Mind the Gap

One thing I enjoy about the holiday season is that it brings a general sense of festivity to the greater Washington region. And part of that means it's also model train display season. Exhibit A -- the train display at the U.S. Botanic Garden. The gardens normally host a beautiful train display inside, and typically a line snakes out the door. Families with young children are eager to see the trains chug through foliage and near detailed models of stations, farms and other landmarks. In past years, I've waited up to 45 minutes in said line. This year, as COVID-19 cases continue to surge due to the spread of the omicron variant, the display has been moved to the outside portion of the garden. I actually liked this setup better, because there wasn't a line and the display could be accessed from many points. Additionally, without a line I didn't feel a need to rush through, and was able to take it all in. Many of the trains themselves I remembered from past years, particul...

A lot of us have had to put our travel plans on hold for the past 14 months. But there's one place I'd been pining to see since it opened in January -- New York's new Moynihan Train Hall. New York has had a history of grand stations past. But the grandest of all, Grand Central Terminal, currently only serves Metro-North trains, and of course the NYC subway. Up until the spring of '91 some Amtrak trains ran out of Grand Central, but this proved inconvenient to passengers who needed to make connections and were forced to go from one station to the other. And then there's Penn Station. It too was once a beautiful, glowing station until it was torn down in the 1960s to make way for Madison Square Garden. The train station moved underground into the cavernous, often dingy confines that travelers have come to know. The station houses Amtrak, NJ Transit, Long Island Railroad and PATH trains in addition to the subway. While not the most glamorous of stations, it's gotte...

As it happens, I'm actually writing about this nearly two years after the fact, but so be it. I thought keeping a blog about my passion for trains and other forms of public transportation might be a fun activity, particularly during a pandemic.  Anyway, a couple years ago I decided it would be fun to travel from Washington Union Station to New York Penn Station, but instead of the normal speedy journey on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, I thought It'd be fun to see how realistic it would be to go from point A to point B using all public transit systems. Doing this, I found, is very possible although not the simplest. There are commuter trains connecting all points of the route except for a 20+ mile stretch between Perryville, Md. and Newark, Del., which is accessible by bus. Leg 1-MARC to Perryville, Md. I probably broke the spirit of my own adventure by Ubering to Union Station, but I only did so because I was catching a 6 a.m. train and Metro only starts running at 5 a.m. on...