My repertoire of traveling disaster stories is limited. In large part, I’ve been lucky, and I’m also a careful planner. I try to bake resiliency into my itineraries and I’ve looked at alternatives. I’m a careful planner now because of what is known in my family as “The France Story,” a multi-day story of cascading failure driven by a series of bad decisions and poor planning, all on my part.

Thursday, May 15, 2003

I spent the spring of 2003 studying abroad at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, Germany. This was a three-month program, and I was a little over six weeks in at this point. I had a Eurail Pass, good for unlimited travel over a two-month period, and I’d been making good use of it, covering about 3,500 miles. Almost all of it was second class without a seat reservation. When I overnighted away from Bonn, I stayed in youth hostels. Reservations were cheap, €5-10 euro/night, plus (often) a deposit for the bed linen.

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Jim Loomis passed away on March 26, 2024, at the age of 87. I met Jim once, for about an hour, but he’s one of those people who stayed with me.

Jim was a train and transit enthusiast. He served on the board of directors for the Rail Passengers Association (which I will always call NARP). He blogged at Trains and Travel with Jim Loomis. He authored several books, including All Aboard: The Complete North American Travel Guide, Travel Tales, and Fascinating Facts about Hawaii.

This last title suggests what for me is the most fascinating thing about Jim. He moved from Connecticut to Hawaii in 1962, and lived there the rest of his life. Hawaii has no trains, save Honolulu’s light rail network, whose first stage opened just last year (I hope Jim rode it). It’s a five-hour flight from Honolulu to the West Coast. That didn’t stop Jim from riding almost every train in North America, some many times. It also didn’t stop him from advocating for improved service, even though as a resident of Hawaii he didn’t benefit directly.

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The fifth and final option from the Lehigh Valley Passenger Rail Analysis is Allentown to Reading. This is the odd man out, and I think was studied for completeness. The other alternatives involve connecting Allentown to existing railway hubs (New York/Newark, Philadelphia); Reading has no rail service and hasn’t since 1981. Restoration of Reading to Philadelphia service is being studied.

Allentown-Reading

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The third of the options from Lehigh Valley Passenger Rail Analysis is Allentown to Philadelphia via Norristown. This uses the same routing as the Lansdale alternative between Allentown and Lansdale so I won’t repeat any of that here.

North Philadelphia

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The third of the options from Lehigh Valley Passenger Rail Analysis is Allentown to Philadelphia via Lansdale. This ought to be the closest thing to “chalk”, to borrow a term from the sporting world. This route was the primary link between Bethlehem and Philadelphia for over a century. If you’ve been reading along with this series you can probably guess it’s not so simple as that in 2024.

Allentown-Bethlehem

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The second of the options from Lehigh Valley Passenger Rail Analysis is Allentown to New York via High Bridge. This is identical to the Hackettstown routing until you cross the Delaware so I won’t repeat any of that here. That post also contains a discussion (“So you want to run a passenger train”) about challenges in general with the passenger rail landscape in the United States.

Phillipsburg-High Bridge

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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.

So you want to run a passenger train

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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:

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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.

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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.

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