Back east

At long last, the (likely) final post in this series! At the end of the last post I was taking a luxurious sleeper room from Colorado to Chicago. When I got to Chicago I met up with my friend Patrick again and we went for a nice ride across Chicago to eat probably the best upscale mexican food I have ever had (it was too good to take any pictures evidently). 

Chicago has a really beautiful, cavernous union station from the 20s with ample seating.

In stark contrast to my private sleeper room from Colorado, I was travelling in coach from Chicago to New York on a sold out train. My seat mate was really nice though, and I found out he was on a much more epic journey than I was. He had traveled by bus from Ogden Utah to Chicago and was now taking the train from Chicago to NY to catch a flight from Newark to Ghana to see his wife. I also learned he played a black Joseph Smith in this irreverent, bizarre, though quite well produced music video his friend made.

One of the first sights we saw the next morning was the enormous Buffalo Central Terminal station, a gorgeous art-deco monolith that is all but completely abandoned. It seems like there’s some money/action around trying to revive this building, but I think we’re a long way from any trains stopping there. The “Buffalo” station on the train I’m on is a 20 minute drive from downtown Buffalo 🙁 

By far the scariest riding I did on the trip was through midtown at rush hour after getting off the train in NY. The bike infrastructure keeps improving in the city, but you still need to consider that cars, bikes, or scooters can come from any angle at any time.

Things calmed down a bit once I got onto the wide separated bike path on the west side.

The new bike path across the Brooklyn Bridge is roughly a thousand times better than trying to jockey your way through the droves of tourists on the deck.

I was in the city to see my Grammy who’s recently moved in with my folks and become very close with Lily the cat.

After a short visit I was back on the train! This time headed north towards western Mass for the very last stop on this trip.

I changed trains in New Haven for the Valley Flyer and immediately noticed the train I was about to board was special. I’m gonna digress pretty hard here into train nerd-dom and if you’re not here for that that’s a-ok, just skip past this section. 

The sort of fun fact about this train is that it’s the shortest Amtrak train at only 2 passenger cars and 1 engine, which is a coincidence for me because the Lake shore Limited I was on the previous day is the longest passenger-only train on Amtrak and can be over 16 cars long.

The much more fun and interesting fact about the train car in the foreground is that it’s one of, if not the oldest car that’s still in use by Amtrak. It actually predates the creation of Amtrak, and has a really interesting history.

In the 60s the passenger rail industry was struggling in the US and the auto industry was about to deal some fatal blows. However, the only thing the US loves more than cars is being better than other countries at stuff, and Japan had just put its high speed trains into service. Japanese trains blew the doors off of the US trains, travelling at over 130mph. 

In response, president Lyndon Johnson signed the “High speed ground transportation act” into law, putting federal money behind bringing high speed rail to the US. A few years later the Budd company (a domestic rail car manufacturer) released this, the Budd Metroliner, which went into service on the Pennsylvania Railroad between NY and DC in early 1969. During testing these trains were able to achieve a top speed of over 160mph, but due to a litany of issues they only really ever achieved 110-120mph in revenue service. One of those issues was that when these high speed trains would pass legacy commuter trains, they would create a low pressure air wave that sucked the windows out of the passing train. The windows on the legacy commuter cars were held in by wooden fairings, and they determined after a number of incidents that they could only run newer cars where the windows were held in by aluminum if they were going to pass the metroliner.

2 years later, after the complete collapse of the US private passenger rail industry, Amtrak was born. Amtrak assumed responsibility for passenger rail across the country from 20 different private operators, and that meant inheriting all of the (mostly derelict) equipment. Throughout the last 50 years Amtrak has been purchasing equipment of its own and retiring old inherited equipment. That is, except for the Metroliners! The metroliners in particular are of value because they are compatible with the more modern electrical train standards, and have a cab at one end where an engineer can sit and operate the train. That means on a short train like the Valley flyer, they can stick a metroliner cab at one end and an engine at the other and operate the train in both directions without having to turn it around. As of writing most of the metroliners have been scrapped, save for the few still in use by Amtrak and one completely original car that’s on display at a train museum in Pennsylvania. 

The refurbished metroliners look very similar to the rest of Amtrak’s northeast passenger cars, but they carry a special history. 

They also happen to be the only Amtrak train that passengers can see out the front of, albeit through three extremely gross panes of glass.

This evening’s valley flyer was really quiet, only 4 other passengers once we left Hartford. Since I was getting a ride (in a car) from western mass back to Portland this was the last train on my journey.

I was in western Mass to see a handful of friends, including Sonia who’s a Yiddish scholar and showed me how to spell my name (and hers) on this sweet type writer at the Yiddish book center in Hadley. If you’re ever in the area it’s worth a stop in.

My very last stop was in Greenfield to see my friend Clare and their cat Ford F150, who was a cute tiny ball of unstoppable energy.

Clare gave me a ride back to Portland and with that the trip came to a close!

I’ll likely do a short wrap-up/summary post with some film photos and stats, and hopefully it won’t take me another month to make it.