FOR some weeks we've been talking about trains and the very impressive areas reached travelling on them. But what kind of people does one meet when they set off by train off on a long-haul, cross-country adventure?

Come along as we introduce you to a cross-section of those we met on Amtrak's Southwest Chief to Albuquerque, New Mexico and the Empire Builder to Whitefish, Montana.

They're diverse, often colourful and take especially interesting trips. All seem to be addicted to train travel and lead active lives that seem to keep them in perpetual motion.

Obviously one can't generalise. Perhaps we were just lucky. Most of the passengers we got to know were met over meals in the dining car. It's railroad practice to seat people together at tables for four. Out of 14 meals on the two trips, only once were we seated with two people you'd rather not ever encounter again.

That glum, very dour Minnesota couple not only didn't speak to us, but exchanged few scant words with each other. Communications in that household must be deadly dull. They were in the West visiting friends . . . one finds it hard to believe they had any.

Otherwise, all people we were seated with were interesting and often very out of the ordinary, the kind you chatted with during the entire trip.

The first meal was a pleasant introduction, a World War Two veteran from Kansas City fulfilling a lifelong dream to experience a train ride somewhere other than the troop train that carried him off to war. Now he was anxious to buy a 30-day pass and cover the country.

The veteran and his wife impressed us as "salt of the earth" types, those newsman Tom Brokaw labelled "The Greatest Generation" in his coverage of World War Two veterans.

They were so obviously very decent people, who sadly lamented changes in a country they once considered such a different place. It was hard not to agree with them.

Next morning at breakfast, we met two passengers who live on an island in coastal Alaska.

"We're pretty much isolated all year, so when we vacation, part of our enjoyment is encountering the great variety of personalities one meets on trains," one said.

One well-travelled couple we ate lunch with were from coastal Huntington Beach, California en route cross country to Maine where they would spend their summer in a beach cottage near Bar Harbour.

The husband was very partial to New Mexico, especially the area around picturesque Cerillos, which Robert Redford used as a location in his 1988 movie . As the train passed that interesting town during our meal, he lamented a preference for spending time there.

"But you know I like to be near the water," countered the wife. "We live on the water all year in California," he answered. Just that brief encounter left little doubt who made travel decisions in that family.

Both did admit they "like to go into Maine village shops and talk to shopkeepers for two hours", and the reluctant Maine-bound husband said: "The train ride is the trip."

At the opposite table a stylish-looking couple from Italy were equally enthusiastic about new Mexico's beauty. Their business was creating hand-painted silk scarves sold in fashionable shops.

"It's our choice to see your country at eye level rather than fly over it at 30,000 feet. Can you imagine seeing Tuscany only from the air and never from the ground? It's the same here."

There was a very pleasant woman, now living in Grants, New Mexico, whose father had come to Los Alamos to work on the Manhattan Project and his family stayed on. Originally from the Cedar Creek area of Virginia's Shenandoah, she returns there for visits, torn between the two places.

It seemed a good idea not to mention how our ancestor General Philip Sheridan's decisive victories in that very Cedar Creek area played a decisive role in Lincoln's re-election and the north's Civil War victory. We remembered all too well the reaction when we asked about his headquarters during a trip there a few years ago.

A couple of hundred coach passengers boarded in Kansas City, Chicago-bound for Memorial Day weekend. Two very bright young African-American students we ate breakfast with were on their way to participate in a debate at De Paul University.

About to graduate from high school, they were enthused about their college future and teachers travelling with the student group were obviously proud of their young achievers.

north on the Empire Builder, first people we met were a family from Mukwonago, Wisconsin, a town where we attend a couple of large farmers' markets every summer. Indian for "Place of the Bears", it's at the edge of a lovely area carved into moraines when glaciers receded.

A very youngish grandmother, two daughters and college-age grandchildren were all in roomettes bound for Portland, Oregon. Once there, they'd rented a beach cottage to enjoy a family reunion.

On a less happy, instead sadly poignant note, was a California grandmother taking her troubled teenage granddaughter to her new home in Minnesota.

Abandoned by their mother, the ageing grandmother had unsuccessfully attempted to raise her two grandchildren holding down several jobs. Now, the girl with disabilities was being adopted and the grandmother travelling there with her, anxiously trying to maintain a close connection.

Conversation with a very personable man who joined us for dinner turned out to be exceptionally interesting. Very well travelled, his knowledge of the transportation industry was definitely far above average.

Small wonder . . . he was transportation editor of a Tulsa, Oklahoma newspaper. He'd become so disenchanted with flying, he was following a quite complicated itinerary back from California to Oklahoma by train rather than fly.

It meant leaving the train in Hutchinson, Kansas at 3 a.m. and catching a bus for the long ride to Tulsa where he was expected to be at his desk writing a column early the next morning.

Although she wasn't on our train, talking travel with a local pharmacy store supervisor convinced her to schedule just such a trip on the Southwest Chief. Her granddaughter was about to enter college and it was the grandmother's intent to take her there and help her settle in.

It turned out to be an eye-opening encounter. We hadn't realised her son-in-law was a member of a small Midwest Indian tribe, now wealthy beyond their imagination because of overflowing casino revenue.

The tribe decided to distribute some of that wealth in a unique . . . probably controversial way . . . by giving each young person around $400,000 outright at age 18, plus a regular monthly stipend of a couple of more thousand indefinitely.

Adult tribal members received a house. The grandmother was worried about how to help guide the youngster down the right path, since she showed absolutely no interest in learning how to handle money. She was already lounging on a Jamaican beach for the summer enjoying her new-found prosperity, spending her new-found affluence with abandon, and grandmother thought the work ethic was forever lost.

, we'd encountered something similar years ago on the Ute Reservation. Because of new-found mineral wealth, each member of the tribe . . . man, woman, child . . . received $600 per person per month.

They'd go into a shop, buy a coke and put $20 on the counter and walk out. Because money wasn't important in their culture, they were sadly taken advantage of. Very aged Indian men began appearing with very young belladonna (white) wives and small children. Other tribes more wisely used their mineral wealth for schools, roads, health and so on.

We've already mentioned the ultimate passengers . . . the Canadian couple who had been away from Victoria, British Columbia for a year on their catamaran. They had now sold it and were going home to sell their other boat and take off on Japanese motorcycles. For long-distance travel, they were right up there with the couple who had travelled from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Seattle to take a Holland America cruise to Alaska. Then travelled north to Whitehorse, Dawson and Fairbanks.

We'd learned about their adventures at the train's wine tasting when homeward bound. He said: "On planes you don't meet people. This is so much more fun."

A very sophisticated Connecticut couple we met at the outbound wine tasting were heading to Fairbanks, Alaska to visit their son. Also train enthusiasts, they'd boarded in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Because our family has early 17th-century roots in both Connecticut and Massachusetts, that conversation led in an interesting direction when we all started comparing family roots and early settlements.

Turns out they lived near the museum-home of our great-great-great-great grandfather, Israel Putnam, who had led the Continental Army in early days of the American Revolution under George Washington.

Hers was Cotton Mather, a name that became infamous in early New England and led her to remark: "It's still a challenge to carry that name as part of your heritage."

It's definitely not our intent to make railroading sound Utopian. There are flaws, mainly in the dining room where food is good, but service often aggravatingly indifferent, orders mixed up and a don't-care attitude often evident.

Three of our porters on these trips ? Julio, Candace and Paul ? were excellent. Prince, on our return from Montana, was totally disinterested and obviously wished he was somewhere else. He was certainly never around.

We boarded what was supposed to be a clean room in Whitefish to find an empty bottle of Black Velvet scotch left in our sink's wastebasket, along with a number of cups from the drinker.

Are we ready for yet another long-distance train trip regardless of these small flaws? Absolutely.

They're minor annoyances compared to the joy of relaxing and watching the world glide by. Everything else about railroading is very special.