak on May1, 1971, the Sunset Limited was operated by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Sunset Limited is the oldest named train in the United States, operating since November 1894 along the Sunset Route. The Sunset Route is the southernmost of the three gateways to the West Coast envisioned through the Pacific Railroad Acts. The other two embarked from Chicago and St. Louis. However, the Sunset Route had two major advantages over the other two routes. It was an all-weather, year-round route that did not face the crippling snows of the Wasatch or Sierra mountain ranges to reach the Pacific Coast. Additionally, the other two routes had to assault the front range of the Rockies.In addition, opened 20 years before the Panama Canal, the Sunset Route vastly shortened the time to reach the West Coast from the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, as New Orleans was already an established seaport for Atlantic shipping lines’ passengers, seeking to reach the US interior. The Sunset Limited allowed passengers to reach the West Coast in a few days, not weeks.
The Sunset Limited was Southern Pacific's premier train. Initially, the Sunset Limited was an all-Pullman train, with sleeping cars and no coaches, running from New Orleans to San Francisco via Los Angeles. From its beginning in 1894, until streamlining in 1950, all the train's cars had 6-wheel trucks and dark olive green paint, with black roofs and trucks. In the summer of 1926, it was scheduled at 71 hr 40 min New Orleans to San Francisco; it then carried a coast-to-coast sleeper from Jacksonville to Los Angeles.
The San Francisco–Los Angeles portion of the Sunset Limited was cut on January 5, 1942. The cut was intended to last only several months to allow for equipment overhaul, but became permanent. On June 2, 1949, the Southern Pacific introduced faster schedules on several named trains. The Sunset Limited was reduced to hours eastbound and 48 hours westbound.
In contrast to its earliest Amtrak years, the Sunset Limited, up to its later years, made stops not only at Phoenix, but also at Mesa and Chandler, Arizona.
Amtrak
assumed operation of most intercity passenger train routes in the United States on May1, 1971, including those of the Southern Pacific. Amtrak retained the Sunset Limited and initially left its route unchanged.On October2, 1981, Amtrak began operating the Chicago-bound Eagle in conjunction with the Sunset Limited. The routes operate as one train between Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.
Extension to Florida
The Louisville and Nashville Railroad had operated the Gulf Wind between New Orleans and Jacksonville, Florida, from 1949 to 1971, when Amtrak did not include the route in its initial system. The corridor saw limited service over the next two decades: from 1984 to 1985 the Gulf Coast Limited ran between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, and from 1989 to 1995 the Gulf Breeze served the segment between Mobile and Atmore, Alabama.On April4, 1993, Amtrak extended the Sunset Limited east to Miami. The train followed the former route of the Gulf Wind between New Orleans and Jacksonville, restoring service on that corridor, and used the route of Amtrak's Silver Meteor south of Jacksonville. On November 10, 1996, the Sunset Limited was cut back to terminate in Sanford, Florida, as part of systemwide cuts. This also allowed the Superliner rolling stock to be maintained along with the stock at. The train was re-extended to Orlando on October26, 1997.
1990s incidents
On September22, 1993, the three locomotives and four of the eight cars of the eastbound Sunset Limited derailed and fell off a damaged bridge into water near Mobile, Alabama. Known as the Big Bayou Canot rail accident, the incident is Amtrak's worst train wreck and resulted in 47 deaths.On October9, 1995, in an event known as the Palo Verde derailment, saboteurs derailed the Sunset Limited near Harqua, Arizona, by removing 29 spikes from a section of track, and short-circuited the signal system to conceal the sabotage. The attack killed one person and injured dozens of others. The crime still remains unsolved.
Bypassing of Phoenix
On June2, 1996, the Sunset Limited was rerouted to a more southerly route between Tucson, and Yuma, Arizona, bypassing Phoenix. Union Pacific, which had acquired Southern Pacific earlier in the year, wanted to abandon a decaying portion of its Phoenix–Yuma "West Line", particularly the Roll Industrial Lead, that had previously been used to serve Phoenix, due to deteriorating track conditions and zero freight traffic. By then the Sunset Limited was only train using the Wellton Branch, and service was slow and bumpy along this worn-out section. The main freight customer was the Department of Energy which used the alignment to transport equipment spent commercial nuclear fuel from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, but after the 1995 sabotage, this was deemed too insecure, leaving Amtrak the only regular customer.UP demanded that Amtrak, as the only customer left using the branch, pay for tracks maintenance, and Amtrak, in an attempt to avoid the rerouting, requested assistance from the State of Arizona to provide the necessary funds to repair the most critical sections of the Wellton Branch, but the State refused to provide the funds Amtrak had requested.
Thus by June 1996, the Sunset Limited was bypassing Phoenix, and UP promptly put the midsection of the Wellton Cutoff out of service. This made Phoenix one of the nation's largest cities without direct passenger service; although the designated Phoenix-area stop is in Maricopa, a suburban community about south of downtown Phoenix. Amtrak Thruway service, run by Stagecoach Express, connects the two cities.
Hurricane Katrina
On August29, 2005, the Sunset Limited route was truncated east of San Antonio, Texas, as a result of damage to trackage in the Gulf Coast area caused by Hurricane Katrina. In late October 2005, service was restored between San Antonio and New Orleans, as the line through Louisiana had been repaired. Service east of New Orleans was suspended permanently despite CSX Transportation completing repairs on the trackage in January 2006.Recent years
The Sunset Limited received a modified schedule on May7, 2012, moving its westbound movements from New Orleans to a Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday circuit. The times allow several 7- to 12-hour rides between major-city pairs; for example, overnight between Tucson or Maricopa and Los Angeles in both directions.While most Amtrak trains saw service reductions in 2020–2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sunset Limited and its existing sub-daily schedule were not affected. The Texas Eagle was reduced to tri-weekly from October 2020 and May 2021, temporarily matching the Sunset Limited.
On December 8, 2022, Amtrak filed a complaint with the Surface Transportation Board against the Union Pacific Railroad alleging that the poor on-time performance of the Sunset Limited was due to issues that Union Pacific could avoid. On July 11, 2023, the STB announced that it was opening an investigation into the matter. Amtrak and Union Pacific settled the case in July 2025.
Proposed expansion
Re-extension to Florida
As time has passed, particularly since the January 2006 completion of the rebuilding of damaged tracks east of New Orleans by their owner CSX Transportation, the obstacles to restoration of the Sunset Limited full route have been more managerial and political than physical. Advocates for the train's restoration have pointed to revenue figures for Amtrak's fiscal year 2004, the last full year of coast-to-coast Sunset Limited service. During that period, the Orlando–New Orleans segment accounted for 41% of the Sunset revenue.Section 226 of the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, signed into law by President George W. Bush on October16, 2008, gave Amtrak nine months to provide Congress with a plan for restoring service that "shall include a projected timeline for restoring such service, the costs associated with restoring such service, and any proposals for legislation necessary to support such restoration of service."
In January 2016, Amtrak and the Southern Rail Commission announced jointly that a Gulf Coast passenger rail inspection trip was to be made from New Orleans to Jacksonville, with elected officials among those on board during the February 18–19 excursion. Stops were planned for all of the stations formerly part of the Sunset Limited route between those two cities. In June 2018, the commission missed the deadline for submitting a request for service restoration along the Gulf. It said that it could not apply for the Federal Railroad Administration's fiscal-year 2017 Consolidated Rail Infrastructure Safety and Improvements funding because Alabama and Mississippi were unwilling to assist with funds. Alabama's share would have been $5.3million. The Louisiana governor, on the other hand, was willing to provide the funds. The three states' cooperation was needed to secure the $35.5million in federal CRISI funds.