tips, tricks and travelogues from the road
Apologies for my continued absence from this blog. Other projects have arisen which now demand more time. Until such time as I can come back to keep this blog ticking over, please drop by my other blogs:
nowordsnoaction.wordpress.com – my dissertation research journal
jamesbrownontheroad.wordpress.com – my personal blog
Even if I hadn’t already bagged a promotional €15 (£10) one way fare, the weather forecast would have made up my mind. In Strasbourg in north-eastern France on Monday, five straight days of rain were predicted. Meanwhile in Marseille, 850km away to the south, five clear days of sunshine and 15ºC February days were expected.
My bargain ticket to the sun was provided by the online travel agency of the SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français – French Railways). Voyages-SNCF.fr will seek to distract you with all kinds of special deals on hotels, air travel and car hire, but the site’s real pull is the booking engine of the French railway system. In addition to the basic travel booking service, the site is the portal to SNCF’s last minute online promotions, where visitors can browse deals on rail travel throughout the country.
At Strasbourg’s grand old station (currently being rebuilt for the imminent arrival of the fast TGV Est Européen), a crowd of sun seekers was waiting to board train 4297, the 20h56 Corail Lunéa service to Lyon, Avignon, Marseille, Toulon, St. Raphaël, Antibes and Nice. The SNCF may be a massive state owned operation, but its also a master of meaningless branding. Corail Lunéa means nothing much in French, but is the slinky marketing name for the network’s older overnight trains. Corail is the generic name for locomotive hauled passenger trains that operate on non-TGV lines. Corail Téoz run by day and Corail Lunéa (evoking the French word lune for moon) run by night. The SNCF recognised long ago that running heavily-staffed overnight trains with a variety of sleeper accommodations and a lounge car or restaurant simply didn’t make money. So by giving overnight services a snappy new name and emphasising the convenience of late night departures from one end of the country to the other, the SNCF was able to ditch the restaurant car and slim down the actual level of service. It upsets traditionalists, but with some savvy online promotions, it seems to be saving the romantic sleeper train and introducing new passengers to the services.
Our train has about six sleeper coaches and a couple of ‘open’ coaches with reclining seats. There are just two classes of sleeper accommodations: first class compartments with four bunks and second class couchettes with six bunks. Both compartments are the same size, so with three bunks on either side of a second class compartment, only a child would be able to sit up in bed.
SNCF cost cutting (sorry, cost efficiencies) have removed traditional bedding from the sleeper cars. Instead of sheets and a blanket (that take more time therefore cost more to be made up and cleaned) passengers find a lightweight sleeping bag on their bed. Two sides are buttoned together: one is padded and the other is a single sheet, so depending on how warm you are, you can choose whether to sleep under the thin sheet or the thicker blanket. Passengers do not undress to sleep, although the sleeping bags offer enough privacy to remove heavier trousers or clothes if you’re uncomfortable in them. These older carriages are ingeniously designed to work as both day coaches and sleeper coaches, even if the days when trans-continental journeys that require both are less and less common. In each compartment the three bunks can be folded away to form two facing bench seats. The lack of any bedding beneath my sleeping bag reveals the padded vinyl that these seats are upholstered with. Outside, that gloriously seventies’ colour-scheme of orange and brown hints at the train’s age.
We depart on time, and begin the journey south, stopping en route in the towns of Séléstat, Colmar, Mulhouse and Besançon. The SNCF emphasises a number of convenient timetabling gimmicks that make Lunéa services appealing. Leaving after 21h00 and arriving early in the morning Lunéa trains can justify the absence of a restaurant car by pointing out that most passengers would rather eat at home or in a restaurant before departure and after arrival. Some SNCF advertising even emphasises how Lunéa passengers can have friends round for a few drinks before the leave on vacation. Intermediate station stops are also kept to a minimum between midnight and 05h00 to help passengers get a good night’s sleep; besides – these shorter distance city pairs remain more popular with equivalent day services than night trains. Since passengers rarely travel in convenient groups of six, they’re grouped into compartments according to destination, so that you’re only woken by the conductor when you are getting near to your stop. Women travelling alone or with children can also specify a female-only compartment.
And the result? The evolution of the overnight train from a romantic and luxurious sleeper to a dormitory-style train might depress some, but its still a remarkably comfortable way to cover ground in France and save on a night’s accommodation. The ride was smooth, my compartment was shared between just three people and I slept well for most of the night. In fact the gentle rocking motion and lulling background sound of the train racing south was so conducive to sleep that I only woke up when we stopped at stations en route. At about 05h40, the conductor came through the train with the passenger manifest and gave us a curt but effective wake-up call.
Just before 06h00, we pull into Marseille’s Gare Saint Charles. With about six hours sleep under my belt, as well as a complimentary bottle of water and a courtesy pack with refreshment wipes, mints and ear plugs from my couchette, I step out into the pre-dawn night of Marseille refreshed, and ready for two days in the sun. Not only has €15 carried me from the north-east of France to the shore of the Mediterranean, it’s done so while I slept, giving me two full days in Marseille.
Corail Lunéa services operate between Paris and Toulouse, Irun/Hendaye, Port Bou/Cerbère, Latour de Carol, Bourg Saint Maurice, Saint Gervais, Nice/Vintimille, Briançon and Luchon. Away from Paris, services also operate betwween Luxembourg, Metz and Marseille/Nice; Reims and Marseille/Nice; Metz and Port Bou/Cerbère; Strasbourg and Port Bou/Cerbère; Lille and Marseille/Nice; Bourdeaux and Marseille/Nice; Hendaye/Irun and Geneva; Hendaye/Irun and Marseille/Nice.
A chilly winter’s night in Sheffield, the fourth largest city in England and the hidden metropolis of the county of South Yorkshire. Tucked between seven hills, just out of sight of the M1 motorway and between the two principal north-south main line railways of Great Britain, it’s no wonder that the city is often overlooked by native Brits.
Sheffield was a city built on the steel industry, an industry which collapsed and re-developed, and which now churns out more steel than at any point in the history of the city. But preconceptions about the city stuck, and Sheffield has now evolved into a quietly proud modern city, with two university’s and a healthy economy of service based industries. The mass employers are no longer the steel mills, but the technology and customer service companies that have sprung up around the edges of the compact city centre. The well educated graduate workforce seems to prefer to stay in the city after finishing their higher level studies, and with house prices on the up, Sheffield is managing to temper the senseless loft apartment boom of Leeds or Manchester with a lively music scene and cultural landscape that has no difficulty in being proudly different.
The centre of Sheffield can easily be criticised for the lack of interesting historical neighbourhoods. But looking closer it can more rewarding to unpick and unpeel the overlapping layers of successive masterplans: redevelopments that were planned to revitalise the city for a generation that was yet to be born. Around the fabulously cheap shopping precint of the Moor, such stained and rusting fifties architectural treats at this Grosevnor House Hotel hark bark to a rapidly disappearing era of tectonic concrete blocks and inhospitable underpasses: a miniature and more loveable recreation of Birmingham’s dreadful (and now demolished) sixties Bullring. Just a few hundred metres away, the next ‘new’ Sheffield is being finished and pushed into the public domain. The established city centre Peace Gardens have now been extended with new commercial developments on the site of the old City Council buildings. Perched incromprehensibly and insensitively between the Peace Gardens and the attractive glazed glu-lam hall of the indoor Winter Gardens is Sheffield’s latest white elephant: the Macdonald St. Paul’s Hotel. This four star hotel seems to have been built the wrong way round, with its reception area facing the Peace Gardens. A nice civic gesture, you might think, but a nightmare for those arriving by car or taxi: an automated bollard blocks the only road that accesses this entrance, and the appearance of the inelegant flat facade of the building does the city centre no favours at all.
So on just such a cold winter’s night, it’s reassuring to find that the ‘old’ Sheffield is still here, in the constantly changing, constantly ‘regenerated’ city centre. On Norfolk Street, a stone’s throw from the Macdonald St. Paul and less than ten minutes walk from the railway station is the Brown Bear. This two room pub has managed to hold out, not only from sweeping redevelopment of it’s higgledy-piggledy block, but also from comprehensive takeover by monopolistic chain pubs. The decor on both sides of the pub (divided by the single island bar) reminds you immediately of your location: dozens of old theatre and pantomime posters have been collaged to paper the walls, and that’s only appropriate considering the large number of theatre-goers who come for a pre- or post-theatre drink. But stay a little longer, and you’ll find a much more varied clientelle. The variety of accents will remind you of Sheffield’s different neighbourhoods and the occasional clump of students will have you checking your change the first time you order at the bar. Associated solely with the Tadcaster Brewery, the pub only sells drinks produced or marketed by that brewery. And while you might bemoan the absence of your favourite homogenous international lager, you should at least try Tadcaster’s finest. At the time of writing, a pint of Sovereign Bitter was just £1.31. I was able to get the first round in using the small change I’d been collecting in various trouser pockets at home. Until I hear otherwise, the Brown Bear retains my recommendation as both Sheffield’s cheapest and most honest city centre pub.
The area around the two London railway terminals of King’s Cross and St. Pancras stations is a-buzz almost twenty-four hours a day with ongoing construction work for the imminent arrival of international Eurostar services. Britain’s first dedicated high speed rail line (optimistically numbered CTRL1, in case we ever get round to building another) will soon be open to passenger traffic, flying through Kent from the Channel Tunnel, skirting around the capital, past the east London site of the 2012 Olympics and into the newly refurbished and extended St. Pancras station on the northern side of the city centre. Journey times will be shorter and connections to other parts of Britain will be improved.
While all this construction work continues, a massive workforce of contractors, builders and labourers are on site building the new infrastructure. Finding myself at St. Pancras early one Sunday morning, the building site between St. Pancras and King’s Cross is already crowded with men about to start work. There isn’t really a uniform as such, but everyone is wearing a luminescent high-visibility yellow jacket and hard helmet. Originally designed to make sure workers could be seen on site by those operating heavy machinery, they’ve effectively become a cloak that symbolises inconspicuity in the city. Next time you’re in London, count the number of yellow jackets that you see in a short walk. They’re everywhere, and yet we’ve become so used to them they no longer catch our attention.
I have just arrived back in London after two weeks in Canada and America. Having already been delayed by two days, I’m eager to get on my train and go home. But being a penny pinching self-supporting traveller, I booked a cheap train ticket that is restricted to the service I specified when I reserved. Whereas I allowed for a safe cushion to get from Heathrow to St. Pancras, we actually arrived early and I’ve managed to ride the tube into London in less than an hour. With time to kill until my train leaves for Sheffield at 10h30, I need something to eat. With the redevelopment of King’s Cross and St. Pancras, the whole neighbourhood around the two stations is being gentrified. It was never a particularly savoury place to find yourself, and undoubtedly the powers of commercial development have seen that there could be good money to be made in tarting up the future arrival point for European tourists and business travellers. So standing outside King’s Cross on the corner of the Euston Road and York Way, I am already disgusted to find generic chain coffee bars popping up. After a fortnight away in the land of real diners, real fast food and real baristas, the last thing I want is a tepid over roasted Starbucks and an overpriced stale pastry. I’m British, damnit, and I want some grease in the morning…
It’s a beautiful winter’s Sunday morning, with a clear blue sky above me and a mild fresh bite to the air. It’s not yet seven thirty, and for a few moments I just stand on the corner, yearning for the ideal greasy spoon ‘caff’ to magically appear in place of the McDonald’s restaurant that has occupied a prime retail location near-by.
But then I realise that the answer is all around me. Where builders congregate, builders find greasy spoons. And I notice a small but promising stream of yellow hi-vis jackets heading east down the Pentonville Road.
I sneak off in hot (if silent) persuit. And within one hundred metres, I’ve struck gold. Adjacent to the King’s Cross Thameslink station on Pentonville Road (at number 275) is the Modern Snack Bar. A diminuitive facade opens to reveal a handful of tables with refilled bottles of tomato ketchup and laminated menus. A few very content contractors in hi-vis jackets bearing the slogan ‘CTRL’ are already tucking in. The Italian proprietor is talking animatedly with a friend, while a young waitress serves. I’m barely on the chair before I’ve decided what I’m having. For £4.75, I’ve found a proper English breakfast in the heart of King’s Cross. With a mug of hot, sweet milky tea and a groaning plate of bacon, sausage, beans, eggs and mushrooms, my first day back in Britain has been kick started.
So next time you have a hankering for some greasy English morning cuisine, you know which colour jackets you need to follow.
It’s Friday morning in Chicago, and we step off a green line ‘L’ train at 35th-Bronzeville-IIT station. This is the oldest urban transit line in the city of Chicago: parts of the entirely elevated line date back to 1892, when the route was constructed for the World’s Columbian Exhibition. Like all suburban ‘L’ stations, we find ourselves standing a storey and a half above street level, on a narrow island platform of untreated wooden planks, barely shaded from the sun and rain by a small canopy. Between us and the large drop to the pavement are the two train tracks, one either side of the platform. Prominent signs remind us that they are electrified.
Chicago’s ‘L’ trains are a destination in themselves: the ideal vehicle for tourists to explore and see the city. Although a few lines dip beneath the ground through the downtown core, most pass through the city centre on the ‘loop’, a circuit of tracks that connect a number of lines to the suburbs by forming a closed loop above the streets of the city centre which has come to name the downtown’s innermost core. Once outside the city centre, the tracks stay above ground level or in the medians of suburban freeways. Far more exciting than an underground network, the ‘L’ is your budget city tour – a seven day pass for train and bus is just $20, and regular ‘L’ service connects Chicago’s two airports to the city.
We’re in southern Chicago on the edge of the historic Bronzeville district to visit the Illinois Institute of Technology. This university campus, which has its principal campus here around 35th street, is home to no less than eighteen buildings designed by the architect Mies van der Rohe, who spent much of his life teaching architecture at IIT. Regardless of whether you find Mies’ architecture cold and emotionless, or clean and uplifting, a new tour programme offered by the Illinois Institute of Technology and the university’s Mies van der Rohe Society is an unmissable part of any visit to Chicago’s architectural high lights. For just $5 a person, you can choose to follow a self-directed iPod tour or be shown around the campus by a student (tours depart twice daily, Monday to Saturday at 10h00 and 13h00). Seeing that one such architecture student was waiting near-by the office that offers the tours, we gladly accepted the latter. The tours start at IIT’s most striking new building: the campus and student centre designed by Dutchman Rem Koolhass. This bizarre and colourful building slides and folds itself beneath the elevated tracks of the green line, and encloses them with a corrugated steel tube that was originally designed to damped the sound and vibrations of the trains passing over the tracks. You can visit the building yourself to see if this grand design works, but it was amusing to compare it to the adjacent student accommodation blocks designed by Helmut Jahn. This calmer and less ostentatious building forms a permeable wall between some of the campus’ open spaces and the passing trains, and it deals with the associated noise much more prosaically: with triple glazed windows mounted in insulated frames.
The landmark architectural feature of the campus is, however, van der Rohe’s Crown Hall building, the huge floating steel and glass block that was built to house the university’s architecture department. The department has now grown and spilt out into neighbouring buildings, but following a multi-million dollar refurbishment in 2006, the Crown Hall remains at the heart of the faculty of architecture school. Our guide confesses that while the building may be worshiped by fans of the Modernist movement in architecture, its refurbishment was well overdue. The black steel frame had begun to rust badly, and with no coherent shading inside the building, it had been likened to a green house in summer and a refrigerator in winter. Double height glass windows enclose the main floor of the building, used as a studio space for undergraduate students. We were there a week before the start of term, and the vast space was silent, with small wooden and cardboard models on white workshop tables reminiscing of last term’s projects.
Some visitors may find the building familiar. That could be because you’ve been in one just like it before. Mies van der Rohe refined many architectural and engineering techniques while he was teaching and building at IIT, and the Crown Hall is considered the peak of van der Rohe’s exploration of the plan libre: spaces that were entirely open and undivided, supposedly allowing for the space to adapt to any use at any time in the future. It’s a romantic idea that this vast open plan studio space could be used in that way, for students to occupy as they wish: design studio one day, lecture hall the next, play room for softball after hours when the security staff aren’t around.
The dream is broken very rapidly though. Two ‘floating’ staircases descend from the open plan studio to the basement level; these are proudly explained and shown off by our guide, because they make no contact with the building at any point other than the two landings – but are designed to hover so close to the adjacent walls that this detail seems wasted. It was here, rather than upstairs, that I understood Mies van der Rohe’s plan libre. For in the hushed basement we found the partitioned offices, ventilated workshops and subdued library. Photographed and reproduced in a thousand books, magazines and journals the world over, Mies van der Rohe fooled the world into thinking that a department of architecture was the ideal client for an open plan pavilion of steel and glass. In fact, the plan libre is a con: van der Rohe just knew to sweep all the messy, noisy and compartmentalised bits of the building into the basement, out of sight of passing visitors and distant architectural admirers.
Any self-respecting travel guide to Chicago will tell you (and I can almost guarantee this without exception) that while the observatory on the ninety-fourth floor of the John Hancock Centre is a great viewing point from which to see the city, you can get the same view on the adjacent ninety-fifth floor for the price of a drink.
As you can imagine, the drinks in the ninety-fifth floor Signature Lounge (11h00 – 00h30, 01h30 at weekends, www.signatureroom.com) are sold at marginally inflated prices, and the service is hardly worthy of the fifteen percent you’ll be adding to tab, but then that’s not the reason you come here.
Ascending from the building’s basement lobby on North Michigan Avenue, the elevator rattles at speed all the way to the top. I’ve experienced smoother elevators in university buildings a quarter the height of the Hancock Centre, but since I’m in the company of an elevator full of relaxed and chatty Mexican waiters, I’m reassured that the ride is always this bumpy. Alighting at the ninety-fifth floor, you can look down immediately to the double height restaurant space, in use tonight for a charity fund raiser. The disconcerting view down one level and out through the windows of the floor below me sends me knees into spasms, but I manage to stagger round (eagering resting one vertiginous hand on the inner wall of the corridor) to the main bar, which occupies the complete western side of the building at this height.
Visiting after dark on this unseasonably warm and therefore rainy January evening, the view is utterly breathtaking. In the same way that the Empire State Building offers a view set back from the main cluster of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the Hancock Centre was deliberately placed outside the dense downtown core of skyscrapers and office buildings. This sacrifice in location means the view is even more spectacular: the tight downtown pile of steel and glass skyscrapers can be seen in one glance from here, including the dizzying heights of the 443 metre Sears Tower. The Sears Tower is taller than the Hancock Centre by several storeys, and the competing SkyDeck observatory is a similarly popular tourist destination. But on a night like tonight, with scattered rain clouds scudding over Chicago at a speed that confirms the city’s nickname, the top of the Sears Tower is hidden in cloud. We seem to be at just the right height for a clear view out onto the orange lights of the Windy City.
My first visit to Chicago was almost five years ago, when a connecting flight brought me through O’Hare Airport en route to western Canada. My first taste of the United States of America was an airport that I couldn’t leave for fear of missing my onward flight. A long trans-Atlantic flight spent strapped into a middle-block seat of a widebody jetliner was finally concluded with a striking view out across the laps of my fellow passengers. We approached the airport directly parallel to the city’s grid of streets, and for a few brief moments before landing, the windows to my left and right framed a perspective of parallel streets flashing past, all pointing towards invisible vanishing points on distant horizons. From up here, my visit to Chicago is suddenly brought into remarkable clarity. The vast grid of right angled streets is laid out before me and marked out with orange streetlights.
The Signature Lounge is packed tonight. There are tourists from Japan, Australia and Holland. Everyone takes their turn upon arrival to edge towards the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the bar, and to peer out over the narrow triple glazed edge to the streets and diminutive neighbouring buildings below. I like neither heights not cognac, but in order to make the most of this view, I drink slowly and gradually acclimatise to both.
You might remember my earlier post in which I described how a aeroplane computer fault lead to a five hour delay flying from London Heathrow to Montréal Trudeau. Well, it’s worth remembering your rights in these circumstances. If you are:
then you should be aware of your rights in cases of delay, cancellation, and denied boarding. This website of the European Union explains them: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/air_po…rmation_en.htm
Thanks to FlyerTalk member Zorn for the tip.
Some of my itineraries have seen me changing trains in some slightly unexpected places. It’s all very well spending a layover of a few hours in a big city, but it’s quite often more enjoyable to discover something of a smaller town when you have time to kill between connections.
Schenectady, New York is one such place. I didn’t know of this small town until I started planning a major train trip around the USA last year. It’s the recommending connection point for passengers travelling between Montréal and Chicago. Unfortunately for anyone in the windy city who fancies a train trip to Montréal, the connection only works going west; the east bound ‘Lake Shore Limited’ misses the north bound ‘Adirondack’ by several hours. Although I suppose you could spend the night here.
This is how I first found Schenectady, in April 2006, en route from Montréal to the west coast of the USA. The full post is here.
Schenectady is a tidy little town, and a good example of the peaceful middle America I’m happy to experience for a few hours between trains. The station is small, with the tracks up on a raised embankment through the town centre, and with a small one-box station below. After leaving my bags safe in the station with the friendly attendant (definitely a good mood day for Amtrak staff) I head out to stretch my legs on a short tour of the town. Schenectady’s biggest feature is that it’s the home of General Electric, and also of Thomas Edison. Although as my USA By Rail handbook explains, that’s not how he started life.
Edison’s first job was selling sweets to railroad passengers, money from which he spent on chemistry sets and building a telegraph system out of scrap metal.
Just behind the station you’ll find the Edison Exploratorium (I think that means museum) but’s only available to visit by appointment, according to a sign in the window. I walk for an hour or two, buy some stamps from a stubborn vending machine that doesn’t like my dollar bills, and then look for a place to sit down for a while. While exploring the smaller tree lined streets on the other side of the station, I find a small saloon called Slick’s Bar and Restaurant. It’s more bar and restaurant, though Slick seems to be doing good business with his sandwiches. I’m assuming it was Slick that I saw, because his hair was indeed particularly slick.
I drank a bottle of Samuel Adams, and watched the CBS Evening News that was on a television screen behind the bar. Tonight’s top stories: the average price of gasoline across the States is now $2.86 a gallon (a bargain in the UK); the prices of building materials such as copper and plastic has increased dramatically in the last few months (apparently because of China’s economic boom… all I can say is that you should go into any Wal-Mart and you’ll see straightaway why there’s a boom in China); and also… an exclusive helmet mounted camera view of an Iraqi soldier’s duty in Iraq. I kid you not…
I am delighted to find Slick’s Restaurant again (click here for address and directions). It’s less than five minutes from Amtrak’s centrally located depot, and the small bar is a perfect place to spend some time between trains. Slick isn’t in attendance today, but a friendly waitress takes our order for two sandwiches (which have apparently made the restaurant famous). I take my time examing the unusually wide selection of bottled beers that are on sale, and settle for a not-too-distantly brewed Vermont Porter, which quickly recovers my faith in real American brewing.
This is my travelling companion’s first visit to the USA. She is slightly perterbed but not unsurprised when our sandwiches arrive. Between two thin slices of white bread are crammed dozens of freshly sliced and tightly packed wafers of meat. I chose ham and she chose beef: both sandwiches each way about as much as my Lonely Planet guidebook to the USA, and take almost as long to consume. Neither of us make it onto the second diagonal half of our sandwiches, and almost with a sense of satisfaction, our waitress offers to wrap them for us. We each mumble an acknowledgement of defeat, pay the bill, and scuttle off into the night.
Nonetheless, I look forward to my next layover in Schenectady.
Thursday morning saw me re-tracing a familiar route that I have taken several times in the last year or so. I was back in Montréal’s Gare Centrale (central train station) for the daily Amtrak train to New York City.
In the USA and Canada, taking the train is not the obvious choice. Distances are so great that flying is almost always faster, and rail lines are so poorly developed and busy with freight traffic that even the Greyhound bus can usually get there quicker. From Montréal to New York, the bus is indeed quicker by at least a couple of hours, but it can’t match the train in terms of price: US$59 adult / US$50.15 concessions for a one way trip.
The train follows a trajectory that is very roughly similar to the bus, heading south to the Québec – New York border and then down through the Adirondack mountains towards Albany and the Hudson River into New York City. The train, however, hugs the shore of Lake Champlain for a significant part of the trip, twisting and turning along a single track that was forged through the rocky shore between the lake and the forrested mountain region of the Adirondacks. When you combine this exceptionally scenic route with the competitive price, it’s no wonder that there is always a long queue in the airy hall of the Gare Centrale to board Amtrak train 68.
After recognising and saying hello to a previously helpful and memorably friendly VIA Rail agent, we are treated to the priority treatment and whisked down a separate staircase to the platform when the train begins to board. As usual for this busy time of year, train 68 is formed of four passenger coaches with an open plan café car in the middle of the train. Comparisons with the Greyhound continue to be favourable once you’re on board: the seats are vast and very comfortable (comparable with short haul airline business class at the very least) and the train is very spacious.
Travelling with Amtrak does require a certain skill though: that of letting go. The journey to New York City is scheduled to take just under ten hours, covering just 381 miles. The border crossing accounts for much of the delay, but so does incredibly sub-standard track. The journey from Montréal to the border takes ninety minutes – almost three times what a similar journey would take by car along the autoroute. And once you reach the border, the timetable becomes even more loose as the process of checking every passenger’s paperwork is labouriously handled by customs agents. Thirty-five minutes is allowed for this, and on our trip it takes twice as long. You can blame the awkward foreigners who require visa waivers for that (my apologies to everyone else on train 68 that day). Passengers who are joining the service (which is subsidised by the state of New York for providing service through the communities of the northern part of the state) further down the line know to check the service status service on amtrak.com or by calling 1-800-USA-RAIL. Since the train crew radio their position to a control centre after leaving most stations the information provided by this service is notably accurate and dependable.
Although today we’re not going all the way to New York City (we have a connection to make before then towards Chicago) I wasn’t too bothered by our delay. As the train pulls away from Plattsburg – the second station stop in the United States – the line pulls alongside the calm expanse of Lake Champlain, with the snowy mountaintops of Vermont visible across the lake in the distance. It’s very comfortable to kick off my shoes, recline the seat, and drift off as our shining silver train does the hard work, and carries us through this beautiful region of upstate New York.
If it hadn’t been for my very late arrival at Montréal’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport on Thursday night (see The Longest Night) I would have hoped to tell you about my sneaky cut price route from the airport to the city centre. Unfortunately I arrived too late to take advantage of the airport’s ’secret’ public transport option, but I’ll explain it anyway.
From Montréal’s only active passenger airport to the city centre, the car-less passenger has several options:
If you can manage your luggage and you can spare a bit more time, I strongly recommend the latter.
You can plan your connection from the airport to any métro station or bus in the city using the Tous Azimuts travel planner of the website of the STM, Montréal’s transit system. Otherwise:
The orange and green métro lines cross at Lionel-Groulx. If you want to take another connecting bus from any métro station to your final destination, be sure to print a transfer ticket from the machines just inside the ticket gate at Lionel-Groulx. A métro transfer ticket is not valid on buses departing from that station, so you have to get it here, not at your destination métro station.
