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When I took Downeaster 682 earlier this month, there was one Horizon coach at the east (north) end of the train, next to the locomotive, which was pushing. Otherwise it was an all-Amfleet consist including the business/cafe car at the west/south end. This was June 11.

Lake Shore 449, due out of Boston at 12:50p, was delayed by an unspecified "equipment issue" yesterday (6/24) and didn't depart till 3:12 p.m. It lost more time going across Mass., arriving at Albany at 9:01p (due 6:10). The Ethan Allen also ran into a "mechanical issue" almost immediately...

On June 11, we took Downeaster 682 from Freeport to Boston and then the Lake Shore 449 from Boston to Albany. The Lake Shore was filthy, with a layer of dirt and dust like the photo of the Capitol above, thick enough to write messages in. Particularly when you're boarding at the station of...

Friday 6/21 was a bad day for Empire Service trains. A disabled NJT train blocked access to the Empire connection out of Penn Station, forcing suspension of service between NYP and Yonkers for several hours starting in mid-morning. Nos. 281 and 283, the two Niagara Falls trains, finally were...

Yes, Room A in those cars is a drawing room. I haven't seen one of the Chateaus in revenue service on the Canadian in years, other than the ones that were gutted and converted to Prestige service. But perhaps some of them still run on the Ocean at busy times when they supplement with HEP cars --...

Well, I'll defer to you on the politics of it, which I'm sure you know better than I do, and I'm aware that the Liberals presided over several rounds of cutbacks too. And you're certainly right that the federal government regardless of party seems to have little interest in any serious...

If you can find one in service that hasn't been converted to Prestige class, the VIA Chateau cars have eight duplex roomettes. I remember riding in both the upper and lower configurations on the Atlantic and later on the Ocean in the '90s and early 2000s.

Definitely this, although the choice was made by the Mulroney government in 1989-90, rather than by VIA. Many of the services cut at that time were very well used. And the loss of connectivity that resulted from the 1990 cuts pretty much eliminated rail as a practical travel choice for those...

No difference in equipment or service. No. 283 is likely to be more crowded overall and typically jumps to higher fare buckets sooner.

When we rode it in 2016, the only food service was takeout from the Park car, which had an extremely limited menu. I would recommend bringing your own food aboard if you want anything more substantial than snacks, particularly on the Prince George-Prince Rupert leg, which is quite a bit longer...

In other words, even though these trains perform well the great majority of the time, they do have catastrophic failures now and then. So if it's very important to reach your destination at a certain time, it's best to start early enough that you'd have time to make a Plan B if the need arises...

From Syracuse, Sunday is the same as every other day, with four departures for New York. The third departure is the Lake Shore Limited, which you probably ought to avoid as it is more prone to tardiness. The two earlier Empire Service departures generally perform well. But as Amtrak25 suggests...

Where was this notification given? When I checked yesterday there was no mention of it in the "service alerts" section of the website.

Also Metro North, which quit printing paper timetables after the pandemic hit, now has printable versions on its website. There was an intermediate period where the timetables were only viewable online in the old format, which was impossible to fit onto letter-size paper to print. The new...

I honestly don't recall whether those rooms had an en-suite wall, though I kind of think they didn't. It has been more than 20 years. I know there was at least one trip where we took a bunch of photos in one of the Chateau drawing rooms, so I'll have to rake those out and see if one of them...

We rode it nearly every summer or fall in the decade from 1994 to 2003, when it still ran six nights a week with the stainless steel consists and normally had a Skyline car and full diner as well as the Park car. Those were wonderful trips, and we visited lots of places around Nova Scotia, New...

Chicago-Detroit strikes me as one that's ripe for upgrading. The current 3-per-day frequency doesn't seem like enough given the size of the endpoints, and there are several decent-sized online cities. Plus Detroit is well more than halfway to Toronto, which is a really major metro with regional...

I think Dearborn, Mich., functions as a big park-and-ride for folks from suburban Detroit.

I doubt we will live to see it. Although still there, the northern half of the Sydney line has been out of service for several years now.

I dunno. I can remember some naysayers back in the late '80s saying that commuter rail would never work in southern California, that nobody would use it because everything was too spread out and Californians love their cars. And now of course there's a very extensive and well-used network of...