Posted on 08/29/2010 5:47:18 AM PDT by Willie Green
ON THE RAILS -- An 11-hour train trip? No, thanks. But four- to seven-hour trips are short enough to allow the novelty of the ride, the steady pace through unfamiliar country, to be an adventure.
So with the kids off to summer camp, my wife and I booked a train from New York to Montreal, stopping each way for an overnight stay in New York's Adirondack Mountains.
The trains cost $306 for the pair of us, and brought us to some of the best meals of our lives (none of them on the train, mind you).
The Adirondack left at 8:15 a.m. Saturday from Penn Station. It was full, and we made the rookie mistake of not getting in line until the boarding announcement. (As with the airlines, that's a cattle call, though without the mandatory shucking of shoes, emptying of pockets and other built-in indignities of post 9/11 flight.)
We entered a train where even a single open seat was rare, but an Amtrak conductor, unbidden, kindly asked another passenger to switch seats so we could have two together. We settled into seats roomier than those on jets and began a trip that got leafy before we left Manhattan.
The Hudson is twice the width of the Ohio, and sailboats began appearing before too far along, as the mansions of the lower Hudson Valley quietly showed us where much of America's Old Money (and plenty of its new money) lives. We were in Albany by 11:15 a.m., where nicotine addicts got their cigarette breaks, and we had 15 minutes to walk the station if we liked. Most people didn't because the freedom to move about a train at any time made that excursion redundant.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
They dropped a lot of coin on that trip.
$150 or so each, roundtrip isn’t all that bad. Try getting a plane reservation for that amount.
Taxis. Hotels. Restaurants.
He can probably afford it. :)
If you fly on a discount airline.. With the train you have no choice plus it is slow going by train..
The meals have to mentioned, because once they are, they are tax-deductible as an expense (against what the writer gets paid for writing).
For $250, they could have rented a nice, big car (like a Mercury Grand Marquis) for 4 days, and had a leisurely drive, going wherever they wanted, and spent less time traveling, too (it’s only 7 hours to drive, versus 11 hours on the train).
And had a car when they arrived in Montreal, if they wanted to see anything.
And had a secure place to store their things out-of-sight when stopping off along the way.
But if the trip is part of the vacation, then I guess the cattle-call lineup at the start, the 11 hours in a seat, the mandatory stops along the way are worth it.
No way it works other than as a fun, vacation activity, though!
It's a BEAUTIFUL drive, by car, most any time of the year, with lots of scenic spots off the beaten path that one can stop at, get out and appreciate and actually experience along the way (I have made the trip several times); and then you don't need to rent a car when you get to Montreal. And it's about a six hour drive.
The accommodations for the one over-night stay the author and his wife had, mid-trip on the way to Montreal comprised at least half the $306 each ticket, because the usual round-trip train fare is about $126 each, which is a highly subsidized fare to begin with. And a ten hour plus train trip, one way.
http://tickets.amtrak.com/itd/amtrak
Why the taxpayers should be subsidizing these folks' travel is beyond the ability of normal human beings to understand.
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