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The parking lot at Rensselaer is run by the Capital District Transportation Authority. I would certainly call them before I showed up with a school bus. In my dealings with them, I have not found them to be the most flexible organization, so my guess is they won't allow it. But it would...

That makes sense. And there's no reason for that second locomotive to go all the way to New York when it's only really needed for the sake of getting in and out of Rutland. It's still interesting to me that they go to the trouble of reversing again rather than just pulling off whichever...

I believe the second direction change at Rensselaer is something they started doing in recent months. Previously the Ethan Allen went directly into the station there, and both engines continued all the way to NYP.

Welcome to the group. Love the photos. I take it these are somewhere one side or the other of SLC on the stretch normally covered in darkness?

Yeah, you pretty much have to be at least 75-plus to remember that era, and for that matter, you probably need to be 60-plus to remember the pre-Amtrak era at all. I'm in the latter group but not the former.

In the '40s and '50s, the New York Central had a separate train, The Pacemaker, that was an "all-coach streamliner" for budget-minded travelers between New York and Chicago. It had dining, lounge and observation cars and ran on a similar overnight schedule, not quite as fast as the all-Pullman...

The compartment was a particular type of room -- two berths, but more spacious than a bedroom. In the consist list above for the 20th Century, there are a few cars that each contained 4 double bedrooms, 4 compartments and 2 drawing rooms. On the New York Central these were treated as the premier...

The drawing room had three berths -- one upper bunk and two lowers, one oriented along the side of the car and the other extending from the side toward the hallway. A "double bedroom" is just another way saying bedroom -- a room with two berths, as opposed to a roomette, which in the pre-Amtrak...

I think I recall reading that the New York Central ran consists up to 17 cars. There was also the all-Pullman Detroiter between Grand Central and Detroit, departing about 7 p.m. from each terminal and arriving about 8 a.m.

It is amazing to me how much passenger traffic the New York Central moved throughout the '40s and most of the '50s -- and how much switching they did en route. Buffalo Central Terminal in particular must have had switching crews busy most of the night to shift sleepers between consists headed...

Rockland is also not far from Port Clyde, the departure point for the boat to Monhegan Island, which I recall from an ill-fated attempt to visit the island years ago.

Definitely including all of these short-distance commuter runs would lower the average trip length to 37 miles. Without them the figure would likely rise significantly -- I'd guess to maybe 150 miles or more. Also figure that at that time, a much larger proportion of the nation's population was...

Do you know: Are there other intermediate stops besides Wiscasset contemplated between Brunswick and Rockland? At Bath, perhaps?

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The thrill of being out on the rails going somewhere is still there in spite of Amtrak's sometimes poor or inconsistent service. So if you love riding trains, you should still seek out that experience. The complaints here and elsewhere might help you decide to avoid certain trains or routes. In...

It's hard to sort out how many coach travelers opted to stay away because of Covid concerns vs. dining concerns. But in the winter of 2019-20 I started seeing the Lake Shore coming into Rensselaer from the west with just three coaches -- one for Boston and two for New York. Previously I don't...

I rode the westbound Lake Shore a lot in the mid- to late 1980s and certainly agree with Johnston that the experience in that era was superb. As a coach passenger heading back upstate, I always planned on dinner in the diner in those years when the LSL still left from Grand Central, and the...

I don't think it's realistic at this point to think the feds are going to pay 100 percent of the cost. If the state won't figure out how to pay its share, then everyone who might like to use the train will keep driving and contributing gas and other taxes into a system that only supports more...

Completely agree that the need is there and the benefits would be huge. If there were reasonably fast and frequent service from Boston through Concord to the lakes region, lots of people would use it. But I've been hearing about the possibility of a Boston-Nashua-Concord train for 40 years, and...

It's too bad the "I'm being held hostage" stories seem to get lots more attention than the "Amtrak got me home when nothing else was moving" stories, when in fact I think a lot more people had the latter experience over the decades. That said, there seem to have been quite a few stranded-train...