The Lehigh Valley Railroad
Ithaca to New York City: 20th Century to Now
When I was a student at Cornell, every time a long weekend rolled around I wondered: why the hell isn’t there a train from Ithaca to New York?
I really hoped that our old friends Ezra and Andrew would have “found a university,” as the motto goes, between the epicenters of the industrial and commercial revolutions happening in late 19th century America. Ithaca, nicely situated between the cosmopolitan buzz of New York City and the manufacturing industry of Lake Erie, would have offered students and professors easy access to both hubs while providing an Arcadian environment for them to rub shoulders with intrastate travelers. Surely such important connections would have been enabled by passenger rail, especially during the railroad boom of this second Industrial Revolution.
So, it did not surprise me to learn that there was, in fact, a major passenger rail network connecting New York City to Rochester via Ithaca. Its name? Albert Einstein The Lehigh Valley Railroad.
But what happened?? Where did the LVR go?? Oh, to travel by rail across the East Coast during the holidays, with spacious cabins, dining cars, full of warm anticipation for the school year and time with friends & family! I imagine myself walking directly from a friend’s apartment to the hundred-year-old Beaux-Arts station in the city center to catch a train that will transport me from urban life to the rural interior. I wish I could’ve had the experiences akin to those of students riding the Hogwarts Express from London to Scotland (accompanying playlist & vibes here).
But you’ll have to excuse me — I’m getting ahead of myself. I am a sucker for getting overly sentimental and romanticizing the fuck out of life, to the point of getting nostalgic for things I weren’t even alive for. So yeah. Maybe that’s why I get so upset when I reflect on the destruction of America’s passenger rail network following World War II. I don’t think we just lost a rail network. We lost a huge part of how it felt to travel.
The Destruction of American Rail
The United States used to have a super robust passenger rail network, until the automobile took over in the mid-20th century. It’s a complicated history, filled with technological innovation, racial segregation, misguided urban design, and short-sighted decision-making. However, contrary to what most believe, the fall of our walkable and transit-friendly urban fabric was not solely because of old man Robert Moses. Rather, I think he was merely a symptom of a much larger, much more insidious problem beginning in the Roaring Twenties with the decline of the streetcar and shifting public attitudes towards car ownership and associated social status. After all, Jay Gatsby didn’t take the train.
But I digress. Although relevant, this is still an entirely separate discussion, and instead of writing my own content I will recommend this article which I think is a great starting point for further research (I would also recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, but as an armchair pseudo-intellectual, I have not read the book and cannot comment on its merit).
Maybe you already knew all this. Books have been written about this sort of thing, of course, touching on all the lost benefits that would’ve materialized if we continued to have widespread access to cheap, reliable, rapid transit - things like no TSA, fewer weather delays, reduced CO2 emissions, and reduced car dependency, to name a few. So I’m not going to preach about how this whole thing was, à la Douglas Adams, “widely regarded as a ‘bad move’” - rather, I want to share what I think I’m most upset about: our lost heritage, lost history, and lost romanticism.
Somewhere in 20th Century Upstate New York
I was never good at creative writing, and my teachers always said I needed to put more emotion in my words. And I am trying my best to resist the temptation to use ChatGPT to make my writing more flowery and ruin what little artistic integrity I have. So I hope you can endure a few paragraphs of me attempting to paint a picture of what I imagine travel would have been like in the days when streetcars and subways were a big part of every American downtown, big or small, connected by luxurious and reliable passenger rail networks. Some of this is based on fact, other is pure optimism. Maybe trains weren’t all that luxurious or reliable and maybe there were frequent delays just as we still have today. But that doesn’t matter, we’re just gonna put on the rose-colored glasses and take a trip to the past.
You’re 18 years old, just about to wrap up your first semester at Cornell. After losing yourself in honors chemistry problem sets, orchestra concerts, weekend house parties, 3am study sessions in the Olin Library stacks researching the history of the late Roman Empire, and visits to the local farmers’ market by the water, winter break arrives with little notice. Sure, you’ve made a few friends and met countless acquaintances, but they can’t (yet) hold a candle to your buddies back home. There’s also that final essay for your writing seminar you need to finish, but fuck it, it’s not due for another 3 days and you’ll probably have time on the way home anyway — all you can think about right now is returning to your childhood bedroom, forgetting about the responsibilities and pressures of independent living for a little while, and reuniting with family and friends.
It’s a cold December morning, quiet and still except for the Cornell chimes ringing softly in the distance. The campus is beautifully painted with last night’s snowfall. Thankfully, the trolley goes right next to your West Campus dorm, and with cars coming every ten minutes you know you won’t have to wait in the cold for long.
Boarding the trolley with your luggage, you take it all the way through Collegetown, directly through downtown and the Ithaca Commons straight to the terminus at Lehigh Valley Railroad Station. Scheduling was easy with twice daily service between Ithaca and New York City. Your train doesn’t leave until 1:13pm, so you know you will have some time to grab a bite to eat somewhere by the station. You also know some other classmates taking the red-eye departing at 11:44pm, which, as you ponder, may not be the worst idea given that it’s a long 7 hour ride to New York Penn.
When the payment at the station is all said and done, the trip sets you back about $3 ($30 in 2023 dollars). Your parents offered to pay for the pricier Pullman sleeper cars (about $120 in 2023 dollars), but you insisted that 7 hours isn’t such an ordeal for a young college student — and besides , you’ll have plenty of time to chill at the café car with your friends and chat about winter break plans over a cup of hot chocolate.
The snowy countryside whizzes by as you sit cozily in your seat. You take some time to unwind, reflect on the semester, think about what you’re going to do back home.
“Day coaches were outfitted with plush velvet chairs, a large comfortable smoking room, and lavatories for both men and women. The last car seated 28 passengers and included a parlor and an observation platform. It was equipped with plate glass windows at the rear and wicker chairs for passenger pleasure.” - Lehigh Valley Railroad Historical Society
In the corner of your eye, you catch some of your friends on their way to the café car! You say hi, they ask if you want to join them for a game of cards, of course you say yes, and you all make your way down to order that hot chocolate and see what other goodies they might have in store. Your final essay will have to wait until tomorrow, you suppose.
The time goes by in an instant. After hours of traveling, you finally arrive in Penn Station at 8:30pm, and find yourself continuing to be awed with all of its magnificent glory. You and your friends go your separate ways, whether it be transfers to the subway to stay in the city or to other long-distance passenger rail to find your way up north to somewhere like Boston or further down south to D.C.
Reality Check: Then vs. Now, Trains vs. Buses
Ahh, wasn’t that fun to reminisce? Although can you really call it reminiscing if I never really lived those experiences? Anyway, I digress. The LVR is now long gone. It began service in 1896, and lasted all the way up until 1961 when The Maple Leaf arrived in Geneva, NY. Large portions of the track have been removed since.
Today, this trip would have consisted of booking service through Cornell’s bus service or through one of many bus companies, costing about $40/person and travel time being about 5 hours, give or take depending on traffic. To my surprise, it is actually faster to travel today than 80-100 years ago! Which, I guess, makes sense. Things should be trending that way, especially on the timescale of centuries. Maybe I needed that reality check.
Buses are great — they are forms of public transit that can make use of our extensive road networks while giving us the tools to lower our energy intensity and contribute towards reducing our CO2 emissions. But they have their downsides — there aren’t any café cars in buses where you can chill with your friends or family, and you have to deal with traffic. They are harder to electrify (source: I made it up, but I think it’s a point of debate) and, in my experience living in Ithaca and Boston, rarely come on time. Also, let’s not pretend that high speed buses will ever become a thing (as much as I would like to manifest The Onion).
Trains, on the other hand, can offer so much more. You can actually get up, walk around, socialize a bit, be more insulated from the ground — almost kind of like a warm, peaceful space. Just you and those around you. I love to imagine myself in suites or cabins with my friends as we play board games, fuck around, catch up from break or from the semester. You can actually go to a café car, or maybe have them come to you, and sit down with a proper meal. And imagine if we had high speed rail! I, like many students, did most of my traveling during shitty, disruptive winter weather: Thanksgiving, Winter Break, February Break, and “Spring” Break (let’s be real, the weather still sucked half the time in April). The thought of commuting directly from Ithaca to Dallas by train without having to deal with flight delays sounds like a dream!
I see an alternative reality for us, one in which our passenger rail network was never gutted, our downtowns and streetcar suburbs were never demolished to make ways for highways that cut through urban cores, and one where our trolley and heavy rail systems were modernized to provide us with safe, cheap, reliable high speed rail on par with or ahead of countries like the Germany1 (or really most of Europe), Japan, and Taiwan (yeah, I’ll take the social credit hit), and other countries who got into the game decades after we did.
Looking Forward
So. Recap. We used to be able to hop on a train from Ithaca to NYC for about $30 and arrive in about 7 hours. That changed in the 50s and 60s, where we transitioned to our current bus service of about $40 and 5 hours one-way, which honestly isn’t a bad tradeoff. I understand why there isn’t a train from Ithaca to New York, and I am relieved that Cornell wasn’t founded in a town with absolutely zero passenger rail connections during the U.S. railroad boom.
But I think there is a future where we revitalize these old rail networks using modern technology, and create these high-speed connections between major urban centers. Maybe Ithaca to New York City isn’t going to make the first cut, but Dallas to Houston, San Francisco to Los Angeles — I’m glad that there is progress and discourse being made here, however slow.
Sources:
Note: it has come to my attention that the United Kingdom does not, in fact, have a great railway network. Replaced this with another European country which is praised for its railway system - Germany.