The Bus

This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

I’m sitting on a bench at the Metropark train station in Iselin, New Jersey. It’s January 23. It’s very cold. I’m pondering how it came to this. Some form of cosmic retribution for the near-perfect runs on the Vermonter and Silver Star earlier in the month?

It started well enough, with Ken dropping us off at the Easton Bus Terminal a little before 8 AM. We planned to take the 8:10 Trans-Bridge Lines bus, which would deliver us to New York by 10:00, more than enough time to catch the 11:35 Northeast Regional (train 125) for Washington, D.C.

It went wrong almost immediately, as multiple crashes in the cold, snowy weather turned I-78 into a gigantic parking lot. By 10:20 or so we had reached Terminal A at Newark Airport (nearly an hour late), and the traffic situation into New York didn’t sound promising. Google Maps predicted an arrival in New York at 11:20-11:30, which was far too close for comfort.

If we misconnected in New York with 125 we were out of luck on the Amtrak front. 125 is the last train with a valid connection to the Capitol Limited, and the last train period scheduled to reach DC prior to the Capitol Limited‘s departure owing to weather-induced cancellations. If we arrived late into New York the only choice would be to rebook for the Lake Shore Limited, accepting the necessary repricing and likely unavailability of sleeping accommodations. I’ve documented at length why the Lake Shore Limited isn’t a desirable option.

The alternative was to bail out at Newark, ride the AirTrain out to the airport train station (on the Northeast Corridor), and catch our train south of New York. Using the last of my laptop’s battery I worked out a plan. We would get off at Newark, ride the AirTrain to station, and hop a New Jersey Transit train to Metropark in Iselin. As we walked through the terminal I called Amtrak and adjusted our itinerary to originate from Metropark instead of New York. We left the Trans-Bridge bus to its fate.