Trip Report: November 27 - December 21, 2001
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
28 DAYS ON THE RAILS
ACELA EXPRESS
Thursday, December 13, 2001
We are up early this morning as we have tickets on Acela Express leaving for New York Penn Station at 8:36AM. We leave the Sheraton at 7:20, unsure of how quick the process will be. Everything goes like clockwork. Our bellman gathers our baggage, the doorman flags a cab, they both load the trunk, the taxi driver knows where the Amtrak Station is located, and we are there by 7:40.
Incoming taxis at the 30th Street Station drop you off at an island inside the coach entrance. You need to manhandle your bags across the outgoing taxi lane to reach the station. There are no ramps off the island curb and onto the sidewalk curb, and there are no Red Caps to assist.
The next step is to get to Club Acela, the new name for the first-class Metropolitan Lounges on the East Coast. The Club is immediately adjacent to the baggage checking area, but it is up a flight of stairs. If you are traveling alone, you will get your bags up the stairs yourself. But if you are in a party, leave someone downstairs to watch your bags, (you cannot leave them unattended for security reasons). Then enter the Club and ask the agent on duty to assist you with the elevator to get downstairs to gather up the rest of your party and your bags. Simple.
Once you are checked in and settled down with a cup of tea, the agent will announce boarding time for your train and send you all down in the elevator directly to the train platform. Slick. We still have a half hour to train time so we explore the Art Deco masterpiece of 30th Street Station. If any of you readers are depressed about the condition of your local Amtrak Station, travel to Philadelphia (or Washington) if only to experience the elation of being in a bustling and well maintained railroad station. It will take you back in time to when the railroad station was the center of every city, and give your railfan spirits a lift!
The 8:36 Acela Express is called at 8:30 and we are hustled into the elevator and sent down to the platform. Our Acela glides in on time just as a southbound Acela is leaving the station on an adjacent track. We board a Business Class coach and are pleasantly surprised to find it full. I leave my party standing in the vestibule as our train departs, looking for seats. The coach ahead is the Quiet Coach (no cell phones, laptops, or computer games permitted) where there are a scattering of single seats, and the conductor moves one passenger across the aisle to make room for us. By this time we are rolling silently out of town at 125mph or so.
The highly-publicized Acela engine is strikingly handsome, with a similar appearance to its European cousins, the TGVs. The interior of the cars look very up-to-date, with low-key blues and grays. The train is unusually quiet, but since the tracks are not as smooth as those in Europe, there is some lurching and vibration.
Many of the passengers were sleeping, as they had boarded very early this morning in Washington D.C. Most looked like professional people who were not seduced by the $59 airfares from Washington to New York being offered at that time. (No matter how low the fare, not everyone will agree to body searches, long security lines, and the prospect of being strapped into one's seat for the entire flight back into National under penalty of being tackled and handcuffed by air marshals should one need to use the restroom.)
The weather, too, made flying unattractive, with a murky low overcast. Before we had time to settle in, we were pulling into New York's Penn Station, 90 miles in 70 minutes, for an average speed of 77mph. Not spectacular, but we did make intermediate stops in Trenton and Newark. Also there is a lot of slow running in the Jersey Meadows before descending into the Hudson River Tunnel.
Our plan while waiting for the Three Rivers to depart from New York at 12:50PM was to taxi to the recently restored Grand Central Station, now used as a commuter terminal. We drop our luggage in the Acela Lounge (formerly the Metro Lounge) at Penn Station and walked outside to the taxi entrance. As in Chicago, it has been closed off due to security considerations, and we have to walk up a ramp to the sidewalk. It had started to rain, and there were 30 or 40 very resigned-looking people standing in the downpour at a makeshift taxi stand.
Recalling the legend that you can never find a taxi in New York on a rainy day, we quickly decided that it would probably be at least a half-hour wait in the rain for a cab, and there was no guarantee that we'd be able to find a taxi back to Penn Station in time to make our connection.
So we returned to the comforts of the Acela Lounge, where we observed the just-released tape displaying the elation of Osama bin Laden while describing his reaction to the events of 9/11.
Travel Tip: Across the street from Penn Station is the Hotel Pennsylvania. It has been there for a long time. Its phone number is still Pennsylvania 6-5000, which was made famous by an original Glenn Miller tune, written during the time that the Glenn Miller Orchestra played in the Blue Room. Recently it has been renovated in an attempt to restore some of its original flavor. I have used this hotel for my clients for many years, only because of its proximity to Penn Station. Client comments have been pretty much limited to "adequate", but since the renovation it has become a more attractive hostelry.
How does Acela Express compare with other fast trains around the world? More than twenty years ago we had ridden trains in Europe that were faster, smoother, and quieter than Acela: the Diesel-powered HST in Great Britain at 125MPH in 1979, followed later by the Electra-locomotive-powered 140MPH trains. In France in the mid 1980s we had experienced the 168MPH TGV Sud and the 186MPH TGV Atlantique. After the Chunnel opened there was the 186mMPH Eurostar.
Acela is a slick train for the U.S., and is based on a European design. However, we cannot really obtain European speed and smoothness of ride on our rails without a complete rebuild of the railroad infrastructure. While this has been going on in Europe and Asia for decades, there is little hope of our ever being able to afford to accomplish it here in America. Just look at the problems that Amtrak encountered in getting its first Acela Express train delivered and working properly. Acela service was begun one year behind schedule with only two train sets, one scheduled, one for a backup. By comparison, when French National Railroads inaugurated its TGV Sud service in 1981, they had 175 train sets ready to roll on Day 1!
So many people I talk to on the trains we are riding ask, "Why can't we have more high speed trains?" Europeans and Japanese do their high- speed rail on a budget that is hardly comprehensible to contemporary Americans. American high-speed rail on a scale such as this would require an entirely new paradigm, in which practical considerations for mobility and for freedom from foreign oil dependency would overshadow the continuance of the status quo.
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