Thursday, April 27, 2006

Rail Excitement

At some point in the near future, if I want to travel to Hartford and not have to pay an arm and a leg for parking downtown (or parking in Great River Park and walking across the bridge), I'll be able to drive to the Enfield train station in Thompsonville, hop on the commuter rail for what will hopefully be a reasonable fee, and ride down to Union Station.

This is very exciting.

Less exciting but still interesting is the fact that I could, once at Union Station, ride that silly busway to New Britain. Maybe I could get off in the swamp near Cedar Street in Newington. Why not? There's going to be a station there.

But that swamp will soon become much more accessible to me. And that's pretty exciting, too.

Now all I need is an easier way to get to the airport.

4 comments:

ctblogger said...

I'm still praying for the day when I can take a train from Danbury and go straight to New York munis the hassle of dealing with silly South Norwalk.

It would be so easy to connect Danbury to the Harlem line which starts in Brewster NY and would solve the traffic problem on 84 and 684.

ctblogger said...

David Mooney said...

I just talked about the Danbury sitaution on my blog but here's the brief rundown.

The problem with the Danbury line is taht it's linked to the New Haven Line. Danbury is basically a shuttle service to South Norwalk. From there, you have to get off the train and wait at least fifteen minutes to catch the New Haven Line and go to NYC. I would say the whole trip takes about 2 and 1/2 hours and it's a real pain.

Now Brewester is right next door to Danbury and driving to the station takes about ten minutes max. The Harlem line goes straight down Westchester County and it takes about 1 and 1/2 hours to pull into Grand Central.

If you can find a way to park in Brewster for free (or get a ride to the station), going to NYC viz Brewster is the way to go. No one likes the Danbury line becasue it's simply too slow and the New Haven Line is horrible.

For the life of me, I will never understand why Danbury is hooked up to the New Haven line when it would take very little effort to connect Danbury to Brewster. There is already a track that goes between Danbury and Brewster that is not being used.

Again, you can check my post on this matter as I have maps of the Harlem and New Haven line as well as a link to the schedules.

This has been a complaint among Danbury residents for as long as I can remember. Very few people who work in NYC take the Danbury train.

ctblogger said...

also...

There is no traffic problem between Danbury and Brewster, the problem is when you get to the I-84/I-684 interchange (most of the time). If there is any traffic, the local people know the side roads and can avoid it (i.e. Route 6, taking the "Jesus tree" road, driving up Route 22 and entering Danbury by North Street, etc.)

ctblogger said...

whoops,

Just read my post here and I made it seem like that was all one short cut.

Those are all diffent type of ways to get into Danbury from New York without using 684/84 that hard-core locals use to aviod traffic. I forgot to remove the word "and" between the words "Route 22" and "entering".