This coming Monday I’m giving at talk at HighEdWeb New England about collaborative development in open source, focusing on liberal arts colleges. If this were one of my movie reviews that would be the “A plot.” The “B plot” is that I’m taking the train to the conference, and that unusually for me it’ll be 100% new mileage.
The conference is Mount Holyoke but I’m taking the Vermonter from New York up to Brattleboro. There are two reasons for this. The first is that my friend who’s picking me up lives closer to Brattleboro than Amherst. The second is that this train will be rerouted to the west bank of the Connecticut River in a year or two, and I want to ride the old route before that happens. Again, I’m that guy.
The ride in from Easton to New York was uneventful. Trans-Bridge Lines does a good job. Its buses are comfortable (for 90 minutes anyway) and the free wifi gets the job done. I-78 was remarkably empty. The only hiccup was finding New York Penn overrun with mouth breathing collegians dressed in green. Sigh. Amtrak Police finally showed up with a bullhorn and cleared them out. Yay!
Today’s Vermonter has five Amfleet cars: four reserved coaches and a cafe/business class car. At the front is an EMD AEM-7, one of Amtrak’s venerable “toasters” now in its fourth decade of service. It brought the train up from Washington and will pull it to New Haven, where we’ll swap it out for a GE P42DC “Genesis” diesel locomotive. We have to do this since there’s no electrification north of New Haven. Lunch today consisted of a turkey panini (good), hummus plus pretzel bits (okay), and iced tea. I’m pleased to finally ride over the Hell Gate Bridge but it really is more impressive from the park below looking up.
Early into New Haven and the power change starts at once which means no head-end power (HEP). I think of this as a staple of American railroading, though very few passenger trains do it now. The long-distance trains which travel south from New York (Silver Star, Silver Meteor, Crescent, Palmetto) change engines in Washington. The Vermonter does here in New Haven. The Pennsylvanian does in Philadelphia. I think some of the upstate New York trains do in Albany (switching from dual-mode electro-diesel to straight up diesels). Fascinating to think about the long-haul diesels which run, essentially uninterrupted, for fifty hours on the Western trains.
I hope I don’t offend anyone (too much) when I opine that Connecticut, at least what I can see of it, is ugly. Admittedly March is an unkind month for viewing the outdoors when there’s no snow on the ground.
We hit our dwell stops (New Haven and Springfield) with plenty of time to spare. Amtrak’s issuing a faster timetable on Monday, and I’d say that’s reasonable. I’ve arrived or departed from Springfield numerous times over the years but this is the first time I’ve headed east. We go as far as Palmer, and then perform a thankfully rare “backup” maneuver. There’s no northeast/southwest connecting track at Palmer, so we have to make what amounts to a J-turn in railroading–crossing the connecting track, stopping, throwing a switch (manually, no less), then reversing direction. The re-route I mentioned earlier will eliminate this step.
Here’s some very crude text art illustrating what we’re doing:
C
\_
\\_________________
A_____________\_________________\(E)______B
\
\D
A-B is the CSX main between Springfield and Boston. C-D is the New England Central Railroad. The direct intersection between the two has no switch. We pull past toward B to the switch at (E), then backup on to the second track which links up at C. It’s horribly slow and inefficient. You leave Springfield at 3:15 PM. By 3:45 PM you’re just getting down with this nonsense and heading north.
Amtrak’s obviously embarrassed about it. There’s a nice long warning about it over the PA, emphasizing that this is normal and planned. I think the only constituency who enjoys this are the railfans who gather since it’s such a great photo-op.
I’m now on the stretch that Amtrak will leave in a year or two. This New England Central RR track is rough; some stretches are worse even than CSX around Buffalo, which has always been my “gold standard” for an unpleasant ride. It makes no sense to rehabilitate it of course when Massachusetts and the Feds are fixing up the new, more direct, route. I don’t disagree with the logic at all. Still, damn. There’s some talk of new service over this route to link Amherst with New London. I don’t see it getting done without serious federal money, and there are other more pressing passenger rail projects.
As I submit this we’re fifteen minutes out from Brattleboro and dead on schedule. No better way to travel.