This is part of a series of posts chronicling our difficult journey to the 2014 edition of B-Fest, the annual bad movie festival at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

I’m sitting on a bench at the Metropark train station in Iselin, New Jersey. It’s January 23. It’s very cold. I’m pondering how it came to this. Some form of cosmic retribution for the near-perfect runs on the Vermonter and Silver Star earlier in the month?

It started well enough, with Ken dropping us off at the Easton Bus Terminal a little before 8 AM. We planned to take the 8:10 Trans-Bridge Lines bus, which would deliver us to New York by 10:00, more than enough time to catch the 11:35 Northeast Regional (train 125) for Washington, D.C.

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Over the next few days I’ll be running a series of posts called “Planes, trains and automobiles,” playing homage to the classic John Hughes flick. The setting is our annual trip this past January to the Chicago area for B-Fest. Although at no time did our rental car burn down to the frame we encountered more than our fair share of problems before arriving on time for the festival. For the second straight year this was the plan:

• Trans-Bridge Lines bus from Easton to the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal (PABT).
• Eighth Avenue Line subway down to Pennsylvania Station.
• Amtrak Northeast Regional to Washington, D.C.
• Amtrak Capitol Limited to Chicago.
• Rental car to Evanston, Illinois.

That’s not what eventually happened. Not even close. Stay tuned.

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Early on in the Avengers there’s a sequence where the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) is interrogating some Russian mobsters. The scene is set in Russia. It opens with a freight train speeding past a warehouse. The freight train’s locomotive is painted in a black scheme with white stripes and markings. If you know your trains it’s very clearly a Norfolk Southern locomotive. NS engines aren’t found in Russia, but they’re found in Cleveland, where the scene was shot. Every time I watch that scene I think the interrogation is taking place in the United States, not Russia, because of that contextual hint.

Suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. I have no problem with the Asgardians, or Helicarriers, or any of that other stuff. That’s all fantastical and it’s fine. An American train in Russia? That’s an actual error (“bug”, if you like) and it pulls me out of the movie.

Below is erroneous from beginning to end. The more you know about World War II, specifically submarine warfare, the less you will enjoy it. Beyond factual errors there are some weird tone problems that make it difficult to watch at times. David Twohy (best known for Pitch Black and the Riddick movies) directed. Despite a fair number of recognizable performers (Bruce Greenwood, Olivia Williams, Dexter Fletcher, Jason Flemyng, Zach Galifianakis) most of the performances are middling to forgettable. This is one of the worst movies I’ve ever watched, and that’s saying something.

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Ghost Ship belongs to the venerable tradition of haunted ship movie (Alien being the best example), with the added twist that Satanic forces are specifically identified as the malefactors. Other examples are Dark Side of the Moon and the not-quite-brilliant Event Horizon. This genre, broadly, has a few conventions:

1. The protagonists are on a ship, either on a sea or in space, and cannot reasonably leave it.
2. In the course of the movie they encounter a second ship of unknown provenance.
3. An unknown evil entity boards from that ship, and the crew starts dying one-by-one.

In Ghost Ship, our protagonists are the crew of an oceangoing salvage tug who stumble upon an Andrea Doria-like ocean liner in the Bering Strait. It’s been lost for fifty years, and there’s a secret cargo which promises a big payday. There’s also a deadly secret and…pretty soon people are dropping like flies.

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I wrote a long post in March enumerating seven reasons why I wasn’t going to take the Lake Shore Limited on future trips to the Midwest. To these I might also have added that the ex-New York Central route between Cleveland and Buffalo is particularly vulnerable to weather-related delays in the winter. Unfortunately I was called back on short notice to Michigan and the Lake Shore Limited was the only train I could catch in time. Let me quote from what I wrote in March:

CSX’s handling of the train in western New York. Amtrak is dependent on the freight railroads for dispatching. CSX does an absolutely terrible job between Schenectady and Rochester. They’re incapable of getting the train though on time. It’s just frustrating.

Now, here’s how my train fared across western New York last night, courtesy of the invaluable Amtrak Status Maps:

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I try to grade B-movies for originality, but there are limits. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a gigantic whale pile-drive a nuclear submarine and jump out of the water with it in its mouth. I’ve definitely never seen it done this implausibly. What a plausible version of the sequence would look like I leave as an exercise to the reader. I’m reminded of something Roger Ebert, that under-appreciated connoisseur of genre films, wrote in his review of Pink Flamingos:

How do you review a movie like this? I am reminded of an interview I once did with a man who ran a carnival sideshow. His star was a geek, who bit off the heads of live chickens and drank their blood.

“He’s the best geek in the business,” this man assured me.

“What is the difference between a good geek and a bad geek?” I asked.

“You wanna examine the chickens?”

Asylum (shudder) has about cornered the market on low-order ripoffs, re-imaginings, and assorted crap. They’re the fine folks behind American Warships and Atlantic Rim, shameless copies of Battleship and Pacific Rim. They also made Nazis at the Center of the Earth, a modern version of of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of Earth but in incredibly poor taste.

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Two congressmen have introduced a bill (HR 2066, the Pets on Trains Act of 2013) which would require Amtrak to formulate a policy for carrying domestic pets on certain trains. See the Huffington Post for a brief summary, and here for the actual text of the bill. What discussion I’ve seen focuses on a non-issue: that after three days in transit a dog wouldn’t be a good companion in the coach. That possibility is foreclosed by the text of the bill, but no one ever reads such things. I don’t see this going much of anywhere but I thought I’d offer some more detailed commentary.

Amtrak allows service animals only. No comfort animals or pets. I once sat across from a woman with a service animal for two days aboard the Empire Builder and it wasn’t a problem, but obviously (a) service animals are well-trained and (b) their owners are used to handling them in public.

The proposed bill, which includes escape hatches like “certain trains” and “where feasible” would require either that Amtrak either set aside a car where pets would be allowed as carry-on items, provided that the pet is contained in a kennel and that the pet as stowed meets the current carry-on policy or that Amtrak allow pets as checked baggage, provided that the area is “temperature controlled” and that the pet as stowed meets the checked baggage policy. In both cases the journey as ticketed would have to be 750 miles or less and Amtrak would be allowed to assess a commensurate fee. Finally, the bill provides that “[n]othing in this section may be interpreted to require Amtrak to add additional train cars or modify existing train cars.”

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Last night I went for a walk down to the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers. It’s a remarkable area. First, it’s bracketed by public parks: Scott Park (northwest) and Hugh Moore Park (southwest) on the Easton side, and the Delaware River Park on the Phillipsburg, New Jersey side. Second, it hosts no less than three railway bridges which stand as a reminder to Easton’s past importance in that trade:

• Lehigh and Hudson River Railway Bridge (northernmost)
• Central Railroad of New Jersey Bridge
• Lehigh Valley Railroad Bridge (southernmost)

The Lehigh Valley bridge is I believe out of service but the other two see daily use. This evening I was fortunate enough to catch some Norfolk Southern maintenance-of-way equipment on the ex-CNJ bridge, followed about 20 minutes later by a grain train grinding slowly across the ex-LHRR bridge and into Phillipsburg.

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This coming Monday I’m giving at talk at HighEdWeb New England about collaborative development in open source, focusing on liberal arts colleges. If this were one of my movie reviews that would be the “A plot.” The “B plot” is that I’m taking the train to the conference, and that unusually for me it’ll be 100% new mileage.

The conference is Mount Holyoke but I’m taking the Vermonter from New York up to Brattleboro. There are two reasons for this. The first is that my friend who’s picking me up lives closer to Brattleboro than Amherst. The second is that this train will be rerouted to the west bank of the Connecticut River in a year or two, and I want to ride the old route before that happens. Again, I’m that guy.

The ride in from Easton to New York was uneventful. Trans-Bridge Lines does a good job. Its buses are comfortable (for 90 minutes anyway) and the free wifi gets the job done. I-78 was remarkably empty. The only hiccup was finding New York Penn overrun with mouth breathing collegians dressed in green. Sigh. Amtrak Police finally showed up with a bullhorn and cleared them out. Yay!

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I keep track of all my train mileage because I’m one of those people. By my reckoning I’ve done over 41,000 miles on Amtrak alone and another 10,000+ on other systems, mostly in Europe. A full quarter of my Amtrak mileage is on a single train: the Lake Shore Limited, which operates between Chicago and New York, with a section to Boston. I’ve taken it to three Moodle Hack/Doc Fests: Summer 2009 at Smith College, Winter 2010 at Lafayette College, and Summer 2011 at Hampshire College. I’ve ridden it to a pair of weddings. I took it to HighEdWeb 2012 and B-Fest 2013. I’ve made three trips on it in the last eight months. This makes writing the following all the harder: Lake Shore Limited, I’m afraid that we may have to break up.

Here’s the situation. I have cause to make the trip between New York and Chicago at least once a year for the B-Movie Festival in Evanston, Illinois. I’m likely to make it another time for business related to the German Studies Association, and it’s a fair bet that I’ll make at least one trip for pleasure to the Midwest. I’ve never made less than two round-trips in a calendar year since 2009. I’ve done one already this year, another is booked and at least one more is on the horizon. I’m just not sure I can do it on the Lake Shore Limited anymore. I think my future lies with the Capitol Limited.

7 things I don’t like about the Lake Shore Limited

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