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While driving home from a Christmas visit to the ancestral homestead in Connecticut I made my usual coffee stop in Old Saybrook (Ashland Farms Coffee, great local place next door to the Amtrak/SLE station). I noticed that the 1873 station building was closed and blocked off and that ticketing and wa...

The main problem with Boston & Maine intercity trains as they approached their end in the mid-1960s was probably the lack of food and beverage service. Imagine spending all day on one of the B&M/CP Boston-Montreal runs with nothing but water from the drinking fountain at the end of the car. ...

One more way to make the system less passenger-friendly. It's policies like this that lead me to fly Southwest (no charge for changes although you may pay a higher fare) whenever I'm aviating. Frequent train service in the Northeast Corridor is one of its major assets and this change would impose a ...

The overnight Caledonian Sleeper operated by Scotrail between London and various cities in Scotland is all-sleeper consist with first and standard class rooms. I rode the British Rail equivalent some years ago before privatization and it was a great way to travel between London and the Highlands. ht...

Heard this early 80's and 3rd-hand, so deets might be contestable. Sometime in the early-to-mid PC era, bilevel open-top rack service was initiated at Readville, and the RR or service contractor hired Wide World Photos -- the commercial and library part of Associated Press Photos --- to commemorate...

No. It was a way of keeping coach seats available for long distance riders who were paying higher fares. Those were the days before computerized yield management.

I495 is a mess, as is Rt. 128/I95. Traffic capacity is maxed out at rush hour, late morning, early afternoon, and holiday weekends. The ubiquitous "construction projects" mouse things up and it often takes Waze and some well placed roads to get anywhere to the northeast of Worcester in a ...

Back on topic- how involved would getting WOR-Ayer up to snuff be? Im sure its not trivial but as compared to the alternatives it shouldn't be that bad? As Mr. Racer notes above, it's roughly 28 miles of 10 mph track. I don't know the going rate for trackwork these days but I'm sure you're looking ...

So should we assume they won't fly either? It must be tough to live with such a sheltered, fearful attitude. I'm well over 55 and somehow I'm not terrified by my neighbors when I ride MBTA or Amtrak trains. Guess I must be living dangerously in my old age.

While we're at it, why can't I ride a train to Manchester, Concord, or Lebanon, NH from Boston? For Manchester and Concord, it's because the MBTA can't operate outside of Massachusetts without financial support from the neighboring state (as Rhode Island currently provides), and the New Hampshire l...

The Red Line between Davis Square and Alewife burrows under the right-of-way of the B&M's Hill Crossing Freight Cutoff, which crossed Somerville and Cambridge. At Alewife, station construction led to the abandonment of the B&M's Bedford Branch, which at the time ran from West Cambridge to Be...

Between Metro North commuter congestion west of New Haven and drawbridge-related movement limits on the Shore Line east of there, isn't Boston-New York basically maxed out on capacity for additional Amtrak runs? If so, it would seem that adding these proposed long distance locals would require cuts ...

The creation of Amtrak was a political response to the bankruptcy of Penn Central and the accelerating pace of train discontinuances in the late 1960s. Things had gotten to a point where there would be few trains left within a few years. Most railroads were loosing money of passenger trains in the 1...

The cars in question are former Amtrak/Connecticut DOT Budd SPV-2000s that were converted to non-powered coaches with commuter seating after only a few years of self-propulsion. They last ran in Shore Line East service and were sold off by CDOT maybe a year ago after years in storage. Their current ...

I am going to use this phrase to describe what the railroad tracks and station platforms will go through at Hartford-"Providenced." I think up until the late 70s to early 80s, the Providence Station was at grade but then it was built underground. The switch at Providence happened in June ...