If you mourn the destruction of the late, great Pennsylvania Station in NYC, you’ll find this glass heralding the coming of the new Madison Square Garden as chilling and cheap as the new building itself. Yesterday found Dr. V, Mr. J, and I at the Danbury Railway Museum. I had used the Metro North Danbury station before but never made it inside the doors of Danbury’s 1903 New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad Station. I had ridden up to Danbury to visit with Ms. M, a Danb

David W. Dunlap writes the rather fun Building Blocks column for The New York Times. On December 30, 2015, his contribution was titled “Longing for the Old Penn Station? In the End, It Wasn’t So Great.” Really? The pun is there (the “late great Pennsylvania Station” for all you not in the know), but it’s hardly apt. The title tarnishes a rather interesting article about Penn’s last years. Completely bone-headed modern alterations to the station took a terrible toll.  They did

Mr. I sent me a link recently to Atlas Obscura’s “The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips.” It is obsessive. Richard Kreitner (writing) and Steven Melendez (map) partnered to create a compelling interactive map over which colored lines streak following the stories of Blue Highways (1982), On the Road (1957), Travels with Charley (1962), Wild (2012), Roughing It (1872), and more. With one click, you can read how a variety of authors experienc

Ladies in nymph-like attire twirling and leaping through fields – sounds like the turn of the century pageantry movement to me. The Centenary Pageant in 1927 for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is a rather late occurrence of this type of display of civic and industrial pride. Part artistic endeavor and part technological exhibition, Baltimore and Ohio set up a location for the festival at Halethorpe near Baltimore. The pageant, staged each afternoon of the festival, melded hist

Better known as the PATH, the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad began shuttling passengers through its cast iron tunnels between Manhattan and points in New Jersey in 1908. My travels have been constrained in the last couple of months due to pregnancy. I haven’t been on a plane since October and my last trip out of the country was a 12 hour jaunt to Montreal in September. I’ve even turned down trips to Paris! Our radius of wanderlust has been increasingly contained within slowly

Christmas generally takes us to Maryland. While the Amtrak train I take travels over the Pennsylvania Railroad into Baltimore’s Penn Station, here’s a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Royal Blue Line menu from Christmas Day, 1900. The selections are fun and shine in comparison to what you can have on Amtrak today. Would you trust an oyster onboard Amtrak? Creme Yvette is a violet liqueur that incorporates blackberries, red raspberries, cassis, wild strawberries, orange peel, vanil

Commuters rush through the LIRR entrance corridor past artwork that evokes the original and only Pennsylvania Station. Andrew Leicester. Ghost Series, 1994. Photo: RL Fifield. If you enter Penn Station through the Long Island Rail Road entrance, you’ll see reliefs along the corridor that depict the tumbling Corinthian columns of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station (1910). If you’d like to grumble along with me, please follow these links to my prior posts about the d

I was peeved. During my Christmas break in Maryland, a winter storm blew in on the day I’d picked to spend some time at the state archives in Annapolis. My plan had been to look at criminal cases involving runaway servants, as well as look up wills and inventories for my 17th and 18th century Harford County ancestors (including the Cole family, see my series Digging Up My Ancestors about their cemetery move, beginning here). But it was really a mess out there, and seeing as D

I spent a day in Montreal, QC last week. I had forgotten how cold it can be up north.  I quickly relearned that northerners find ways to snake through buildings and basements to get from point to point. Here are some of my travel notes from last Thursday: Cords, shirt, thick sweater, run jacket, down parka, hat, hood, two pairs of gloves, hike socks, hike boots. That all was pretty good, except thighs would go so numb that I couldn’t feel them move. I stopped in Ogilvy’s on S

Colleagues of mine were up from DC this week for the Alliance for Response NYC program “Community-Based Recovery After Superstorm Sandy” (see the post here). One of them exclaimed “this is New York! look at everyone walking along the streets!” New York didn’t used to have a monopoly on street life. Certainly, my city lends itself to walking. The tight space forces us to live more closely together, further drawn together by our renowned subways, busses, and trains to closely c

Munich Hauptbahnhof. RL Fifield 2012. I had a crazy scheme for last week’s trip to Germany. My last visit was to Dusseldorf and Cologne. I had work in next door Bonn this time around. I wanted to see something else of Germany besides its western edge. I flew into Munich and spent the day there. How do you get to Bonn if you are train geek? You take the ICE. I got a bit more of a train ride than I bargained for: it was a 5 1/2 hour ride. What’s on the Menu? New York Public Lib

Hauptbahnhof. It has to be my favorite German word. Feeling adventurous, I decided to fly directly to Munich and check out the city before going to Bonn for an appointment. This meant a five hour train ride via the ICE, the express service which gets up to a thrilling 157 mph between Frankfurt and Cologne (the speed staved off the increasing jet lag and my need to nod off). There are two places I check out in every town: the market, and the train station. Like so many German

Transit Tuesday is moving on in on Museum Monday. London Transport Museum. Old Metropolitan Railway Car. Photo: RL Fifield 2010. If I didn’t live in New York City, I would live in London. It feels like home. And for fans of transit, the London Transport Museum is an excellent time. In the city that invented modern urban transit, a plethora of equipment, signage, photos, and groovy wax mannequins in the old flower market building in Covent Garden just has to be good. In the su

Sorry for the pun. Photo: r25 Productions. Flowers by Amanda’s in Havre de Grace. Since I was a little girl, driving into Havre de Grace meant curving around the high stone embankment to the right and passing under the hulking iron bridge that carries the Pennsylvania Railroad over the Susquehanna: it’s been doing so since 1906. That bridge says Havre de Grace to me like little else; so much so that some of our wedding photos are in front of it. Rendering of the new bridge at

Call me a dreamer. A romantic. Impractical. Head in the clouds. One of those city folk (that’s hilarious, you should see where I grew up). Trains will become more important, even necessary, in the near future for transportation. Hogwarts Express at Universal Studios. RL Fifield, 2012. I recently visited Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure with Dr. V. By far, the most busy part of the park was the Harry Potter section, with it’s wobbly roofs, token castle, and shops sellin

Ancestry.com, as a genealogical tool, is a start for many doing genealogy. I see it as a way to sketch and share only. There are a lot of problems with it, but it’s certainly quicker than cranking through all those census records on microfilm like we did in the past. It allows you to get through the basic stuff, and focus on the more difficult questions, and spend more time in the archives with wills, tax records, and the like. It’s also a sharing tool. A distant relative of

The El still lives on in Chicago – I’m not sure that they could live without it. But the El once was a vital part of New York transportation, an improvement on surface railways, pre-dating the underground subways, and discarded hastily during the rise of the automobile. The last elevated line in Manhattan was the 3rd Avenue line, at last abandoned in the Bronx in 1973. The Els were noisy and cast shadows on the streets below. There were once elevated lines on 3rd, 6th, and 9t

Cold Spring. RL Fifield 2012. Dr. V and I took the week off a couple of weeks ago, and finally followed through on a plan to go hiking. Most modern Americans expect to hop in their car in order to achieve reaching a remote wooded location. But as residents of Manhattan, we wanted to reach the trails by public transportation. Cold Spring, New York, fits the bill. The Hudson line of Metro-North deposits you right on Main Street. After walking about two blocks up Main Street, tu

This post is not about servants. So much of the time when I refer to runaways, it’s in relation to indentured and enslaved women. Communipaw Terminal’s now grassy rail beds. RL Fifield, 2011. Thanks to Mr. I for sending around this link to a well-written article in Popular Science about a runaway Jersey Central ghost train that charged out of Jersey City’s Communipaw Terminal on November 12, 1959 at 10:30pm. Read the article here. How the locomotive jumped a closed switch and

Fred Harvey was a British immigrant that brought high standards for trackside eating halls alongside the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad. Beginning in the 1870s, the Harvey family operated numerous restaurants and hotels along the railroad, culminating in several hotels along the south rim of the Grand Canyon, which still operate today. It also outlines the careers of many others, including interior designer Mary Colter, who was responsible for the interiors of many