Last month, Amtrak notified 115 writers that they’d been selected as semi-finalists for a residency on one of the company’s fifteen long-distance routes, complete with meals and a “private sleeping roomette equipped with a desk, a bed, and a window to watch the American countryside roll by for inspiration.”

Part of an ongoing PR effort to rebrand itself as a classic, more cultured form of travel, the residency has generated enthusiastic praise from writers across social media as well as in high-profile publications like the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review.

In the latter, Jessica Gross, a New York-based freelancer who received a trial residency earlier this year on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited route, extols the virtues of writing by train, describing Amtrak’s sleepers as “cozily small, like a carrel in a college library.” Likewise, Adam Kirsch waxes romantic in the New Republic on the affinities between writing and rail travel, contending that “to ride the train . . . is analogous to choosing to write a book when you could tweet or text. It means refusing the ‘best’ option our technology has to offer, in the name of an ideal other than speed and efficiency.”