(The following story by Brian O’Neill appeared on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website on August 29, 2010.)
ON THE RAILS — An 11-hour train trip? No, thanks. But four- to seven-hour trips are short enough to allow the novelty of the ride, the steady pace through unfamiliar country, to be an adventure.
So with the kids off to summer camp, my wife and I booked a train from New York to Montreal, stopping each way for an overnight stay in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.
The trains cost $306 for the pair of us, and brought us to some of the best meals of our lives (none of them on the train, mind you).
The Adirondack left at 8:15 a.m. Saturday from Penn Station. It was full, and we made the rookie mistake of not getting in line until the boarding announcement. (As with the airlines, that’s a cattle call, though without the mandatory shucking of shoes, emptying of pockets and other built-in indignities of post 9/11 flight.)
We entered a train where even a single open seat was rare, but an Amtrak conductor, unbidden, kindly asked another passenger to switch seats so we could have two together. We settled into seats roomier than those on jets and began a trip that got leafy before we left Manhattan.
The Hudson is twice the width of the Ohio, and sailboats began appearing before too far along, as the mansions of the lower Hudson Valley quietly showed us where much of America’s Old Money (and plenty of its new money) lives. We were in Albany by 11:15 a.m., where nicotine addicts got their cigarette breaks, and we had 15 minutes to walk the station if we liked. Most people didn’t because the freedom to move about a train at any time made that excursion redundant.
By Schenectady, the train was less than half full. We’d chosen the Fort Edward-Glens Falls station, about 40 miles farther north, as our first stop. We arrived roughly 20 minutes late but before 1 p.m. We didn’t know much about Glens Falls (about 14,000 residents) beyond its waterfall figuring in “The Last of the Mohicans,” but that’s one of my wife’s favorite novels. A $7.50 cab ride took us to the Queensbury Hotel in downtown Glens Falls 15 minutes away.
We had a fine lunch at a nearby restaurant with the punny name Wholy Crepe, then took a walk across the Hudson (considerably thinner this far north) to “Cooper’s Cave.”
James Fenimore Cooper wouldn’t recognize the falls today, which long since have been tamed by a hydroelectric dam, but as I dipped my feet in the Hudson downriver, I noticed something that separated this riverfront from Pittsburgh’s: no litter.
That night, as we walked a downtown straight out of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the menu in its window lured us into Black Watch, a farm-to-table restaurant that opened only a few months ago. I went for the market oysters ($13) and cider-brined pork rib chop with roasted apple sauce, walnut polenta, rhubarb and red onion chutney ($19). My wife had chilled root vegetables with locally made goat cheese, fennel vinaigrette, hazelnuts and citrus ($8), and scallops with pea hash, pancetta jus and parsnip puree ($24).
We gave it two thumbs way up. Store-bought pork is so often dry, but it’s succulent when the pig can walk to the restaurant. Despite pre-dinner cocktails, a fresh-fruit dessert and post-dinner glass of port, the bill was just $97 before tax and tip.
Were we stopping in Glens Falls again, we’d take in the Hyde Collection, which includes works by Degas, Eakins, Homer, Rembrandt, Renoir and Rubens. This time, we took a long morning walk through a park along the Hudson and breakfasted at Maud’s Kitchen, a neighborhood joint across the river, festooned with homemade aprons and hats, that touts a $1 fine to anyone who is “grouchy, irritable or just plain mean.”
We cabbed back to Fort Edward to make the 12:19 p.m. train. Run by Kathleen Presti and Denise Mayer, this postcard-perfect station doubles as an art gallery/gift shop, and Ms. Mayer even gave us a couple of the juicy tomatoes that she grows a stone’s throw from the tracks.
The journey north from there is dominated by Lake Champlain, which stretches for 110 miles on the right, and countless great blue herons in the marshlands on the left. A tour group of New Jersey seniors would be getting off in Plattsburgh to ferry across the wide lake to Burlington, Vt., and at least one of the women wasn’t smitten with the scenery. (“I’ve seen enough trees to last me a lifetime!”) But after a stretch of stations that were little more than picnic shelters, a built-in one-hour stretch for Canadian customs officials to come through the train, and long looks at the small towns and vast farms of Quebec, we arrived in Montreal at 7:27 p.m., just about 17 minutes late.
Montreal is a great walkable city with a good subway system and a new public bike system. Some 3,000 bicycles are scattered among 300 self-serve rental ports, and a swipe of a credit card allows a free 30-minute ride with a drop-off anywhere else one finds a BIXI rental port. The bikes are available 24/7, May through November.
We didn’t pack bike helmets and won’t bike in a strange city without them, even one with two-lane bike paths coursing the urban center. But the Metro and our feet got us everywhere we wanted to go during our three-night stay.
We stayed near McGill University and each morning would have cafe au lait and pastries at Premiere Moisson Boulangerie. We walked one morning up to the Parc du Mont-Royal, for a sweeping view of the city, a walk that would have been a serious challenge were we not one with Pittsburgh’s hills.
In old Montreal, we took in the Notre-Dame Basilica, one of the great cathedrals of North America, built in only five years in the 1820s, or roughly the same pace it’s taking to refurbish Point State Park. Mostly, though, we ate like we’d never see food like this again — a fair bet.
Blackened cod (Morue noire) at Restaurant Alexandre was magnifique ($25 Canadian), as was its assortment of Quebec cheeses ($13.50). Blood pudding at the Cafe des Beaux-Arts ($19.50) was delicious, as was the cucumber soup ($6.50). At Troika, a Russian restaurant on Rue Crescent, the wild boar ($35) would tame any appetite.
We boarded a Wednesday 9:30 a.m. train for New York at Gare Central, a busy station with cafes and boutiques that put Amtrak counterparts south of the St. Lawrence to shame. At 4:19 p.m. (26 minutes late) we got off in Saratoga Springs, where the horse racing season runs each year from late July through early September. We took a cab to our hotel, a 15-minute walk from the city’s center.
Max London’s on Saratoga’s Broadway also had a farm-to-table menu, and we enjoyed a nice little dinner of beet salad, risotto, mussels, wine and cocktails for less than $100 before tax and tip. In the morning, we got up early for a mile walk through a quiet residential section to the Saratoga Race Course. Gates open at 7 a.m. for a $16 buffet breakfast at trackside. That includes a to-die-for burrito and an up-close look at thoroughbreds going through their morning exercises on a beautifully landscaped track with expert commentary over the public address system.
Two daily trains run to New York from Saratoga, and we had booked the 9:43 a.m. Ethan Allen Express that originates in Vermont. The train again hugged the Hudson, and we arrived in Penn Station five hours later, 19 minutes late.
We’d do it again, perhaps tweaking the trip next time to take in a day of horse racing or stopping at Fort Ticonderoga. (Upstate New Yorkers have embraced the French and Indian War in ways Western Pennsylvania promoters are only beginning to figure out.)
What’s nice about a long train trip is that it can be treated like a buffet. No two trips down the line need be the same. Train stations, unlike airports, are nearly always close to the center of town. That invites a long vacation where one can leave driving entirely behind.