What it the furthest one can travel from one point to another via commuter rail - not amtrak.
What I can see (in my neck of the woods) is that you can get on LIRR (Long Island Rail Road at Montalk NY and take that to grand Penn station. Then a hop on New Jersey Transit will get you to Trenton NJ. From there you can get abord septa and get to Newark Delaware.
For a total of 220 mi point to point. I was wondering is this the furthest that you can travel using commuter rails in the US?
I don’t have a current answer, but according to “The Wrong Track” by George W. Hilton, from the Spring, 1993 Inventiion and Technology, “Between 1910 and 1922 it was possible to make a continuous trip of about 1,087 miles from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin to Oneonta, New York, by interurban, though it would have meant riding some two dozen lines along the way.” (Interurbans were self-propelled electric railcars used for short and medium distance travel).
I got too excited and just pushed off the post. There are two stretches that prevent you from making the trip between Washington and Boston… that’s the Newark, DE to Aberdeen, MD and Providence to New London. If those gaps could be filled you could spend, I don’t know, about a full 24-hour day to get from one to the other.
Note: in NYC you have to take a subway, so maybe you won’t count this as longer than your LIRR connection? A subway is, after all, strictly NOT commuter rail.
This is the route I was thinking of, though I wasn’t sure how far you could go past NYC. I’m more familiar with the other end, having taken the SEPTA train from Newark, DE to Philly on many occasions.
One thing you could do to add length to the trip past Newark is take the Rail to the Fair , which last ran on Saturday, July 20th of this year. It runs for one day a year between Philly and the DE State Fair in Harrington, DE (at the southern end of the state). There are two possible problems with this. One is that it uses Amtrak cars, which may disqualify it under the OP’s conditions (though the trip is sponsored by DART, DE’s public transpostation system). The other problem is that this train only runs on a Saturday, so I don’t know if you could catch the other commuter trains down from NY. If acceptable, this would add another 80 miles or so to the trip.
Another possibility to extend the trip is another one of the SEPTA rail lines out of Philly, such as the R5 out to Thorndale. I’m not sure if this is farther than Newark, as the drive from Philly to either of those places is about an hour.
If you do allow subway connections and they fill in those stretches in MD-DE and CT-RI, then you could get from Fredricksburg, VA to Newburyport or Haverhill or Lowell or Fitchburg, MA (Newburyport being the farthest north, but they’re all real close to NH)…
J S Princeton,
As far as I know, there are no rail links between Newark, DE and Baltimore Metro system, except Amtrak. There’s this big empty gap in northeast MD with not much there. You actually have to get pretty close to Baltimore before you can pick up a train again.
New London? How? from http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/mnr/html/mnrmap.htm
(map of metro north) I see that waterbury looks like the furthest point and New haven looks like the furthest along rt 95. If new london has a commuter rail link to New Haven then that will get you 225 miles instead of the 220 miles to montalk.
Also I have no problem allowing subway travel so grandcentral to penn station is OK (also they are close enough that I would allow walking between them)- but not weekend only train service - I’m looking for trains people regualrrly take to work with several runs per day.
Is there any other rail system (combo’s of systems) in the US that has anywhere near this distance?
Well, in the SF Bay you could board BART Northeast of SF in Pittsburg/Bay Point, take it into San Francisco, get on MUNI to the CalTrain station, then take CalTrain South all the way down past San Jose to Gilroy. I’m not sure if the total distance would equal 220 miles, but it’s quite a ways…
Allowing for subways and/or a small walk you can only get from Kenosha, WI to South Bend IN in the Chicago Metro Area.
What if you add buses, and rephrase it to say how far can you go on Public Transportaion. Obviously Amtrack and airport trans (example the O’hare to Peoria run) don’t count.
Back in the mid-80’s a guy went from San Diego to Los Angeles entirely by city bus. He made liberal use of transfers. It cost him around $5.00 and took about 14 hours.
And on your way to Newburyport, you’d pass within a 3 minute walk of my house, when you went through the North Beverly, MA, train station.
Unfortunately, all of the MBTA trains do not qualify under the rules of the OP, as they are operated by Amtrak. Now, I’m sure this is true with many local commuter rails, but, strictly speaking, you’d be on an Amtrak train your entire way from Providence to Newburyport, aside from your short hops on the Red Line and Green Line in Boston.
Gah! I forgot. You can catch an MBTA train (I THINK it’s MBTA, anyway) out of North Station to Portland, now. It’s called the Downeaster, or somesuch, and I’m 90% sure that it’s under the MBTA, and not directly under Amtrak, and, as such, may qualify as a “commuter rail.”
Dooku , I know that you used to be able to catch county transit buses between Santa Cruz and San Jose. Santa Cruz County’s system also had transfer points for Salinas, which in turn could get you to Monterey. So it looks like its possible to get from the north east SF bay to Montery by mass transit of one kind or another.
Kenosha, WI to South Bend IN - distance 102mi (but you have to go around a big lake)
Both are long trips but nowhere near the 225 mi.
amtrak does offer some commuter rail service but I would like to exclude them for several reasons - the most important one is that it would be very hard to draw the line between commuter rail amtrak service and the ‘travel’ amtrak service. For places that don’t have commuter rail amtrack sometimes will fill the void. As for MBTA - are they Amtrak or are they some agency/company that hires amtrak to run a commuter line - if MBTA are running the show and just chose to use amtrak trains and personel then it would qualify. If it is a sub. of amtrak then it would not.