Travel

Around Long Island Sound

It started over a cup of coffee. My friend Nate and I were having coffee at ThreeBirds. I was back from HighEdWeb North Carolina and getting ready for WPCampus. He was basking in a delightful trip that he’d taken to DC recently and was interested in replicating the experience–a trip taken for the trip’s sake. We didn’t set ourselves many parameters, save that we’d like to knock it out over a weekend and we wanted to travel by train wherever possible. We settled on circling Long Island Sound.

Long Island stretches 118 miles, from New York City to the Atlantic Ocean. North of it lies Connecticut. There are two ferries that cross it, one between Bridgeport and Port Jefferson, about halfway across; the other between Orient Point and New London, at the eastern end of the island. The Long Island Rail Road comes within a mile of one ferry and eight miles of the other. The various rail services on the Northeast Corridor have direct service to the ferry terminals in Connecticut. We devised a plan involving eight trains, three ferries, and two buses. Looks simple on the map, right?

The trip

I maintained a pretty lively account of the trip on Mastodon. You can start the thread with my post from our arrival in Denville which I’ve embedded below. All told we were on the road for 56 hours, crossed Long Island Sound twice, and did roughly 289.1 miles by train.

Reflections

I’ve spent the last week thinking about what worked and what could have been better.

Transport providers

We dealt with seven different transit providers over the weekend:

  1. NJ Transit
  2. NY Waterway (ferry from Hoboken)
  3. Metropolitan Transportation Authority (New York Subway, Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad)
  4. Suffolk County Transit
  5. Cross Sound Ferry (Orient Point to New London)
  6. Shore Line East
  7. Bridgeport & Port Jefferson Ferry

We bought NJ Transit tickets on the platform at Denville and again at New York Penn on the way back; there’s also the NJ Transit Mobile App which we didn’t have. We bought the NY Waterway tickets at the ticket office in Hoboken; they also have the NY Waterway App which I installed but didn’t use. We used tap-to-pay or single-use https://new.mta.info/fares for the New York City Subway and bought individual tickets on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad. We didn’t know about the TrainTime app and didn’t use it.

We did install and use the Suffolk FastFare app for the buses in Suffolk County. Fares are $2.25, transfers are a quarter, and it didn’t seem likely we’d be carrying exact change. Neither Cross Sound Ferry nor Bridgeport & Port Jefferson Ferry have apps; both support booking in advance through their websites, and both have staffed ticket offices. Shore Line East is part of the CT rail umbrella and uses the CTrail eTix app. We bought tickets in person at New London Union Station. The tickets are issued on Amtrak ticket stock, and Amtrak sells Shore Line East tickets through its website.[1] Amtrak cross-honors Shore Line East tickets on select trains, and Shore Line East tickets are valid for service beyond New Haven to New York Grand Central.

That’s a gaggle of transit providers and apps. I don’t know if the average rider would have the patience to plan all this out. Aggregator sites like Rome2Rio are helpful in identifying transit providers, but you’re still doing some work to identify all the different tickets you’ll need and how to pay for them. One of the reason I eschewed apps is that I wanted to see how hard it would be to make this trip without them. Answer: it wasn’t. We only used the Suffolk County Transit app for want of quarters and there were either ticket sellers or vending machines everywhere else.

I dream of a far future where I could buy a ticket for Denville to Orient Point without worrying too deeply about all the different providers and their fare policies. The political complexity alone is staggering. It’s a nice thought though.

Infrastructure

For the most part signage and wayfinding weren’t problems, but there are a few challenges worth mentioning:

  1. Driving to Denville, there is no sign on East Main Street indicating that you should turn on Estling Lake Road to access Denville station (and its parking lot).
  2. Maybe it was just early on Saturday morning, but Grand Central Madison was surprisingly difficult to find under the circumstances. Allegedly there’s access from Lexington Avenue but we never found it. It is accessible from Grand Central Terminal, and there’s probably the easiest option. It’s well-signed with the station complex.
  3. There were no bus stop signs in Port Jefferson, New York. At all. We walked up and down Main Street (NY 25A), guided by Google Maps, the Transit app, and the Suffolk County Transit website. Ultimately we flagged down our bus, but not without a good deal of anxiety. That, coupled with the massive “In Trump We Trust” banner that greets you coming off the ferry, contributed to an overall poor impression of Port Jefferson.

Let me also flag a few wins:

  1. There’s good signage throughout Hoboken Terminal linking the train platforms, the light rail line, and the ferry piers.
  2. The primary bus stop in Greenport at 1st and Adams is signed and has a shelter.
  3. In both New London and Bridgeport the ferry terminals are in line-of-sight of the train stations and there are signs guiding you from one to the other.

Planning

Overall this trip worked really well. One thing I wish we’d done at the time–and could have done–was to spend more time in Greenport. We both liked the town. The ferry and bus schedules would have accommodated a later departure. I’d looked at Greenport as the transfer point from the Long Island Rail Road to the bus that would take us to the ferry, and I’d allowed time for lunch, but hadn’t really considered what we’d do in Greenport. The result was that we hit New London in late afternoon, too late to do anything there besides a nice dinner. A counterargument to the above is that the Adirondack chairs on the MV Susan Anne were really nice.

What’s next?

We both had a really good time and would like to do a similar trip some time. The SEPTA network in Philly, despite its proximity, remains unexplored. Two years ago I cooked up a plan that touched Philadelphia, Norristown, Trenton by way of the River Line, and a walking transfer from Bethayres to Fox Chase. MARC has its own line between Baltimore and DC, and occasional service to Harpers Ferry. There’s the LIRR line to Montauk, and a ferry connection to Block Island. I’ve visited Port Jervis by car and always wanted to travel on the former Erie main line down to Hoboken.

Stay tuned.

  1. Only between New London and New Haven Union Station. If you search for New London to Bridgeport, you only see Amtrak services. ↩︎