FRIENDS OF AMTRAK PHOTO GALLERY - Page Twelve

A recent visit to Vermont -- I once lived near Woodstock -- reminded me that it's just a great place if one likes trains. There's Amtrak's Vermonter in the East and the Ethan Allen Express in the West. Short lines carry the Vermont Valley Flyer, soon the new River Valley Rambler, and the Green Mountain Flyer, connecting the likes of North Bennington, Manchester, White River Junction, Norwich, Bellows Falls, and Chester Depot to a splendid landscape of working farms, bubbling streams and highways filled with happy leafers and geekers from Boston and Manhattan. On the left is Monadnock Central's Bellows Falls - Chester Depot run, photographed arriving in the latter in 1964. On the right is a Steamtown excursion pulling into its home base in Bellows Falls in 1978. The Monadnock Central is no more. Its trains now trundle behind diesels over Vermont RR tracks operated by the Green Mountain Railroad Corp, which runs the other short line trains mentioned here. Steamtown has relocated to Pennsylvania but, as they say, the memory lingers on in the Connecticut Valley.

The Amtrak station at Rensselaer, NY, just across the Hudson River from Albany, was a bustling place on May 24, 2000. Serving 28 weekday trains to and from Chicago, Vermont, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Buffalo and New York City, it dishes up quite a collection of equipment, including turbos, Heritage Fleet, Amfleets and Viewliner sleepers. Here's the New York-Boston Bound Lake Shore arriving an hour late with a consist of nine Heritage, Amfleet and Viewliner cars, one heck of a passenger load and the usual mail-express cars. The real excitement here is the new station, scheduled to open in 2001, along with a parking lot that will hopefully relieve the pressure which currently plagues anyone arriving mid-day. This is all quite a contrast to the last days of Penn Central and the early Amtrak years, which I remember well. Now if Amtrak can just get new equipment to keep up with all these new stations...and rising customer expectations.