Foaming for Breakdown

Tonio Guajardo’s twenty-one-and-a-half-minute YouTube video, “I Took America’s Worst Possible Train,” is a rare instance of clickbait delivering on its promise. The video’s premise is simple: travel across the country—from Miami to Alaska—via public transit (no planes or cars). This mostly meant riding Amtrak, the unsaid but obvious referent of the video’s title. Still, the idea holds a certain romance: taking in the country’s majestic landscape by train, as Americans did a century ago. Not everyone would sign up for it, but how bad could it be?