Krackel Hopper & RapitBunny in the Northeast

[Krackel Hopper]

Just returned from a short vacation to Maryland, Delaware & New Jersey..

 

After flying into Washington DC, we did all our travel by rail.

 

The DC Metro is much like I remember and while the cars are a little dated (same interiors as I remember 10yrs ago) the service was fast and efficient.  I think the longest wait we had was about 10 minutes.  Most of the time we only had a one or two minute wait.  Metro stations were nice, but lacking.  I'm surprised there are no news stands or convenience stores inside the stations.  Either way - it was nice to travel.

 

From DC we rode the Amtrak Acela Express to Wilmington, DE.  It was a very nice ride.  The seats on the Acela are very comfortable.  Nice big windows for viewing as we traveled.  Just outside Wilmington there was some track work going on and I got to see some interesting MoW equipment.

 

Just outside Wilmington, DE we took a tourist train, the Wilmington & Western.  I had never heard of this railway before.  It has a fairly interesting story and their restored Pullman cars were extremely nice.  They operate a 4-4-0 steamer.. which was not being used that day.  Our train was pulled by a restored SW1 diesel.

 

We returned to Washington DC on an Amtrak Northeast Regional.  Seats were closer to airline seats, and certainly not as comfortable as the Acela.  We did find a "loophole" that made the Regional nicer to ride.  Our "loophole" was to sit in the Cafe car.  The cafe car had booth style seating that was much more open and much less cramped than the seats in the coach cars.  Our Regional was pulled by an AEM-7 as well as every regional we saw.  I wanted to see an HHP-8 and our last return trip to DC I was able to see one, but not Amtrak.  The only HHP-8 we saw the entire trip was in MARC livery.

 

We spent a day in Baltimore to visit the B&O Roundhouse Museum.  We used the Baltimore Light Rail to get down there.  I was not very impressed with the Baltimore Light Rail service.  There were no indications of when trams were running, so I do not know if we were just unlucky - but we had to wait nearly 20 minutes every time.  In retrospect, instead of Taking Amtrak from DC to Baltimore and Baltimore Light Rail from Penn Station to Camden Yards - I should have just got tickets on a MARC train from DC straight to Camden Yards.. oh well.. you live you learn..

 

Finally - we got to meet Jeff (cten04) and a handful of the JRM people.  RapitBunny and Jeff were wearing matching t-shirts!  What are the chances?  It was great food & great company!  Hopefully next time we travel to DC we can catch a JRM show, meet some other members and see the layout.

[cteno4]

It was great to meet yet another couple of JNS folks in person! so many times folks are just electrons converted to characters on the screen, really nice to put the wetware with the characters!

 

Even odder the two tee shirts that Rapitbunny and I were wearing were not only basically the same, rather obscure godzilla tee shirts (world destruction tour with cities destroyed and dates on the back) but they were two different artistic layouts of the same one! odd to have the same obscure tee shirt on, but two different versions of the same tee shirt...

 

Great night was had by all to just hang out and talk trains, japanese anime, etc, was great they could get a free evening on their vacation to visit with us!

 

Glad to hear the NE train connections all worked well for the trip!

 

come back again!

 

jeff