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When I last rode the Wolverine in BC in 2018, I was given a copy of the day's New York Times, which really impressed me as this perquisite had been gone for some time from the Empire Service BC, just as newspaper delivery had been dropped from the LD sleeper cars. I guess the newspaper is gone...

It's the Northeast Regional menu.

Charlottesville, VA

If you have time to spare, you could take one of the Wolverine trains from Chicago to Detroit, taxi or bus across the river to Windsor, and VIA Rail to Toronto, and then the Maple Leaf to Niagara Falls, Ontario, which has the better view of the falls. But you'd need an overnight in Toronto and...

Another note about parking at Albany-Rensselaer: If you or someone in your party has a handicapped parking tag, presenting that at the booth when you leave entitles you to 50 percent off the price of garage parking, which makes the garage slightly cheaper than the most remote surface lot. In...

In general the advice here is sound: Book early to be sure of getting the rooms you want, and this makes it easier to plan the other elements of your trip. Booking early also used to mean that you'd also get the best fare, but that no longer is the case. In fact, you may have to shell out a...

Looks like all the upstate trains are operating normally this morning to/from NYP.

We took Maple Leaf 64 from Syracuse to Albany yesterday. It was the most sparsely populated train I have seen in awhile. Leaving Syracuse I counted a total of 45 people in the three coaches that were open, including about six of us who boarded there. Even with BC added in, I doubt there were...

I hope there is a contingency plan to start running some trains through to GCT if this lasts more than a couple of days. At a minimum, Amtrak needs to post some sort of coordinated schedule telling riders which MN trains they need to catch to make connections. Leaving everyone to find the Hudson...

Back when the Atlantic was still running, the crews used to joke that the train arrived into Brownville Junction, Maine, running on fumes so that VIA could maximize its savings while refueling there. In my experiences it does seem that the Canadian customs agents generally are much tougher on...

Well, you missed it by a few days, but at least the Crescent did get to use the VLII diners for a couple of years as they were intended. Here's the northbound Crescent set up for lunch service on Sept. 22, 2019, barely a week before the end, as it blows through Perryville:

More so, the VLII diners were designed specifically to support traditional dining, unlike the Amfleet cars. What really galled me at the time was that the Lake Shore, having gotten by with "diner lite" service in an Amfleet car for at least a couple of years while we waited for the VLII cars to...

That route from the 1890s seems totally amazing -- starting off on the B&M Central Mass. line and continuing on all of that long-gone trackage through northwestern CT and Pine Plains NY. The later routing using the NH through Danbury seems at least to resemble what freight trains did in my...

I think I remember seeing that train in an old Official Guide. Didn't it run through NJ via the Lehigh & Hudson River line?

I haven't been up on the bridge yet myself, but it is a long way up from the Metro North tracks, and the bridge extends eastward over a chunk of Poughkeepsie before making landfall. You would not want to hike from the station to the east end of the bridge, as it would be all uphill for about a...

Definitely the ride up the Hudson is way more scenic than either of the routes out to the eastern tip of Long Island. I took an early morning run yesterday from Albany down to Poughkeepsie and then to Beacon on Metro North and was still wowed by it, even though I've ridden that line hundreds of...

Well, by this definition, the northbound Crescent is now a daytime train from Charlotte to New York, though personally I found it much more useful as an overnight run for a lot of that distance.

I believe this train, The Westerner, was one of the many operational changes pushed through by Robert R. Young after he won control of the New York Central in a proxy fight and set out to make it more user-friendly. The creation of this train in 1956 basically severed the long-running South...

Yes, I think the extended Pennsylvanian was designed in part for mail and express business back when Amtrak was pursuing that. NYC-Cleveland makes a lot more sense to me as a day run, and could be achieved fairly easily by extending either the Pennsylvanian or one of the Niagara Falls trains...

When the trip gets to be more than 8-10 hours, I would much prefer to cover the distance on an overnight train than an all-day endurance run, though I really won't travel overnight anymore without a sleeper accommodation of some kind. The standard Amfleet I coach starts to feel a bit tedious to...