(The following story by Katie Warchut appeared on The Day website on June 7.)
NEW LONDON, Conn. — They rush off the train at Union Station in the late evening hours, wheeling compact suitcases and carrying briefcases across the tracks and into taxis and cars.
These are Amtrak’s regular travelers, returning from doing business in New York or Boston, who will be forced to make other plans when trains stop running for four days this month.
About 3,350 riders travel between the two Northeast cities on weekdays. The number of weekend riders drops some, to an average of 2,890 a day.
Amtrak will not run trains on June 14 and 15, a Saturday and Sunday, and June 16 and 17, a Monday and Tuesday, while workers replace the moveable span of the Thames River railroad bridge.
In southeastern Connecticut, riders headed to New York have the advantage of a short traveling distance to Old Saybrook, where they can catch a Shore Line East commuter train to the city.
That’s what Joanna Miller of Mystic says she’ll do. Working for Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive recruiting firm, she travels regularly to New York and Boston.
”It’s inconvenient,” said Miller as she got off a train from Boston this week. “But it’s better to have a safe bridge.”
Shore Line East officials have said some trains would be extended from Old Saybrook to New London to help make up for the loss of Amtrak service, but they have yet to release a schedule.
Others getting off trains in New London from New York this week said they’ll fly or simply not travel at all during the outage.
Susan Elliot, a spokeswoman for Delta Airlines, said the company does not give out daily ridership numbers, adding that it’s hard to gauge the usage of the company’s New York-to-Boston shuttle because ticket sales for those flights are purchased at the last minute. The shuttle runs 64 flights between New York and Boston from early morning to late evening on most days.
The Greyhound Bus Co., on the other hand, is working with Amtrak to try to accommodate displaced rail passengers, according to Abby Wambaugh, a company spokeswoman.
Between the signs, Web-site postings and even conductor announcements on the train, Miller said it seems highly unlikely that riders would be unaware of the outage.
Still, Stephen Dobson of Stonington was surprised to learn this week that there would be no trains for a few days later in the month. Dobson, who travels to Pfizer’s New York office on a regular basis, said he simply would avoid the trip that day.
Pfizer spokeswoman Liz Power said the company’s travel service is advising employees to make other travel plans during that time.
Power, who makes the trip to New York on Mondays, will not be traveling there June 14. But she normally takes commuter rail anyway, because Pfizer offices are closer to Grand Central Station than Penn Station, where Amtrak trains stop.
Jan Lindberg of Norwich said the fact that Amtrak has removed reservations from its booking system does not mean all passengers will be well-informed.
Lindberg works for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., and travels often by train to Washington, D.C. He is also a regional director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers. With high gas prices and grounded planes, he said, many trains are sold out.
”So people are used to that (service),” Lindberg said. “I don’t think the normal business person thinks, ‘I’m going to make a reservation.’ When they arrive at Penn Station or South Station, that’s when they’re going to find out there’s no trains for the next four days.”
The project is one of the largest since Amtrak began ownership of sections of tracks on the Northeast corridor in 1976, said spokesman Cliff Cole, but he could not say whether Amtrak has actually suspended service for this length of time since then.
Amtrak had originally planned for buses to carry passengers between stations during the outage, but decided that move would be logistically difficult because of the high number of riders.
Cole said Amtrak also considered the passengers’ habits.
”There was an overall feeling that anyone who uses Amtrak would not be interested in using that kind of service,” he said, referring to the length of time and multiple connections for a bus journey.
Amtrak is adding one extra train per day between Washington, New Haven and Boston via an inland route through Springfield, Mass., between June 15 and June 17.
Amtrak trains cannot go from New Haven to New London, or Boston to Mystic, and then reverse direction because that would require an engine on each end of the train, which is not feasible, Amtrak officials have said.
Acela trains can reverse direction, but do not stop at smaller stations like Mystic because they require high-level platforms for passengers to get on and off. They are able to stop in New London, but Cole said several hundred passengers getting off here would also have been problematic.
The railroad bridge span that opens like a drawbridge is being replaced with one that rises between two towers. Trains are scheduled to begin running again June 18.