In fact, given the cuts in domestic air service and the other problems of air travel, I realized that the rail option could be viable, and not just on the popular Amtrak Northeast Corridor line that carries nearly 16 million passengers a year, many of them on spiffy Acela trains that thread from Boston to New York, Philadelphia to Washington.

Image Credit... Chris Gash

My Houston itinerary, for example, took about 24 hours from my front door to my destination, including the night’s lodging. It cost $432.79 ($348.60 in one-way airfare and $83.29 for the airport hotel, not counting meals.) By train, the total time would have been about 25 hours on a section of Amtrak’s Sunset Limited, which stops in Tucson and Houston on its long haul between Los Angeles and New Orleans. The train fare, including a private roomette with a sleeping berth, would have totaled $577, all meals included.

It’s almost 1,000 miles from Tucson to Houston, so the train-versus-plane option — though it would have worked for me on that trip — is less persuasive there than on Amtrak routes of roughly 500 miles with overnight schedules, when you’re going to be sleeping anyway.

Mr. Fels suggested more than a dozen such overnight routes with evening departures and early-morning arrivals.

These were among them: Richmond, Va., to Savannah, Ga., on the Silver Meteor route between New York and Miami; Charlottesville, Va., to Atlanta on the Crescent, which goes from New York to New Orleans; Eugene, Ore., to Sacramento on the Coast Starlight between Seattle and Los Angeles; and Chicago to Buffalo on the Lake Shore Limited, which goes from Chicago to New York and Boston.

Some critics of Amtrak in Congress and elsewhere deride the long-distance trains as a kind of subsidized luxury, providing “land cruises” for leisure travelers with unlimited time. But business travelers seldom go the whole route, Mr. Fels pointed out.

“Amtrak critics get preoccupied with the length of the route, end to end,” he said. “For example, the California Zephyr goes between Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area, about 2,500 miles — but few people on that train actually are riding the whole way.