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northeast corridor journey

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vermont foliage flyer

vermont foliage flyer

Our special train gleams in the early autumn sunshine at the former Central Vermont Railway depot (now the Windsor Station Restaurant) at Windsor, Vermont. We are on a day trip sponsored by the Massachusetts Bay Railroad Enthusiasts; our train consists of Amfleet long-distance coaches, MBTA Messerschmitt commuter rail coaches, and the luxury private car Caritas. There is also an Amtrak food service car.

Our trip started from Boston's South Station at eight o'clock in the morning. From Boston to Palmer we travelled on CSX's ex-Boston and Albany line through Framingham and Worcester; this is the line that ran near my grandparents' house in Wellesley Farms, whence we used to walk to the station around three in the afternoon to watch New York Central's New England States go by on its way to Chicago. My grandfather used to buy his newspaper at the station most mornings, and there was always a commuter train or a freight to watch. Even then, in the mid 1960's, the Boston and Albany was only an echo of the great four-track main line it had once been, and the trains looked old and rusty.

West of Worcester we roll past some canoeists in a lazy meandering river typical of eastern Massachusetts. The water in these rivers tends to look very dirty because of a brown pigment that leaches from the soil; a colleague of mine who once tried scuba-diving in the Charles River told me afterwards he couldn't see his hand six inches from his face. Nevertheless the water is pretty clean. The upper Charles is often swimmable.

Water has ever been New England's principal blessing. Before the age of steam, water powered mills were the heart of cities like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire. They spawned America's industrial revolution, and it is said that by the beginning of the Civil War Massachusetts had a greater annual industrial output than did the whole southern Confederacy.

The trees are just starting to turn as we cross over another river farther west. We are in the hills of central Massachusetts between Worcester and the Pioneer Valley. Much of the state was once farmland in the days before the far more fertile lands of the midwest were settled. Over the past two centuries almost all the farms were abandoned and the land has returned to forest. Stone walls that once marked the boundaries of fields and pastures, the product of many years of hard work, can often be found in the deep woods.

Here is a surviving farm on the ex-Boston and Albany line not far from Palmer. The biggest industries in Massachusetts today deliver services such as health care, education, and financial management; the high technology sector is strong but this too is a service industry. Relatively few things are made or grown here any more; I fear that in a re-run of the Civil War today the once-dominant northeast would be hard pressed, particularly if the southwestern states took the side of the south.

Henry Hobson Richardson designed this stone depot at Palmer and many others along the B&A. This station, completed in 1885 at a cost of $54,000, sits at the junction of the ex-B&A and New England Central's ex-Central Vermont lines. No passenger train on either line stops here today, although Amtrak's Boston - Chicago Lake Shore Limited rolls by once a day in each direction, as does the Boston - Washington train formerly called the Bay State.

Here is the west end of the Palmer depot. The track in the foreground is the single remaining through track on the ex-B&A, while that in the background is the ex-CV line to New London, Connecticut. Our train is on a track connecting the two lines; from here we will follow the ex-CV northward to Vermont. Amtrak's Vermonter, running daily between St. Albans, Vermont, and Washington, DC, uses this same connecting track. Before 1995 the Montrealer, as it was then styled, was an overnight train to Montreal and ran on the CV between that city and New London; today it runs via Springfield and Hartford on the ex-B&A and ex-New Haven "Inland Route".

Amherst, Massachusetts is the home of Amherst College, Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts, and this former Central Vermont depot. There is no easy way to get to or from Boston by train, however; the schedule of the Vermonter is such that no connection with either of the two daily Boston trains is possible at Springfield. It is a sad fact that one cannot go anywhere in northern New England or Canada from Boston by train (except for the occasional special such as ours) without waiting overnight at Springfield or Albany.

We stopped briefly in this town in north central Massachusetts. It still looks a lot like summer here; the most spectacular fall foliage is still two to three weeks in the future. At this point in our trip we are still east of the Connecticut River; we will not reach it until just south of the Vermont border. While our route from Boston to Vermont makes some sense, particularly since the abandonment of so much former Boston and Maine track in New Hampshire, a glance at the map shows that routing the Vermonter this way is absurd, particularly since there is a perfectly good B&M branch north of Springfield on the west bank of the river.

A Connecticut Valley farm slides by to our left as we travel northwards along the river in southern Vermont. Like the St. Lawrence and Atlantic (ex-Grand Trunk) line from Portland to Montreal, the Central Vermont Railway was until very recently owned by the Canadian government, being a subsidiary of Canadian National Railways. Oddly, the ownership of so important a part of New England's transportation infrastructure by a foreign government seems never to have elicited any controversy. I can only assume this testifies to the good relations the United States and Canada have shared over the past hundred years or so.

The Vermont countryside is marked by rolling hills. This one, just south of Windsor, has an FM radio transmitter site, not visible in this view, at its summit. I have long wished that some broadcaster in this part of the Connecticut Valley would pick up my employer's classical music network, which is currently running on a station in Burlington, Vermont, three stations in Maine, one in Massachusetts, and one in Rhode Island. Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, is not far from here.

I got off the train at Windsor and had lunch at the restaurant in this depot. Meanwhile, the train continued on to White River Junction to be turned for the trip back to Boston. Had I stayed on board there would not have been time for lunch, and the Windsor Station Restaurant was convenient and surprisingly good. I find myself drawn to rural New England, and would gladly live there if I could find a way to make a living so far from the city. The train would give me easy access to New York and Washington (but not, alas, Boston) if I lived here.

The sun pours through the trees around the Masonic hall at Windsor, about a block from the depot. Nowadays everyone drives these damnable sport-utility vehicles, even in supposedly "green" Vermont. I wish someone would organize a town that excluded motor vehicles and provided clean, safe, and inexpensive public transportation. Everything but bicycles and pedestrians should run on streetcar tracks, I think, and be powered by electricity.

Meanwhile, back at the depot, passengers wait for the train back to Boston. Our train was delayed almost two hours by freight traffic on the way up here, and some of us seemed rather frustrated at having considerably less time here than they had hoped. With the sun settling towards the horizon it will soon be dark, affording no more picture-taking opportunities and few new sights to see. Nevertheless it was an enjoyable trip; perhaps some day I will be able to ride all the way to Montreal.

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