Here’s a new one: I missed the last train to Boston from Philly last night, so I got to chill at the station, with the homeless, until the midnight regional arrived. I piled on board with a bevy of disappointed Yankees fans, who shared a raucous hour up to New York and debarked. I spent the next 6 hours curled up in a variety of uncomfortable configurations until now – 7 in the morning. I’m sipping insta-coffee and watching one of the most glorious fall sunrises I’ve seen in a long time, over the still waters of costal Rhode Island.
The man who served my coffee remarked on my Michigan sweatshirt. Turns out that he grew in in Detroit – he’s a little older than my mother would have been. Where she was a high school student for the riots of 1967, he was a police officer.
While I sorta got burned on this schedule, I still swear by the train for travel in the Northeast corridor. I think that Philly may be the southern limit of “dead simple one-day travel” by train though. Even with the standard mantra about “you save an hour for security, and the seats are so much more comfortable,” a seven hour midnight ride is pretty clearly inferior to an hour in the air.
