Downeaster joyride

Yesterday I went to Portland and back on the Amtrak Downeaster. Because I could.

I realized that I actually had lived in New England too long when the train got to the second stop and the conductor announced "Hahver Hill", and I had an instinctive urge to strangle him. (Hint: "hay-ver-ill", as intuitive as "pea-biddy" and "wuh-stah".)

Remember when Amtrak sued Guilford Transportation Industries (now Pan Am Railways) to let the Downeaster go faster than 59 mph? The trusty ol' GPS says we topped out at 74 mph at a couple of places in New Hampshire and Maine. It'd help if the T didn't have its own 59 mph limit, or if there weren't slow zones in Lawrence and Haverhill, or if you could go faster than 40 mph on the Wildcat Branch.

But otherwise PAR seems to have kept the line in pretty good shape. Mostly continuous welded rail, though one spot I noticed jointed rail in Dover, NH was still pretty good (compare with the Lake Shore Limited between mileposts 187 and 199 going into Albany from Boston). We stopped for a meet with another Downeaster on the return trip, and there the opposite track was clearly stamped as 115 lb/yard RE rail forged in 2000, so pretty new infrastructure. A couple of new signal installations too; too bad these things take out the line for half the day for three years (*cough*).

As far as rail infrastructure goes: there are a couple of rail-freight customers in Massachusetts, even on the Lowell line in Woburn. (But not the giant Market Basket distribution center in Tewksbury right next to the Haverhill line.) Outside of Massachusetts, it's a single-track line with sidings; everything interesting -- signals, mileposts, sidings -- is on the east side of the train. And it being single-track probably means Downeaster frequency is limited to current levels without some major improvements.

We did pass a couple of PAR trains, which were by and large 35ish car mixed trains, mostly boxcars with a couple of tank cars and center-beam cars, but that behind 2-3 engines (all with the Guilford "G" logo), which felt overpowered to me. The Portland and Lawrence yards both looked pretty sparse. But the only time we were waiting on a signal, I'm pretty sure, is for that northbound Downeaster, so PAR did a pretty good job of giving the passenger trains priority.

Minor T observations

Lots of Green Line trains parked in the subway yesterday morning -- several Bredas parked on the unloved station track at Park Street, one on the stub track there, one on the loop at Government Center. I wonder what it meant. The trains going through to GC/North Station/Lechmere were by and large Bredas too, though.

The CharlieTicket machine UI really is that terrible, if you just want to buy a ticket to go somewhere and come back. Warnings that CharlieCard fares are cheaper are pretty useless if you don't already have a card since there's no way to get one. I didn't go down the rathole of pressing the only thing on the top-level screen that said "Tickets" (on its own line; maybe it's "commuter rail" or subway "tickets"? more plausible than "stored value"). $5 is not an integral number of subway fares, it doesn't tell you how many subway fares it is, it (apparently by design) doesn't tell you what the subway fare actually is.

I've also noticed, though not yesterday, that nobody even sees the screens on the CharlieGates. On the handicapped gates they're well below eye level. On the normal gates they're obscured by the rest of the equipment. So if they say "smart cards only" because they've conveniently eaten some poor sucker's $59 commuter rail pass you're not going to notice this until maybe after you've tried to feed your own stored-value ticket in a couple of times and failed.