The first of the options from the Lehigh Valley Passenger Rail Analysis that I’ll consider is Allentown to New York via Hackettstown. Before diving into the routing itself, I’m going to deal generally with the challenges of operating passenger trains in the United States.
The Lehigh Valley Passenger Rail Analysis is here. And?
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s study on restoring passenger service to the Lehigh Valley is out and you can read it on the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission website. The study looks at three possible corridors: both Lehigh Valley-New York and Lehigh Valley-Philadelphia, and Lehigh Valley-Reading for good measure. All previously had passenger rail service, some as late as 1984 if you include commuter rail service to Phillipsburg.
There’s a lot of good information in the study and I had a good time reading through it. I remain skeptical that anything will come of this. There are political, financial, and operational obstacles to any restoration. None are fatal by themselves, but taken together they’re a real challenge. I’ve often described the Lehigh Valley to New York problem as “who wants to pay for transporting people from Pennsylvania across New Jersey to New York City?” Lehigh Valley-Philadelphia at least keeps the problem within one state, but the situation is no less difficult.
My plan over the next few days is to blog about the different alternatives, explaining in layman’s terms what the benefits and challenges are with each. These are the five alternatives in the study:
An evening in Albany
I wrote before that the most important ritual on the Lake Shore Limited is the is the engine change at Albany. Follow along for an illustrated discussion of that daily ritual.
Modes of power
There’s a tradition in railfan circles that non-electric operation within New York City is illegal. That may not be true: compare this story in the New York Times from 1970 and this analysis from Joseph Brennan. It’s certainly true that the railroad geography on Manhattan discourages it. The platforms at Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station are underground; their approaches feature miles of tunnels or runs in cuttings. Prolonged diesel operation there is bad for everyone’s health.
Fifteen years on the Lake Shore Limited
I’m on the Lake Shore Limited today, heading back to Michigan by way of Toledo. This is my 29th trip on the Lake Shore Limited, for a total of 23,596 miles. That’s about 20% of my Amtrak mileage, and slightly edges out the Capitol Limited (33 trips for 23,375 miles). I’ve got a complicated relationship with this train. I broke up with it in early 2013, only to make a rapprochement in 2017.
I made my first trip on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited on May 31, 2009, when I traveled out to a NITLE conference at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at the time. I took the Wolverine down to Chicago and endured a long layover–back then the eastbound train left at 10 PM, Central Time. I rode in the Boston coach out to Springfield, Massachusetts, where I caught a Peter Pan bus up to Northampton.
My notes from that trip mostly concern trying to get an internet connection through a tethered Blackberry that I’d borrowed from my department. Based on that experience, I developed some long-standing beliefs about cell signal strength in various parts of the country. What I left out then is that I was used a Gateway laptop dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu, and the kludged-together open source software for tethering over Ubuntu was way less reliable than the official supported stuff on Windows. Thing is, I didn’t want to be booted into the Windows side, because all my development tools were on Ubuntu. These days the Lake Shore Limited has WiFi (it works sometimes), and hot spotting from my phone is infinitely more reliable than tethering. Cell phone networks have come a long way in 15 years.
That Man from Rio
Cédric Pérolini calls 1964’s That Man from Rio (L’Homme de Rio) the “missing link” between the Tintin comics and Indiana Jones. Our main character neither exclaims “Great snakes, she’s been hypnotized!” nor cracks a whip, but neither would be out of place. Jean-Paul Belmondo loved the Tintin comics and the whole story runs on Tintin logic. Notwithstanding an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, several plot points are drawn from the two-hander The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. Director Philippe de Broca claims Steven Spielberg saw That Man from Rio nine times, and several set pieces in the Jones films obviously take inspiration from scenes in the earlier film.
Spoilers toward the end.
The elevator pitch for That Man from Rio is that a group of Amazon tribesmen seek three statues. The statues were held by three men who led an expedition and removed them from the Amazon. Of the men; one is dead, one is in France (Professor Catalan, played by Jean Servais, the organizer of the heist in Rififi), and one is in Brazil (financier Mário de Castro, played by Adolfo Celi). Our protagonist is Adrien Dufourquet (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a private in the French Air Force on a week’s leave visiting Agnès Villermosa (Françoise Dorleac) in Paris. Agnès’ father was the third (dead) member of the expedition. Our plot is set in motion when the tribesmen steal Catalan’s statue from a museum in Paris and kidnap him and Agnès.
The Return of the Pink Panther
The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) is the third of the Clouseau movies with Peter Sellers, but it’s also a pretty good heist movie in the tradition of Rififi, Topkapi, and Grand Slam. That the first Pink Panther belonged to the same tradition was overshadowed by Sellers’ performance as Clouseau; David Niven was supposed to be lead and Sellers stole the picture from him. The second film, the hilarious A Shot in the Dark, was a pre-existing crime drama with the Clouseau character grafted on to capitalize on the success of the original film.
The movie opens with the theft of the titular Pink Panther, a fabulously valuable jewel, from a museum in Lugash. The heist is patterned on the heists in Rififi and Topkapi, right down to the iconic Henry Mancini score disappearing at the climax. In response, the authorities in Lugash take the fateful decision to call in the famous inspector who recovered the jewel in the first movie. Meanwhile, relaxing at his villa in Nice, retired jewel thief Sir Charles Litton realizes that he’s being framed and that it’s up to him to catch the real thief first.
From here we proceed with two movies in parallel, occasionally overlapping: a heist caper built around Christopher Plummer’s Litton, as he tries to find out the truth and save his skin; and a comic farce featuring Sellers’ ludicrous attempts to conduct an investigation. Both work well and support each other.
Rififi
I’ve been working backwards to Rififi. Oh, I’ve seen earlier heist films. The Lavender Hill Mob came out in 1951, but it’s as much a comedy as a heist. Many of the conventions of the modern heist genre come from two French noirs, released a year apart: Rififi in 1955 and Bob le Flambeur in 1956. You can trace a direct line from Mission: Impossible, the Pink Panther movies, Topkapi, and others, straight back to Rififi. It was time that I saw it the original, and was not disappointed.
Rififi opens with Tony (Jean Servais) getting booted from a poker game because he’s out of cash. Tony’s just out of prison and his girl left him for a gangster. Tony’s friend Jo (Carl Möhner) tries to get him interested in a smash-and-grab job at a jewelry store that he’s been planning with his buddy Mario (Robert Manuel). Tony’s not so sure, but eventually agrees and ups the ante by adding Cesar, a safecracker from Milan (played by Jules Dassin, the film’s director).
This is the the usual assembling-the-crew stuff, but it plays longer than it does in derivative works. We meet Mado, Tony’s ex (Marie Sabouret). He’s abusive to her, but she might still be in love with him. We meet Jo’s wife Louise (Janine Darcey) and their young son Tonio. Tony dotes on Tonio. Mario and his wife Ida (Claude Sylvain) have a tempestuous relationship but are clearly infatuated with each other. Cesar has an eye for the ladies, and his relationship with the nightclub singer Viviane (Magali Noël) will have tragic consequences for multiple people.
Neave Trio
Dad was a chamber music fiend. Central Michigan didn’t pull enough acts north, then or later, so he and Mom were always going down to concerts at the Wharton Center in Lansing. Back then that was a good 70-75 minute drive each way, and finding a babysitter for me. Above the stairs in their home hangs Scott McKowen’s marvelous poster from the 1989 “Beethoven Quartet Cycle” performance series by the Juilliard String Quartet. The poster features a baleful Beethoven riding a wooden bicycle, sheets of a score fluttering away.
I didn’t have to go so far tonight. The Williams Center for the Arts is on Lafayette’s campus and within walking distance if I felt like tackling the hill (which I didn’t). Visiting tonight was the Neave Trio: Anna Williams on violin, Mikhail Veselov on cello, and Eri Nakamura on piano.
I’m strictly an amateur when it comes to classical music appreciation. The well-intentioned attempt by my parents to have me learn the cello ended in failure. I can’t read music nor carry a tune. I enjoy and find meaning in the experience while feeling that I lack the vocabulary to describe what I’m enjoying. No matter.
Triangle
I picked Triangle at random and went in cold. Aside from Liam Hemsworth, none of the actors are familiar to me. Even he’s not all that familiar; I only saw the first Hunger Games. I haven’t seen any of Christopher Smith’s other films. Two people I follow on Letterboxd have seen it, but neither of them mentioned it to me. The title implies a Bermuda Triangle connection, and I’ve seen plenty of those (all of them are bad). I’m always down for a good sea story. Spoilers follow.
Our primary point of view character is Jess, played by Melissa George. She’s a single mother with a young, autistic son. Her daily routine overwhelms her. Her grasp on reality is slipping. This is all conveyed in largely wordless scenes that open the movie. Her son fades into the background as she packs her car. When she arrives at the dock to meet her friends for a sailing adventure, we’re left wondering somewhat uncomfortably where her son is.
Six people assemble for a sailing party: Greg, Victor, Jess, Sally, Heather, and Downey. The group dynamics are set up quickly, with a minimum of fuss. Greg (Michael Dorman) owns and lives on the sailboat. Victor (Liam Hemsworth) is living on the boat right now; Victor ran away from home and Greg took him in. It’s implied, but not stated, that Greg and Victor are in a relationship. Greg met Jess at the diner where she works and invited her along. Sally (Rachael Carpani) and Downey (Henry Nixon) are married and old friends of Greg’s. Heather (Emma Lung) is a friend of Sally’s and Sally’s trying to set her up with Greg, oblivious to Greg’s disinterest.
It Follows
It’s harder to write about It Follows then, say, Gymkata or Alien Predator. This is new territory for me and I don’t feel especially well-equipped to tackle it, but I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.
This post will discuss themes of sexual assault. Please don’t read further if that’s going to make you uncomfortable, and consider this a trigger warning for It Follows itself if you haven’t seen it.