Recent content by fdaley

In other words, even though these trains perform well the great majority of the time, they do have catastrophic failures now and then. So if it's very important to reach your destination at a certain time, it's best to start early enough that you'd have time to make a Plan B if the need arises...

From Syracuse, Sunday is the same as every other day, with four departures for New York. The third departure is the Lake Shore Limited, which you probably ought to avoid as it is more prone to tardiness. The two earlier Empire Service departures generally perform well. But as Amtrak25 suggests...

Where was this notification given? When I checked yesterday there was no mention of it in the "service alerts" section of the website.

Also Metro North, which quit printing paper timetables after the pandemic hit, now has printable versions on its website. There was an intermediate period where the timetables were only viewable online in the old format, which was impossible to fit onto letter-size paper to print. The new...

I honestly don't recall whether those rooms had an en-suite wall, though I kind of think they didn't. It has been more than 20 years. I know there was at least one trip where we took a bunch of photos in one of the Chateau drawing rooms, so I'll have to rake those out and see if one of them...

We rode it nearly every summer or fall in the decade from 1994 to 2003, when it still ran six nights a week with the stainless steel consists and normally had a Skyline car and full diner as well as the Park car. Those were wonderful trips, and we visited lots of places around Nova Scotia, New...

Chicago-Detroit strikes me as one that's ripe for upgrading. The current 3-per-day frequency doesn't seem like enough given the size of the endpoints, and there are several decent-sized online cities. Plus Detroit is well more than halfway to Toronto, which is a really major metro with regional...

I think Dearborn, Mich., functions as a big park-and-ride for folks from suburban Detroit.

I doubt we will live to see it. Although still there, the northern half of the Sydney line has been out of service for several years now.

I dunno. I can remember some naysayers back in the late '80s saying that commuter rail would never work in southern California, that nobody would use it because everything was too spread out and Californians love their cars. And now of course there's a very extensive and well-used network of...

Well, assuming the trains have the same capacity, five trains serving a much larger market will necessarily be carrying a smaller share of that market.

I would think the online population of each route would be a factor in trains' market share. On population alone, for example, it seems likely that the Downeaster, with five round trips per day, is capturing a bigger share of the total Boston-Portland travel market than a Chicago-St. Louis...

If I am remembering correctly, Windsor Junction is about 12 miles west of Halifax. In the late 1980s, the westbound Atlantic was scheduled to cover the distance in 19 minutes. It stopped there to pick up passengers connecting from the train up from Yarmouth, which rolled through that junction on...

Oh, that must be really disconcerting. In that case, yes, taking the nearest route upstairs is much better than a walk along the length of the platform. If you go up to the old Amtrak concourse on the 8th Avenue side, it's easy to just go out to Eighth Avenue and cross the street to Moynihan.

If you're arriving on Amtrak and want to get up into the Moynihan hall, I do think the easiest way is to follow the yellow to that elevator at the far west end of the platform. If the arriving train pulls east along the platform, it can be a long hike, but it saves having to navigate the maze of...