A 6:13 AM departure to Boston on the Northeast Regional and then a transfer at Boston’s North Station to board the Downeaster to Portland. I had to forego CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning, which has been a favorite to watch these days rather than political news because the market is awash with mad money.
The last trip to Portland was not too long ago. In September last year we camped in the 100-mile Wilderness in northern Maine for five days. Was supposed to be six but we decided to drive south to Portland a day earlier.
I decided to take this excursion for three days because I’m a Amtrak MasterCard holder and I’ve accumulated over 40,000 points to utilize for train travel! And Portland is just a great town. Spring sprung yesterday but it’s going be 25 degrees on Sunday in the Far North.
So I’ll be arriving in Portland around 2:30 PM. There’s about a two-hour layover in Boston before boarding the Downeaster.
But traveling via Amtrak has been a go to since I first took the Northeast Regional to Washington, DC’s Union Station in 2013 as a former reporter. I was so impressed with the convenience that I wondered aloud why I had not previously used the service.
Since 2013 I’ve traveled quite a bit with Amtrak. When the company restored passenger rail service directly to Burlington, Vermont in 2022 I wasted little time to book a seat on the Ethan Allen Express from Moynihan Train Hall in Manhattan to downtown Burlington.
There’s actually a lot of work happening right now along the Northeast Corridor route, Amtrak’s highest-volume ridership in the country between Boston and Washington, DC.
For starters the biggest project of all along the route, and probably second in the country after California’s high-speed rail project between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the construction of a new passenger rail tunnel under the Hudson River, dubbed the Gateway Program.
That project calls for a four-track tunnel to replace a tunnel that was built by the ol’ Pennsylvania Railroad in 1910.
Then there’s the Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel in Baltimore, Maryland that was built back in the 1870s. To be renamed the Frederick Douglass Tunnel in honor of this country’s great and eloquent abolitionist.
And while taking a break from writing this post, I looked out the window and, alas, another major rail project happening in Connecticut between the Old Saybrook and New London stations—the Connecticut River Bridge, built in 1907, according to Amtrak’s projects website.
Really glad to see these projects happening. Back in 2013, when I took that train to Washington, DC to report on an Amtrak hearing at the House Transportation & Infrastructure the Gateway Program was still very early in the planning stages. But now there’s construction happening on both sides of the Hudson River.
I have about another one hour and 30 minutes to go to Boston as I alternate between writing and gazing out the window. The conductor just announced we’re approaching Mystic, Connecticut.
Onward to Portland, Maine!
