The rail route between the Twin Cities and Seattle/Portland goes by many names. It was the main line of the Great Northern Railway. BNSF calls it the Northern Transcon (“Transcontinental”). Most locals call it the “Hi-Line.” Amtrak’s Empire Builder crosses it daily in each direction.

It’s the northernmost main railway line in the United States. Cut Bank, in Montana, is only 20 miles from the Canadian border. In the winter, there is significant snowfall all along the route. Sub-zero temperatures freeze switches and pipes. It’s legendary in railfan circles that the Superliners, first ordered in the mid-1970s, were designed with the harsh conditions of the Hi-Line in mind. It’s certainly true that the Empire Builder received the new cars first, in 1979.

In my first trip on the Empire Builder, in January 2009 (see “My worst best trip on the Empire Builder”), I experienced everything the Hi-Line could throw at me: equipment failures, a frozen switch, crew-service-time issues, and freight trains. We were 12 hours late into Spokane and bussed the rest of the way. My return trip was canceled by mudslides. My wise and tolerant wife forbade me from taking the Empire Builder in the dead of winter again, until she relented for this holiday season. How’d that work out for me? Well, let’s say there were some challenges amidst a good trip…

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Back in June LANTA LANTA June 2025 changes introduced a number of service changes. The most important, to my mind, was the refactoring of the service between the West Ward and College Hill in Easton. The 106 bus was extended through the Downtown up to Forks Plaza (location of a Giant grocery store ), and the frequency was doubled to half-hourly, with every other bus short-turning at Easton Hospital. Folks traveling from the West Ward to College Hill gained a guaranteed half-hourly connection.

No longer. LANTA, like every other transit agency in Pennsylvania, is stuck with rising costs and a flat budget. The state is allowing it (and other agencies) to raid capital funds, but there’s still a gap, leading to service cuts in January and a fare hike in March.

LANTA has a full breakdown of changes posted. Many of these aren’t very significant. One or two frequencies removed, various stops retimed. These are the most significant (I’m looking at weekday changes only):

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When I was growing up, my parents had season tickets to Central Michigan University football games. We tailgated in a small grassy area near Kelly/Shorts Stadium with other faculty. My education in football was on the big, grassy hill that used to mark the northern end of the stadium before the big expansion in the late 1990s. This was at the tail end of Herb Deromedi’s tenure as head coach. He didn’t really hold with the forward pass. I can still hear the announcer intone “Smith, the ball carrier, brought down by…” Mid-American Conference (MAC) football is in my blood.

The MAC created a championship game in 1997 when it split into divisions. It’s been played at Ford Field in Detroit (home of the Lions) since 2004. CMU made it there in 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2019, winning all but the last. Before 2024 I’d never gone to the game, but I’d always wanted to. When we lived in Kalamazoo it was just a few hours to the east. Now that I’m in the Lehigh Valley, it takes a bit more effort. Nevertheless, the itch didn’t go away.

I made my first trip to the game in December 2024, and had such a good time that I went back again in 2025. I took notes during the first trip but never got around to blogging about it. This post discusses both trips, and my ideas about a 2026 trip.

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I spend a lot of time on long-distance trains. In the United States, those trains pass through areas with little or no cell signal, leading to long stretches of limited internet access. I’ve written about that challenge over years; the Capitol Limited/Floridian and Empire Builder stand out for their long stretches of signal loss.

This week I took the Floridian from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., by way of Harpers Ferry. It’s a beautiful route, following the Youghiogheny and Potomac rivers, and I decided to try measuring signal strength using the onboard WiFi.

Uptime

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Even before we left Brunswick in May we were determined to come back for the ᖃᓪᓗᓈᖅᑕᐃᑦ  ᓯᑯᓯᓛᕐᒥᑦ   Printed Textiles from Kinngait Studios exhibit before it closed at the end of October. Separately, we got invited to a friend’s birthday party in Rochester, New York, toward the end of July. Now, Rochester and Brunswick are in opposite directions from each other, but they’re both reachable by rail, and for us that’s enough. Over a period of nine days we took six Amtrak trains (covering 1400 miles), several commuter buses, and innumerable local buses and subways.

We saw textiles, vintage games, and the director’s cut of a Captain America movie (not one with Chris Evans!) Ate Indian food in two different states and BBQ in an old train station. Found a Frank Lloyd Wright tribute in a warehouse. Gave some books away and bought more than enough to replace them. Read on.

Rochester

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I was always aware of Paul Theroux growing up. I was raised in a family that traveled (and travels) by train and had read Theroux’s travel books. There was also a VHS of The Mosquito Coast, with a crazed Harrison Ford staring back at you, and a tagline proclaiming that “He planned a paradise. He created a Hell.”

I think the first Theroux I read on my own was the delightful Riding the Iron Rooster, about his travels (mostly by train) through the People’s Republic of China in the mid-1980s. The thing about Theroux is that he’s interested in the world around him and in seeking out new experiences. When he travels to a new place, he talks to people and asks penetrating questions. His books weren’t banned by Singapore and apartheid South Africa for nothing.

I read Riding the Iron Rooster while on study abroad in Germany in 2003. My father probably gave it to me. I have an email listing five books I’d read in the first month:

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I’m migrating my older galleries from Flickr to my self-hosted static gallery site based on thumbsup. This is a slow process because I’m reconciling my local copies with Flickr; for some of the older albums I don’t have local copies. In those cases, I download the originals and rewrite the metadata.

I ran into one interesting problem. With my configuration thumbsup usually generates three top-level containers:

• Tags
• Years
• Albums

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The Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority (LANTA) is restructuring its routes at the end of June this year. Some interesting changes within Easton:

• West Ward / College Hill: Route 106, which currently runs from downtown Easton north to the Palmer Industrial Park via PA 248, is being extended from Easton up Cattell and Sullivan Trail to Forks Plaza. In addition, it’s frequency is increasing to half-hourly between Easton Hospital and Forks. Route 214, currently running from dowtown Easton to the Forks Industrial Park on an hourly schedule, goes down every three hours and meanders around in Forks.
• Downtown / Northampton Crossings: Route 216 was running on a not-quite-hourly schedule from downtown up PA 248 to Northampton Crossings and making local stops on Northampton Street. It loops on Greenwood now and doesn’t go up 248, with a reduced schedule.

The big change here is the vastly improved access between the West Ward and College Hill. In theory you could make a connection with the 216 downtown but (a) buses weren’t held for it and (b) it was hourly. Now the bus becomes a viable option for reaching campus. Losing some local service on Northampton is offset by the more frequent service on Lehigh/Washington, and I was already using it more often anyway.

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Ahead of our trip, most of the conversations around Brunswick involved specifying that we meant the one in Maine, and then turned to some variation of “Oh. Why?” Admittedly, we didn’t have much of an answer for “What’s in Brunswick?” beyond Bowdoin College. We went here because it’s the northern terminus of Amtrak’s Downeaster, and I wanted to scratch it off the list. Besides, we have friends in Boston. Following the philosophy of never spending more time traveling to a place than you’re in the place itself, we did two nights, and I’m now prepared to give a partial answer to the question of “What’s in Brunswick?”

People

Wednesday morning I went for a walk around town, mostly looking at railroad infrastructure. The first thing I noticed, however, is that when you come to a crosswalk as a pedestrian the cars actually yield to you. This kept happening throughout the day. Later, we went to Twice-Told Tales Book Store. It’s run by volunteers, and proceeds go the local library. Everyone there was genuinely friendly and helped an out-of-towner find a book–Terry Pindell’s Making tracks: an American rail odyssey. Before we left I lightened my luggage by dropping off two books that I’d bought and read during our trip and wasn’t likely to re-read, though I’d enjoyed them: Ben Macintyre’s The Siege and Douglas Preston’s The Lost City of the Monkey God.

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The filming locations for Mercury in Retrograde are variously given as Allegan, Fennville, and Saugatuck. All three are towns in Allegan County, Michigan, a corner of Western Michigan known for being on Lake Michigan and for producing your prescription drugs. Saugatuck, on the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, is an art colony and incongrous gay mecca in the middle of Dutch Reformed country. My family rented a cabin there for decades, and I knew the area well even before I went to college in nearby Kalamazoo. Holland, the setting of the recent, eponymous Holland, is just over the county line to the north.

This accounts for my interest in Mercury in Retrograde, which is a movie about three couples in a cabin in the woods for the weekend but is not a horror movie. It’s a low-key drama about three couples who loosely know each other and who spend a weekend together away from the city. There are no creatures, no mysterious forces at play. To misquote Sartre, in this film horror is other people. I don’t usually watch this sort of movie, and I’m really glad I did.

The cabin in question is the Fern Hollow Cabin, which is available for rental. At the risk of a digression, it’s not really in Fennville. To my mind it’s in Ganges, west of the Blue Star Highway and south of the I-196 interchange. Never made it to the What Not Inn for dinner but was always curious. The location is a perfect distillation of cabin life in that part of the state. You’re in dune country, with the trees so thick that the light barely penetrates. Myrtle covers the ground. In the evening rain patters on the cabin’s roof. I was having feelings before the action even got going.

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