This time was adjusted since bringing the train back after COVID. There is limited areas the train can pass and I guess they decided leaving later is better.
I don’t think taking the train south is worth it, you spend your morning waiting in line because you don’t have booked seats (and you want a window), and then you sit on a train the whole day.
But for going north, you arrive to Moynihan Train hall in NYC 30 minutes before to print and stamp your ticket for going into Canada, as well as getting your bags tagged. Then you can wait in a lower mezzanine and go down to Track 8 where it normally sits there early (you can go before they announce it, and just ask the employee to confirm it’s the train to Montreal), allowing you to board before anyone else. Then once you reach the border, depending how busy your train is, if there are less people then you can arrive sometimes an hour and a half early! It’s not faster than the bus but way more comfortable and very pretty depending on the time of the year.
A night train however would be perfect for how long this takes…
And an other hour with customs preclearance on both sides (before on boarding the train)…
Also, night train anyone? I mean hotels are expensive, it could be very attractive to save time and one hotel night if you could travel while sleeping.
I always thought that a night train that leaves after business hours and arrives before business hours would actually be cool for professionals going for meetings, if it’s well publicized.
Like leave Montreal at 8-9pm, arrive at 7am in NYC, just in time to get to your meeting, with a bed and a shower, it would be a great way to travel! rather than either flying late at night into NYC, checking into a hotel, or flying on the 6am flight and risking delays and what not.
Experience in europe shows that sleeper cars don’t always work: A night train requires expensive dedicated sleeper cars; The limited beds per car also means it can often be as expensive as a flight and hotel, and so the predicted demand can often fail to materialize resulting in large operating losses.
The thing is, speedups for the day train are probably better investments than a night train; In general, faster trains require less paid man-hours per revenue trip; The current time of 11hrs can theoretically be shortened to 8:
One hour can be gained fixing the CN track
One and a half hours can be gained with a customs preclearance
Half an hour can be saved with the new Airo trainset removing the need for a long stop in Albany
