northeast corridor journey
![[Worcester, MA]](images/worc.jpg)
I found
this pen at work. A new blue day dawns brightly.
It's 6 am; I'm at Route 128 Station waiting for a train to New York. The moon which I saw rising in the east last night at nine is now visible in the blue morning sky high over the station building. I feel weird; I haven't had any breakfast yet. I'll probably get something on the train, though.
Beginning in November I'll have to go to New York to get a train to Chicago unless I want to take a bus to Albany. Buses don't suck but they aren't trains. They get stuck in traffic, start and stop suddenly, and they're not nearly as relaxing. You can't get food on a bus.
People are starting to arrive now. The train is still 20 minutes away. I could have gone to South Station; the taxi fare would have been about the same. Amtrak does not assign seats so starting from South Station often means getting a better seat...
I'm on the train now somewhere east of Mansfield. It's 211 miles from Route 128 to somewhere. Is it Grand Central Station? That's where most of the old New Haven trains went, I'm told. Service south of New York operated into Penn Station, but north and east the trains went to Grand Central. I never set foot in either place before Amtrak except as a very young child.
Mansfield, says the sign we just passed...
Well, now we're on the other side of Providence, passing Milepost 193. Providence is only about twenty miles from Route 128; I had imagined it to be forty or fifty. Considering that it's almost an hour's drive from Boston I'm quite surprised not to find it farther away... An ancient military installation slides by, abandoned for some time by the look of it. A relic of the Cold War, maybe.
Milepost 165. Trees. Fog. It's a misty, moisty morning as my mother would say. I imagine we're still in Rhode Island as I haven't seen Kingston or Westerly yet. Evil construction. Crap for crap's sake. Crap gratia crapis. Greed gratia greedis. Slocum Grange, whatever that is. I thought the Grangers were some sort of farm lobby. Ain't no farms here. Trees, fog. More fog and fewer interruptions: it's the Fog Orgy®, 45 hours beginning Monday, January 23, on WHRB Cambridge. Well, what do you know? This actually looks like some kind of farm. A turf farm, perhaps... Kingston; milepost 157. More trees, more fog. The sun's starting to burn through, though.The sun has a habit of doing that. I love the sun. I love the earth, too.
Swampy stuff. It's good to live in a part of the country with lots of water. There are shit stirrers now, sliding by on the left. The sun breaks through. More trees and less static. We're almost there, says someone. Almost where? New London? Not bloody likely.
Milepost 150. Stubby pine trees. Sandy soil. We must be getting close to the ocean. This line has some spectacular ocean views. Here are swamps, and woods. You wouldn't know this for one of the most densely populated parts of America. Steam rising from the surface of a river. Major league fog. When the New Haven Railroad ran this line, did their trains go this fast?... More swamps and a clear field. Not agricultural, though; at least, not today. We're coming into Westerly, curving to the left. A town; Westerly Station. We zoom right through. A grade crossing, the first of the journey.
Milepost 140; boats in the water. I am seventy miles gone from 128 and this is Connecticut. Swamps. A landfill, the grave of thousands of tons of garbage. Salt flats, albeit overgrown with long grass. The sea! What bird builds its nests in those raised wooden platforms in the water? Here is an old resort. Stonington, Connecticut. Boats and tennis courts. More boats. No birds at all; usually there are egrets and swans by the dozen. Trees again. The fog is mostly gone now. Cormorants! There are some egrets and a couple of swans.
Milepost 133. Mystic. This part of Connecticut is beautiful. I should come down here sometime. Shallow coastal inlets. Seagulls. Noank. Milepost 130. Oooh... great blue heron. More grassy flats. Milepost 128. A rusted out railroad yard. An airport. Soneco Service, whatever that may be. No gas-wasting assholes here. All is still except for the train.
Trees. Entering the city of Groton, says a sign. Groton is across the river from New London. Here is the great highway bridge over the Thames; it looks like it was built to accomodate battleships. New London. Crossing the Central Vermont, or the New England Central as it now styles itself. There is the ferry boat to Long Island. New London Station. We stop. Across the river is General Dynamics; now there is an ambiguous name: General Dynamics. That could stand for just about anything. I guess not much is happening in New London because we're moving again. There are two cormorants and a bunch of seagulls. There goes the ferry to Long Island. Five swans in the water near the tracks. An old baggage car, yellow-- Union Pacific, maybe? Trees.
An Italian acquaintance of mine describes New England as green. He's right, and I'd grown so used to it that I hadn't noticed it lately. But it is very green and that comes from an abundance of water. The East is Green. California is not like that.
Milepost 119. How the miles rush by! Cormorants on the wing, five of them. Ducks: female Mallards, maybe, or American black ducks. There are no more black ducks in Boston; they're all Mallards. Here are gulls on a deserted beach. Very gentle wave action. No lifeguard on duty, no lives to guard anyway. A yellow house with a Yagi antenna on the roof. Mud flats; the tide must be out. Ducks, silhouetted against the reflected sun. Bedrock and trees. Here's another beach. No one swims; the water must be too cold. Milepost 111; I've come a hundred miles.
How far is New Haven from New London? Trees again. With this scenery the New Haven Railroad should never have gone bankrupt. Today Amtrak's Northeast Corridor is rumored to be profitable. Why not the New Haven? Incredibly, the fog has returned. There's some guy in a boat poking at something on the shore. We've crossed over some sort of river, and the fog is again gone, vanishing as abruptly as it came. If only conservatism were like that, a brief nightmare amid the dreams of a happy America. Perhaps it may be so; Bill is twelve points ahead in the polls-- and that was before this week's Democratic convention.
More trees. I do not know trees, or I would tell you what they are: maples or oaks or beeches. They are not willows. There is a pair of white swans in a creek. My friend Diane would love this. Milepost 100. We are more than halfway to New York, even if it is probably the wrong New York. The approach to Penn Station will be complicated and roundabout, involving something called Hell's Gate. A school looms momentarily through the trees, then vanishes and is left far behind. Allied, proclaims a parked moving van, and Smedley, Clinton, New Haven. That's wrong: it's Clinton/Gore, not Clinton/Smedley. And who can imagine a Smedley administration? "President Smedley today travels to East Lansing, Michigan, for a campaign rally and fundraiser..." No; it doesn't sound right at all. And New Haven? Who needs New Haven? Yet that's where we're going next, to exchange our diesel locomotive for an electric one.
Salt flats; beach houses on the distant shoreline. Goldenrod blooms in a field, a sign of summer's end. I am sad, for I love the summer. I live too far north... now here's some guy in the water with a net.
Milepost 85. We cross over a railroad track curving seawards; it's in pretty good shape. Now who do you suppose uses that track, and where does it lead? There ain't no train to Paris. Wouldn't it be cool if there were, though? There are a heron, an egret and a swan in an estuary to the left. The tide is out and much mud is exposed, glistening in the sunlight. There is no cloud in the sky, only blue and the haze of the departing fog on the horizon. Some of it may be smog, though.
Suburbia. Gas guzzlers, the first in significant numbers. This country spends more to move big hunks of metal than it does to move people. Now we're back in the trees again. We enter a tunnel; I didn't know there was a tunnel on this line. We pass through a second short tunnel and then curve leftwards. I see unmistakeable signs of a city: freeways and factories. The line from Hartford joins us on the right. This is New Haven, the city which defines the border between New England and what Joel Garreau calls "the Foundry." Of the much ballyhooed electrification of Amtrak's New England Division there is not a sign. Indeed, old towers that appear to have once supported a catenary have been cut down on both sides of the tracks. We slow; we enter the great yard at New Haven, passing from Amtrak territory to that of Metro-North Commuter Railroad. The sign at the boundary between the two marks the southwestern edge of New England. Now we are under catenary. Now would be a good time to place your trash in the receptacles. The power goes off. Welcome to New Haven.
A lot of people off our train are walking by on the platform to the left; I suppose they want to watch the locomotives being changed. A train of emus from the wrong New York pulls in on the next track. Two guys with radios meet a guy off the other train; they saunter off toward the front of our train. There is a lurch; methinks we have a new engine already. They've recently got very good at engine changes; it only takes a few minutes. Compared to the mess 449 and 49 go through at Albany it seems remarkeably easy. This is train #95, by the way, bound for Newport News, Virginia, although I plan to get off at New York-- the right New York not the wrong one. The wrong New York gets only commuter trains these days, which is why it's wrong. But it was not always that way. The empire service trains went there until a couple of years ago. Now everything goes to Penn.
We have power now; in fact, we're pulling out of New Haven. A frustrated Angola had no comment. Connecticut appears to run its own rail service between New Haven and New London. We should be doing that in Massachusetts. There should be trains running from Boston to Albany, Hyannis, New Bedford, Concord, New Hampshire, and Portland, Maine. But the Republicans-- fuck them!-- won't let it happen. They don't want to pay any taxes.
There are no mileposts in Metro North country, it would seem. There are only signs at irregular intervals. 66.56 may be significant. Alto Voltaje. 64.49. Those are indeed mileage signs. Here's the police station. The river. Bridgeport Steel Company, rusted out and abandoned. This is the Rust Belt, and once more I wonder if America could still muster the industrial capacity to defeat Germany and Japan if World War II were fought today. What a difference fifty years makes. We're crossing a big river now, and we appear to be in Stratford. Stop and Shop is here. New construction. Stratford, milepost 59. I cannot believe how fast time is passing. It still feels like early morning but it's probably 9:30. There's an old coal tower, a surprise. This line has been electrified for what-- seventy years? Rotair Industries; looks like it's still in business, too. I suppose they must make fans or blowers. There's a pile of rubble next to a church. More rubble. Someone sweet-smelling just walked by.
Someone's been working on the railroad. Major construction; it looks like they're building a new viaduct, and we seem to be on a temporary structure. This is Bridgeport. The new viaduct only has enough room for two tracks: big mistake. And--jointed rail! Replacement of Peck Moveable Bridge and Bridgeport Viaduct, says the sign. We are stopped; I didn't think we were supposed to stop here. And we're moving again; maybe the construction had something to do with it. Hey, a Connecticut train pulled by an FL-9 in New Haven colors just went by. There's a big power plant to the left. Housing projects. Shiloh Baptist Church. Dead factories; one showing signs of life. More projects. The new i-95: real rock. Public storage.
Milepost 53.83. The United Pattern Company; he's dead, Jim. Ferrolato Steel Company. BJ's Wholesale Club, which Diane and her husband refer to as Blow Job's. Pepsi-Cola. Someone on this train has a bad cough. There's a gas station with a weather vane in the shape of a whale. It has no clothes on. Weird offices or condominiums (condominia?). Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer, he's a demon on wheels! Pow, pow! Northeast Utilities Emergency Something-or-other; it's a power substation. Lots o' transformers, each testifying to Thomas Edison's pigheaded foolishness and lack of imagination. Egrets in an estuary, lots o' egrets. Egrets rule. They don't eat frogs in an estuary because they are not French egrets. When they leave the salt marshes and tidal estuaries, egrets become French. They will then eat frogs. But frogs are never eaten in estuaries; there are only English egrets there.
A freight train passes us on the left. Ooh, Conrail Quality. It says engine oil, dipstick inside. Funny, the guy in the cab looks perfectly normal; you'd never know he was a dipstick. We speed up and pass the freight train. A freight train with an Amtrak logo is not the Broadway Limited. Beyond the Mac is not a typewriter. HOCON Gas, Incorporated Even here there are trees. Rowayton, Connecticut. A woman walks through the car. I like women; I am a gynophile.
More trees. Noroton Heights. Mileposts on this line are scarcer than snowstorms in July. Milepost 34.71; less than 35 miles to the wrong New York. Here are the Metro-North Shops. Stamford. 32.97. We don't stop here. Old Greenwich. The heart of suburbia. When you see ads for The Club posted at the station, you know you're either in car theft city or paranoia prefecture. Cos Cob; I'd love to know where that name comes from. Milepost 22.9. We're travelling about as fast as the gaswasters on the freeway. 27.78. The other milepost must have been a lie. Are we in New York State yet? The cars have New York plates.
Milepost 25.75. Port Chester. Willow Motors; Hino Diesel Trucks. Path Mark Freshness. Not food, mind you, freshness. What bullshit! Why not Path Mark Food, for God's sake? Freshness is meaningless in a can. To 95; to 287. The road to Hell is paved by the Highway Trust Fund, your highway taxes at play.
Mamaroneck. The American Society of Mammalogists ought to heet here: Mammalogists at Mamaroneck. Larchmont. Leon's Taxi; Atlas Van Lines. East River Savings Bank. Mother Fucker Electronics (actually it's just MF Electronics, but how else are people likely to interpret it?). There's a building that looks like an old hotel but it just says K. Yonkers Contracting Company; Almstead Tree Company. Tree company? We run the tightest tree in the treeing business? I thought only God could make a tree.
Uh-oh. Rough track! We're on Amtrak track; I must have missed New Rochelle. Major egret action in the river. Mudflat city. The rails are bumpy; perhaps this division of Amtrak doesn't maintain its track as well as Metro-North. Now where in Hell's Gate are we? Milepost 10.87, I think. Where there's a bridge there's a marker. A blimp to the left; I wonder what that's all about. There's an airplane, a fair-sized one, landing to the left. Here's a tugboat with a big barge. We're on a viaduct now, high over New York. There are the buildings the fire department uses for practice. Lots of traffic in the river we're crossing. To the right is Manhattan. There's a lot of gas being wasted on the bridge to the right. We pass over the end of a subway line; is this Brooklyn?
The blimp is at ten o'clock high, much closer now. BEST MANUF- T - NG, reads a sign. The Sports Authority. We are joining the Long Island Railroad on the left. Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to paint DANSTER INCAIR on a concrete wall; one wonders why, since it doesn't appear to mean anything. I suppose people in these parts have little better to do with their time. They are probably watching too much TV. If drink makes you drunk and drugs make you drugged, what does TV make you? Televisioned? Vidded-out? TV'd? The World Trade Center looms at ten o'clock. HAROLD, reads a sign, and Thank You for Riding the M Long Island Railroad. IDCNY: what does that mean? Very rough track now. Tunnel; we're pulling into Penn Station. The journey is concluded.
Of course, the real reason egrets in estuaries don't eat frogs is because there aren't any frogs there. No amphibian can tolerate salt or brackish water.
[Since 1996, when I wrote this, the Corridor has been electrified all the way to Boston and now boasts Acela Express high-speed trainsets, which get you to New York thirty minutes sooner at twice the price. Such is progress. But the Chicago train was saved by John Kerry. Hooray!]