Back in the New York Groove (feat. subway, Metro North, and Amtrak)

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NEPATrainTraveler

Service Attendant
Joined
Sep 12, 2018
Messages
200
"Many years since I was here"



That's the opening line to the song "New York Groove", and a line that felt extremely relevant to me as I arrived in NYC for the first time since 2019. In this trip report, you will see bus, Subway, Metro North, and the shortest Amtrak ride I have ever been on yet. The events of 2020 prevented me from traveling and even after things started getting back to normal, Martz Bus's schedules never did. Currently there are no busses from Wilkes-Barre to New York between 6:45 AM (7 AM if leaving from the mall) and 12:30 PM on weekdays. In the past, there were busses at 7:20 AM, 9:35 AM, and 9:55 AM, all of which I have ridden at some point or another during the pre-pandemic days (though I always boarded the 7:20 AM one at WVM, making my departure time 7:30 AM instead of 7:20 AM). The 7:20 AM, aka Schedule 113, has since turned into the 6:20 AM, the 9:35 AM no longer exists at all, and the 9:55 AM is now weekends only. Since I was taking this trip during the week, the 9:55 AM was not an option (if I was to leave on a weekend day, the 9:55 AM would be the only bus between 6:45 AM and 12:30 PM). On top of this, the Shopper Special/Curbside Express no longer exists and the Big Apple Daily special is no longer offered either. I waited and waited for Martz to bring back the 9:35 AM run or at least have the 9:55 AM run on weekdays again or put Schedule 113 back to its original time slot, but none of this has happened so far. I was severely tempted to try and get to Scranton for FlixBus or Greyhound since they sometimes have departures that would get me to NYC in between the arrival times of Schedule 115 and Schedule 121 (aka the 12:30 PM run), but the horrendous reviews have made me stay away from those companies. Tired of waiting for Martz to fix their schedules and weary of Greyhound and FlixBus, I decided to work with what Martz currently gives me and and do an overnight trip to NYC by taking Schedule 121 to NYC and then taking an early afternoon bus back to PA the next day. Amtrak service to northeast PA can't come soon enough!



I took this trip during the end of July/beginning of August. The weather was hot, though not as bad as my August 2019 visit to New York. The bus ride itself was fine, though for reasons that were never really explained (we were just given a vague "safety" as the reason) we had to switch busses at the Stroudsburg/DWG station, resulting in us being late by about 15 minutes-ish. When I got off the bus at Port Authority, it was as if no time had passed at all since my last visit to the city. I quickly fell into my usual routine of making my way to the subway station and buying a MetroCard, even though OMNY exists now. My first subway ride of the trip was the A from PABT to Penn Station, a ride that has often been the start of many a NYC solo trip for me. I won't cover every subway ride in this trip report, but I will bring up ones I feel are interesting. When I got off at the Penn Station stop, I thought there would be signage for Moynihan, but I couldn't see any, so I exited into the old station as I have done many times before, but I was amazed by what I saw.



I barely recognized the place. The renovations made Penn Station look way nicer than it did in 2019. It is much more brightly lit now and the ceilings are higher. It was the stairs leading down to the tracks that made me realize I was in the LIRR concourse. One downside to this new Penn Station is the lack of shops and food places. Gone are things like the Kmart (whose presence in Penn Station always amused me to no end) and the McDonald's. I took a wrong turn at some point and missed the hallway that led to the West End Concourse and instead found myself at the old Amtrak section of the station. The waiting room was still there, but gone were the masses of people waiting for trains by the departure boards. I think the only people who were waiting for a train were in the waiting room. The Auntie Anne's is still there though. I ended up exiting to the street and as much as I wanted to see Moynihan, I lost time making the wrong turn and decided to just check into my hotel. I stayed at the New Yorker hotel. The hotel is pretty nice, check in was smooth, the room was a bit small and dated, but it suited my solo traveler needs just fine.



After that I rode the subway to Union Square, walked around a bit and then made my way to Grand Central. I always like going to Grand Central from Union Square via the 4/5. I took the 5 to get to Grand Central and for the first time ever I rode in the first car on the train. I even got to see a bit out of the front window, mainly the turn the train takes to go into Grand Central. The station still has its great old fashioned charm, but I wanted to see its most recent addition, Grand Central Madison. GCM looks nice, but much like the newly renovated Penn Station, food and shops are lacking. I also feel that while the architecture tries to resemble GCT, the white marble makes it look too bright and modern to me, so GCM never truly matches or feels like it is a part of Grand Central to me. The escalator to get down to the platforms is super long. I was severely tempted to ride a LIRR train out to Woodside or Jamaica, but lost my nerve due to the ever present feeling that my time was limited, so I literally just rode the escalator down and then turned around and went back up. As I walked back to GCT I kept seeing people with Yankees shirts on. I knew there was a game that night and was super super tempted to go (mainly so I could get MNRR crossed off my bucket list). I resisted temptation to ride MNRR that night, but as you will see my resistance would falter the next day. After leaving GCT, I visited my favorite book store Book Off. It is a really cool place featuring books, movies, games, and music in both Japanese and English. In the past I used to come out of that store with a basket full of cheap manga and anime, but this time all I ended up getting was an SNL DVD for around $10. I spent way more time than I should have in that store. I had a Broadway show I had to get to and I almost ran out of time for dinner. Luckily, the service was quick at the 8th Ave Shake Shack. Shake Shack may be a chain, but it is not one I have here in the W-B area and besides Shake Shack started in New York. I had a double cheeseburger and fries with a drink, which was a little under $20. More expensive than McDonald's, but cheaper than if I had gone to someplace like Applebee's. Shake Shack burgers are better quality than McD's too.



The show I saw was called "The Shark is Broken." It was a comedy about the making of Jaws. It was pretty funny, reminded me of a good SNL sketch at times. The tickets were pretty cheap (by Broadway standards) too, so that was nice. After the show, I rode the subway again. I had never ridden the subway at 10 PM before, but I made it through without incident. I was going to go to a bar called Barcade, but when I got off at 23rd street, I felt uncomfortable with how deserted the area was. I was already pushing past my comfort zone by riding the subway so late that I just didn't feel comfortable venturing further to 24th street, where the bar is, so late. So, I ended up taking the subway back to the hotel, but did so in a way that was so convoluted (because I wanted to arrive on 8th ave and not 7th) and involved a transfer that required me to walk along 14th street, that I may as well have braved the journey to Barcade. I took the 1 to 14th street then walked across 14th to the 6th Ave L, then the L to 8th Ave and then the E train to 34th street. All of the stations and trains I was on had at least a handful of people, except for a brief moment at the 6th Ave L stop where I was the only person on the platform. That felt freaky. When I walked up the stairs to exit to the street at 8th Ave, I saw the Empire State Building all lit up. It was a beautiful sight. I did take a picture, but after I had crossed the street. I went to CVS and got some snacks and drinks to take back to my room. After having a night time snack and pondering what I would do with the few hours I would have left the next day, I fell asleep.

(To Be Continued due to character limit...)
 
I started my day the next morning with breakfast at the Tick-Tock diner. I had some really good pancakes, but me and the server had some difficulty understanding each other and he came off as rude about it. Unsure if I would go back or not, but at least the food was good. I checked out of my hotel after that and decided to make a choice, a choice that would be the whole reason why I even bothered making this trip report in the first place. I noticed the previous night that it was possible to take a Metro North train to New Rochelle and then go back to Manhattan on the 125 NER. While I had initially planned to re-visit the High Line (haven't seen it since 2013), the urge to do a crazy train journey won out and I made my way to GCT once again. I took the 2 and the S shuttle and immediately made my way to the TVMs. Why the TVMs and not the MTA app? Well, part of this is due to me being used to using the TVMs since that is what I do with the subway and what I did when I took my LIRR trips years ago. The other reason is that I just didn't see the point in downloading the app when I don't even ride NYC's commuter rail that much. It took 5 tries before I finally found a machine that worked (one machine had part of somebody's card in it!). Once I got my paper ticket, I waited for boarding to start and once the sign by the track lit up (I forget the track number now) I made my way to the train. It was surreal to be doing this, to be taking a train from Grand Central that wasn't a subway. So many times have I visited Grand Central, yet never rode Metro North. I never had any reason to ride Metro North and even now I was just riding the train for the sake of riding it. I would be checking off the bucket list item of departing GCT via Metro North and partially fulfilling the bucket list item of riding Amtrak on the portion of the NEC that goes from New York to Boston (this item was only partially fulfilled due to me not going to or from Boston). Catching a Metro North train at GCT was something I had only seen in YouTube trip reports and the video game Train Sim World 2 up to this point. I showed my ticket to the MTA employees hanging around outside the train, as Amtrak has conditioned me to show my ticket before boarding, but MTA doesn't do that, so I felt a little silly.



Boarding the train, the first thing I thought of was how similar it was to a LIRR train. The train was an M8 and aside from the red seats, it looks incredibly similar to the M7. I sat down at a forward facing seat by myself on the right-hand side of the train. When the conductor came to check tickets I think I was the only one using a paper ticket. Everyone else was using the app. Once the train started moving out of the station, I made the decision to roll the dice and booked a ticket on 125 NER NRO to NYP, roughly 40 minutes before it was scheduled to depart. The ride was mostly uneventful. We slowed to a stop after Harlem 125th Street, but we got moving again and ultimately was on time to NRO. As far as scenery goes, emerging from the tunnels leading to GCT and seeing upper Manhattan was pretty cool and crossing the Harlem River was pretty neat, but after that the scenery was kind of boring. You go from seeing urban landscapes in Manhattan and The Bronx to a bit of suburbia around Pelham and then back to urban landscapes again around New Rochelle. Overall, the experience of riding Metro North really isn't that much different from LIRR other than scenery.



As I had expected, Amtrak was running late, 15 minutes late to be specific. I used that time to explore the New Rochelle station. Metro North dropped me off at Track 4, so I had to go up the stairs, across a bridge and then back down more stairs to reach the station building. The building was small, but nice, painted with pictures of the city's landmarks. There was a station agent and a Quik Trak kiosk, but the store inside the station was closed. There were also some displays talking about the history of the city. I didn't have time to explore the city, so I made my way back across the bridge to track 2 where Amtrak was scheduled to arrive, though all the departure boards had a 4 super imposed over the two, luckily both track 2 and track 4 use the same platform.



Finally, 125 pulled into the station and when I saw that ACS-64 and the familiar Amfleet I coaches, I felt all warm and fuzzy inside. When I stepped into the Amfleet I coach, it felt like I was coming home. The Northeast Regional was my first ever Amtrak route, after all. The seats were still comfortable as I had remembered and the leg room was better than Martz's. Compared to the Hiawatha's Horizons, I say legroom and comfort are pretty similar. I was thankful that the conductor didn't judge me for making such a short trip, he just simply reminded me that NYP was the next stop. As is tradition with me and Amtrak rides along the NEC, I was not able to snag a window seat, so I had to sit on an aisle seat on the right side of the train. I was still able to see the scenery though and I have to say the view of the Manhattan skyline while crossing the Hell Gate bridge is arguably better than the view you get coming up from Jersey. Seeing Sunnyside Yard was really neat too. Saw plenty of LIRR trains with a touch of NJT rail in the mix too. I was tempted to go to the Cafe car, but I didn't want to miss out on the scenery. Going into the tunnel from Queens into Manhattan made my ears want to pop, which is something I noticed on my LIRR rides too, but rarely something I get going from Jersey into Manhattan. Arrival into Penn Station was only a little bit late, much less late than my previous NER rides. I got turned around at first when I got off and almost ended up at the old Amtrak area, but thankfully I remembered what others had said in their Moynihan Train Hall trip reports and turned around and found the right way to Moynihan Train Hall.



Much like my ascending the stairs the previous night had led me to seeing the Empire State Building all lit up, ascending the escalator for track 11/12 led me to see the famous clock inside Moynihan Train Hall. This to me was just as iconic as seeing the Empire State Building all lit up. Now, I've seen many, many high quality videos of Moynihan on YouTube, but seeing it in person is a sight to behold. I think it might actually give GCT a run for its money! I walked around a bit checking out the station and a bit of the West End Concourse. I found the hallway leading to the subway, which I have made a mental note of. I also discovered the dining hall of Moynihan to be, in the words of a redditor, "bougie." Indeed, it has a very upscale vibe. Gone are familiar things like Nathan's or that local pizza place whose name I forget, but had some rather good pizza. Sure you can get pizza in this "bougie" food hall, but instead of a coke or pepsi you get served craft soda. I held off on getting anything here and made my way to Midtown Comics in Times Square. Disappointed in their selection, I went back to Book Off and bought a graphic novel from them instead.



Now most people would walk from here to get to PABT, but I am not most people. Instead, I took the B train to 53rd and 7th and then the E to PABT. Transferring between the B/D and the E is super easy, just go up a flight of stairs and you're on the E platform. I've also done it where I took the B/D to Columbus Circle and taken the A/C to PABT, which is also an easy transfer. I got pizza from Villa's inside PABT which, while a chain, is rather nostalgic to me as I would often get a slice before heading on the Martz bus home.



I took the 1:45 PM bus back home. I chose that departure so I could take LCTA to get home, but in hindsight I should have just chosen a later bus and got a ride home from family. It was an uneventful ride. Thus my trip was over. Overall, I enjoyed myself, but despite staying overnight, I really felt like I didn't have enough time. Some NYC trips leave me exhausted, some leave me feeling just right, even energized, and others leave me thirsty for more. This was one of those "thirsty for more" times. In the future, I will hold out for times when I can get a ride for the 7 AM mall departure, so I can do a day trip and have family pick me up from the mall at night. I managed to get one of these rides to the 7 AM bus for my upcoming Chicago/Milwaukee trip, allowing me to take Amtrak both ways instead of only on the return journey.
 
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