Trip to New England, 29 August to 10 September 1997

(Return here in a couple of weeks and you might find some more photographs to go with the text.)

My 50th birthday, earlier this year, was the pretext for this trip to the Boston area. I wanted to be on hand for the centennial of the Boston subway system. Given that we were going to be in New England, we decided to tack on a few excursions and come home by train -- the long way! Originally, this meant via Canada, but the train we wanted to ride was already fully booked back in May, so instead we came home via Orlando and Los Angeles.

We started, however, with an uneventful United Airlines flight to Boston via Chicago. We rented a car Friday evening before Labor Day weekend and headed out to our hotel in Woburn via Cambridge. (You may question the sanity of this route, but Andréa and I have a vacation tradition of taking roads we have not previously seen whenever possible. This time, we wanted to take the Middlesex Turnpike.) Surprise! The traffic was backed up on Alewife Brook Parkway from the Route 2 rotary, and we got rear-ended. No injuries, and the only damage to our car was a new scuff mark on the rear bumper. Believe it or not, this was the first time in my life I've had to go through all the paperwork involved in a motor vehicle accident, and of course we wouldn't be able to go through most of it until the following Tuesday. It put a bit of a damper on the first few days of the vacation.

Saturday started better, though. We drove to the Museum of Science from Woburn on the Middlesex Turnpike (I had mistakenly taken Route 3 the previous evening) and saw an OmniMax film about Antarctica, a planetarium show about the Mars Explorer, and an exhibit shamelessly sponsored by Corbis and William H. Gates III about the science and art of Leonardo da Vinci. Later, I stood outside the door of the previous site of the Tech Model Railroad Club on the last day it was to be accessible to members. Its old home, Building 20, is finally to be taken down, about 50 years later than originally planned. The club's new quarters are in the M.I.T. Museum building, about halfway to Central Square on Mass. Ave.

On Sunday, the planned highlight was a trip to the Railroad Museum of New England, in Waterbury, Connecticut, where we would ride a tourist train to Thomaston Dam and back to Waterbury. Upon our arrival, we found to our delight that, for an additional $15, I could ride in the cab of the locomotive! Also, we were joined by Andréa's cousin-in-law, Anna Heydt. Following the train ride, we drove south to Norwalk with Anna and saw some rarely-visited relatives and sites. We had taken the relatively direct I-84 route to Connecticut, so we drove back to the hotel that night on I-195.

Monday was September 1, the actual centennial of "the first train off the surface of the Earth," to use the Boston Globe's strange headline from September 2, 1897. The MBTA is planning to celebrate the centennial on October 21, because Clinton will be in Boston that day for the bicentennial of the U.S.S. Constitution. Despite this odd decision on the part of the MBTA, the Boston Street Railway Association's Charlie Bahne planned an informal centennial for local railfans on the true date of the centennial. We gathered at the outer end of the oldest line of the system, the Beacon Street line, and rode into Boylston Street. There, we went upstairs to a corner of the Boston Common, and Charlie gave an informative speech about the centennial and its significance. So there, MBTA!

We had further plans for the day, and we started out on a new (to us) piece of US 20. Our destination was Salisbury, Connecticut, my childhood home and site of my parents' graves. Previous trips had taken us around the south end of Barkhamsted Reservoir, not far from Bradley Field. This time, we went around the north end. We also went past Lime Rock Park while a rather noisy auto race was in progress. Lime Rock, a village in bucolic Salisbury township, is rural even by Salisbury standards, so when we were even a mile away from the race course, the race was still the loudest thing to be heard! Other new roads for that day included New York 22, north from Millerton to the vicinity of Pittsfield, and Massachusetts 9 back to Northampton.

Tuesday was a business day, and we now had to find and fill out the paperwork entailed by our mishap of the previous Friday. It took until a little past lunch time, but all in all, it could have been worse. The remainder of the day, Andréa indulged me in my continuing fantasy that we are going to move back to New England someday, and we drove north to New Hampshire to look at places we might live. This time, we looked at Nashua, Hudson, and Pelham, New Hampshire. Here and there, a few precocious trees were beginning to change color. Andréa allowed as how it was a pretty area as I waxed enthusiatic about New Hampshire's lack of sales tax and income tax (so far). We looked for routes along the Merrimack River and observed that Nashua has but one bridge across the river (well, actually, two bridges, but they're both one way, so they might as well be one bridge), and that bridge becomes mighty busy at 4:30 in the afternoon. I finished off the day with a visit to a TMRC work session at the new location of the club, where I helped Joe Onorato put down a few inches of new roadbed.

Wednesday was to be our first substantial foray into Maine (1970's slogan: Lover come back to Me.). We had dipped our toes in, so to speak, in May 1996, when we went about a mile into the state, to the first Tourist Information Center we saw, and then came back out. This time, we were joined by our friends Don and Jill Eastlake, and we headed off to the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport. We rode a couple of historic streetcars and toured their car restoration project. Returning to their home in Carlisle, we concluded the day with that all-important trip to Kimball Farms Ice Cream!

Thursday was our last full day in New England. Since neither Andréa not I had ever been to Vermont, naturally we had to visit Brattleboro. We took another piece to Route 9 to start out, detouring to the south end of Quabbin Reservoir and Winsor Dam (very impressive). Then we went north to Brattleboro, rattled around some very pretty back roads along the southern border of the state, and finally returned to our hotel on the Mass. Pike. I returned the rental car to the airport and filled them in on the accident. The rental car folks assured me we were still friends, and I hopped on the Logan Express bus to Woburn, which stops just the other side of a parking lot from our hotel (one of the reasons we picked it).

Our extended rail trip home began on Friday morning at the MBTA Mishawum commuter rail station, also adjacent to the hotel. We took a taxi from North Station to South Station. (In our younger days, we would have not hesitated to get on the Orange Line to Downtown Crossing [which would have been Summer/Washington/Winter in our younger days], and the Red Line to South Station -- but by now, the taxi is just plain more convenient.) Then on to a Northeast Direct Club Car to New York, where we spent a few minutes in the Metropolitan Lounge with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and we changed to the Silver Meteor to Orlando. This overnight trip passed without noticeable incidents, and we arrived in Orlando in plenty of time to pick up the Sunset Limited on Saturday afternoon.

The Sunset Limited, at three days, was the biggest element of our homeward trip, and it was the most trouble-plagued. Amtrak is not very good at telling passengers what's going on, so it is fortunate I had brought my radio scanner along. However, it was gossip that brought us the news that a freight train had split in two ahead of us in the middle of the first night of the trip, blocking the main line until crew members could repair the broken coupler, and that the train had stopped short of an eighteen-wheeler stalled on a grade crossing in the middle of the second night. The rest of the problems were mostly signal failures, each of which made it necessary for the train to stop at a false red indication and then proceeding at restricted speed (sometimes requiring the radioed permission of the dispatcher). Railroaders call this "flagging" the signal, referring to an old procedure requiring a railroad employee to walk ahead of the train, carrying a flag to protect its movement. At one point in west Texas, we had flagged past a couple of signals when I saw a railroad pickup truck drive speedily off the nearby highway and head down the track past the head end of our train. A couple more desultory announcements on the scanner about red signals, and all of a sudden the engineer happily informed the conductor about a red signal that had changed to green! The pickup truck had been carrying a signal maintainer.

The cumulative delays to the Sunset Limited over three days amounted to more than four hours, though, and it became clear that we would not make our Los Angeles connection to the Coast Starlight. Amtrak's standard Plan B in this case is to transfer us to bus at Ontario and zip over to Santa Barbara to transfer to the Starlight. So we got into our space on the Coast Starlight a couple of hours later than anticipated, but the rest of the trip north to Portland passed without further incidents. Thanks for reading about it!