[This is the first in a series of articles on rail travel in CT]
On a recent return from Washington, D.C., a late-season snowstorm shut down the highways. Cars were crawling on I-95. Flights out of Reagan were grounded. I was on a train, watching the snow fall over empty streets at sixty miles an hour, reading a book. I was home before midnight. That trip changed how I think about regional travel.
I used to be a diehard driver. Kept the travel time down, had flexibility at the destination, controlled the schedule. But fuel prices kept climbing. Parking fees kept rising. Traffic kept getting worse. So we started flying more—but not without issues. Cheap flights are always late or early, which starts the trip off rough. Security lines got longer, so we paid for TSA PreCheck at $80 per person per year. And we got stuck overnight several times due to weather, footing hotel bills or renting cars just to get home. Flying isn't a panacea, and for regional travel—anything under 300 miles—it's really not optimal. That realization led us to reevaluate how we travel regionally.
My wife's commute was the first test. She travels to New York regularly for work. By car, that means navigating I-95 or Merritt Parkway traffic, dodging potholes, construction, paying tolls, and racing to get back into Connecticut before 2 PM—because anyone who's driven that corridor knows that after 2 PM, you're sitting in gridlock until 7 PM. If there's an accident, longer. Add parking fees and five lost hours of productive work time each way, and it's a brutal day that has to be recovered somewhere. She now takes the train from New Haven to Penn Station. It's faster than driving, cheaper, and she works the entire way in and out.
We also make regular trips to the D.C. area for family visits and to see our daughter at George Washington University. Our old routine was leaving at 5 AM sharp; not a suggestion—a requirement. Leave by five and you clear New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore before rush hour hits. Leave after eight and you won't arrive until late afternoon. The return trip is worse. Either way, the one-way drive takes about 6.9 hours and costs about $275 round trip in gas, tolls, and parking—more during Thanksgiving week, when travel times double. By train, the one-way trip takes about 7.3 hours with off-peak fares dropping as low as $162 round trip. Only 25 minutes more than the best-case drive, but cheaper—and we arrive relaxed instead of drained. No white-knuckle merges through the Cross Bronx. No praying the GPS finds a way around the Baltimore tunnel backup. We just sit down and go and keep the miles off of our car.
For a recent convention in Boston, the drive would have been about three hours and $151 round trip for gas, tolls, and parking. I took the train from Berlin to Boston South Station instead, then walked twenty minutes to my hotel. Door to door: 4.5 hours. Round-trip cost: $145, with off-peak fares as low as $126. The numbers are close to a wash—but I read the entire way and actually enjoyed the scenery through southern New England instead of sitting in traffic as I passed Fenway. I'd do it again without hesitation.
Still, I should be honest about the trade-offs. Train fares vary by time, day, and class, but the numbers I've cited are representative of coach class. If you want silence or assigned seats, you'll need business class, which runs about double the price. They also don't work for every trip because you're locked to the schedule, which has a narrower travel window than driving. And if your destination isn't near a station, you'll need a plan for the last mile—a cab, a bus, an Uber. These are real constraints, and I'll dig into them in future articles.
But there are things you get on a train that you just don't get in a car or on a plane. In addition to café cars with food and drinks, you can bring your bike. You can bring your dog. There's Wi-Fi. You can take a walk through the train to stretch your legs, and there are far more bathrooms than any flight you've been on. And unlike flying, bad weather doesn't strand you in a city scrambling for a hotel room—something that's happened to me more than once.
Experiencing all of this, I started wondering why I ride trains more? The cost savings are real. The experience is better. The stress is gone. So, the obvious question is—if rail works this well, why don't more people in Connecticut use it? Because the system has serious gaps.
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