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I can remember seeing trackside propane tanks with gas jets burning to keep important switches thawed out.

I would call it a tunnel too. If you're headed north, you go through it just before the station. And then a few minutes later, you go through a second tunnel at Riverside Park, after which you almost immediately go onto the high trestle over the James River.

The eastbound Lake Shore finally made it to Albany at 10:48 p.m. last night, about eight hours late, and arrived into Boston at 4:34 a.m. (due at 8:32p). Today's arrival is off to a bad start too -- didn't leave Chicago till nearly 2 a.m. and has been running about 4:30 late across Ohio this...

There is an element of culture and expectations here. As others have noted, you almost never see VIA Rail cancel its trains because of severe cold or snow. In a country where arctic cold is so common in many places (VIA runs to Churchill, for god's sake), there is an expectation that CN and VIA...

In those days the trains pretty much ran no matter what, and the railroads trumpeted their all-weather reliability in advertising as an advantage over planes and cars: "Your trip's a go, weather or no." Of course, they did have the occasional calamity, such as the UP/SP City of San Francisco...

Reading your recollections of the advent of the 1984 Panorama and the RTN coverage of the Skeena really made me kind of sad, because it reminded me of how much VIA still mattered all across Canada in the 1980s -- and how many people still depended on it to travel long distances. That pool of...

Ditto for Metro North. In the early '80s, one of the rush-hour trains to Poughkeepsie, leaving GCT about 5:15 p.m., had cars that had been redone for then-new Adirondack in the mid-70s, including some that I believe had been part of the Phoebe Snow's consist at one time. They still had D&H...

When we rode out to Prince Rupert in 2016, I looked into taking the ferry to somewhere in Alaska -- anywhere, really, just to say we had done it -- but found that to go anywhere by boat and get back to Prince Rupert would have required adding a week or more to our trip, and coordinating with...

That all sounds exactly right to me, in much better and greater detail than my summation above.

I believe VIA gave the Prince Rupert train the Panorama name only for a couple of years around 1984 when it ran through to Winnipeg. At the time, the Supercontinental had been canceled in the 1981 cuts, so the Rupert train was the only service west of Winnipeg on the CN, and there was no service...

I had forgotten till I read your post that there were a few heritage sleepers that were converted to retention toilets and put back into service in the late '90s. I never rode in any of those, but I recall now that they did run on the Three Rivers for a time. When I rode that train in 2002, it...

I think the 10-6 was basically the only heritage sleeper configuration that survived into the late '80s and early '90s on Amtrak, other than the slumbercoaches, which were considered a different class of service. The 10-6 was probably the most common configuration among the private railroads...

I remember seeing really long consists of heritage cars, maybe 13-15 cars, on the Crescent in the early '90s when it was carrying through cars for the Gulf Breeze. The slumbercoach only ran NYP-ATL, and I thought maybe one or more 10-6 sleepers also ran only from Atlanta north. Heading south...

The story from The Travel has a byline, but it reads like something that was written by AI -- basically a bunch of information that could be gathered from a Google search all stirred together without any real news to report. There's a lot about the Airo train sets, but I don't think the...

I think the Chateau roomettes were called duplex roomettes in pre-VIA days. Although they resembled the slumbercoach single rooms in terms of overlapping one another, I remember them as much more spacious, if maybe a bit smaller than a standard roomette. As I recall the Chateau cars were...

I think the upside of the old Union Station site is that when you cross St. John Street from there, the development pattern becomes much more compact and urban. So you could walk into the downtown from there, though it would be a hike to most things, and it's basically on the opposite side of...

I did ride in the drawing rooms a few times when the Chateau cars were still in regular use on the Ocean, in the '90s and early '00s, and once in the Park car drawing room. They carried a higher price than a bedroom but were more spacious and perfect for two parents and child, which described...

It was the mid-1990s. I never found an occasion to ride it. I believe Les Otten, who was the owner of the Sunday River ski area in Bethel at the time, was the prime mover behind it and talked hopefully at the time about connecting in Portland to the still-under-discussion Downeaster service. But...

Also the Ethan Allen now must reverse direction to get out of Rutland. And when I rode it southbound earlier this month, for some reason it crossed the Hudson River bridge and turned north onto the old Troy branch, then reversed direction again into the Rensselaer station.

I don't think it's all of a mile, but the train does have to reverse direction to get into and out of the Portland station. There has been discussion of building a new station with platforms along the main line to eliminate the need for this maneuver. The current station is an intermodal...