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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...

I would love it if a sleeper on 66/67 ran through to and from Roanoke. But the main market is between Boston and Washington. The sleeper that ran on the Night Owl between those points was always well used, and I rode it quite a few times in the '80s and '90s, especially on 66 from NJ/PA to...

Double track from Westfield to Palmer will be a big improvement and will certainly help to reduce freight-related delays. Of course, I can remember when this line had double track from Boston all the way to Post Road Junction, 187 miles to the west. Between this and the work on the Hartford line...

The highway drive time from Boston to Albany is about three hours now -- a full 2 hours faster than the Lake Shore's current schedule. So shaving off 88 minutes would go a long way toward making the train competitive. A travel time of about 3:30, while still somewhat slower than driving, is...

This, plus the Meteor is much faster from NYP to Jacksonville than the Star, given the latter's roundabout routing via Selma. From New England and Albany, the southbound Star requires a very early morning departure, and the northbound requires a late night -- plus the risk of missing the last...

There are elevators up to the Moynihan hall on all of the platforms used by Amtrak, including tracks 5-6. These elevators are at the far west end of each platform -- so at the rear of the train if you're coming in from Albany. How long a walk it is depends on how far forward they pull the train...

Changing our development pattern is really the key to making rail and transit useful to a much bigger chunk of the population. But in many communities developed since World War II, local zoning laws effectively prohibit the kind of density needed for walkable neighborhoods -- by restricting...