FRIENDS OF AMTRAK PHOTO GALLERY - Page Twelve

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.

I've never seen an airplane add much to a landscape, especially one that is pretty bleak and remote. Certainly, I wouldn't stand around waiting for one to fly over to make things look better. Trains are different and I well recall long waits for these two. The one on the left is the Rock Island's eastbound Rocky Mountain Rocket near Limon, Colorado, on a grim day in 1965. Reduced to but a sleeper, club lounge and coaches, one from Denver and one from Colorado Springs, en route to Chicago [it would pick up a sleeper in Des Moines enroute], this train was approaching its last days. A happier sight -- service continues on this route to this day on the Skeena -- is VIA's Jasper - Prince Rupert run, photographed on a cold day in 1983 near Jasper, its deep blue and yellow a wonderful complement to the wilderness it traversed.