Surprise! Albany's impressive train station

It may not be located downtown, but Albany, N.Y. has one impressive train station.

Climbing up from the platforms, arriving passengers enter a grand hall that feels unexpectedly monumental. It's way better, for example, than what Amtrak is stuck with at Penn Station in New York City.

All this for Albany?

Well, yes. Albany claims to be the ninth-busiest station in the whole Amtrak system (a statistic I found on ever-reliable Wikipedia), something that seems rather surprising at first glance.

But then again, it makes sense when you consider that Albany boasts a level of passenger rail service that most small cities in the United States haven't seen since World War II.

Not only does the Capital Region enjoy frequent service to Penn Station (14 round-trips each weekday, according to the current Amtrak timetable), but it also maintains frequent service to Buffalo (three trains daily each way), as well as nightly service west to Cleveland and Chicago (sleeper on the Lake Shore Limited, anyone?), east to Boston, and north to the thriving metropolis of Rutland, Vt.

Add in two exotic international trains that cross the Canadian border – the Maple Leaf to/from Toronto and the Adirondack to/from Montreal, which both pass through here each day – and you've got yourself a schedule that most cities of similar size would envy.

So it adds up to one busy place – about 700,000 rail passengers a year, again according to Wikipedia. And things will only get busier due to a recent agreement with freight carrier CSX for Amtrak to take control of the tracks from here south to Poughkeepsie, a big chunk of the route to New York City.

This will improve dispatching and also clear the way for track improvements to speed up travel time to/from the Big Apple, so more service is planned for the future – so much so that a fourth platform is planned in additional to the existing three.

Just as the level of passenger service evokes a bygone era (a nightly sleeper to Chicago?), so does the passenger terminal. It's big – not quite cathedral scale, but big enough to give the Capital Region a rail gateway that the community can be proud of.

The main hall, ringed by balconies and sporting an impressively tall windows, has a genuinely grand feeling. The peaked roof soaring above evokes a feeling of being in some great Gothic hunting lodge or library. The tall windows looked impressive and inspiring even in the darkness.

The colors work together like players in a string quartet: elegant pink granite, rich brown wood, green-painted steel structural and ornamental elements, cream-colored walls, all of it anchored and reflected and amplified by very attractive designs in the floor tiling.

And it's a busy enough place to support a nice range of retailers, including a full sit-down restaurant, a big bookstore/newsstand, and other shops. It was enough to be useful, anyway, to those of us on the Lake Shore Limited (Boston to Chicago, with a two-hour layover in Albany) who wanted to escape the train for awhile and wander around.

All this in a station that, praise be, was actually designed and built in the modern era, opening in 2002.

I'd been through it before, but never had a chance to explore the station since it opened. (In earlier days, my primary memories of Albany are of the downtown bus station, which I used to visit a girlfriend. Later, while in college in the 1980s, I would take Amtrak from NYC up to visit a high school friend at Rennsalaer Polytechnic Institute, but I recall the station being little more than a platform in the middle of nowhere.

Of course prior to all this, Albany was home to Albany Union Station, an enormous Beaux Arts station from the late 19th century right in center of downtown. Here it is:

With rail service in decline, then-tenant Penn Central moved out in December 1968, and the majestic building fell into serious disrepair. Fortunately, a bank renovated it in the 1980s, and it's back in business today, though not as a rail station.

Which takes us back to the present station, about a mile-and-a-half away and across the Hudson from downtown Albany. Although it was dark, I ventured out front to see if the station's exterior lived up to the inside. I wasn't disappointed. The place has the same feel – a structure of consequence that gives the feeling that something important happens here.

And perched high above the main entrance was, yes, a giant clock (non-digital) with four sides that must have been visible from some distance. The faces were lit, too and each seemed to be displaying the correct time, too.

Yes, I suppose overall the place does have a kind of modern synthesized Disney World feel to it. The clock tower in particular looks like something out of sci-fi movie – or maybe a giant pencil eraser. In terms of a local reference point, it might be a kind of stripped-down version of the Governor's Mansion:

Is this...

...an homage to this?

Perhaps this feeling is a function of the place just being so – well, new. After all, we don't see many brand spanking new train stations in this country anymore.

In fact, the only other one I can think of is the big new Lautenberg transfer station in Secaucus, N.J, which rises out of the marshes and does its best to channel the ghost of the original Penn Station, the next stop on the line. The Lautenberg station, too, feels kind of theme-park-ish, perhaps just by virtue of its newness. But hey – it took Grand Central Station a century to become the Grand Central Station we know today.

One element that adds to the station's role as a transport hub is a surprisingly robust bus service. I remember my RPI friend joking about the local bus system's inane radio commercials, but there seems to be a heckuva lot more options than in my hometown of Manchester, N.H. Check out the rack of timetables!

Maybe it helps to be the capital city of the “Empire” state, with all the prestige (and money) that comes with it. Maybe it's no coincidence that the Albany area also boasts a first-rate airport with a wonderful contemporary terminal, as well. (I passed through there in March, 2012.)

Minor quibbles: the bridge above the platforms forms a kind of airline gate waiting area, complete with TV set droning on. Lose it!

But no matter. Albany's train station is a delightful surprise, especially in the context of the revenue-starved state of passenger rail service in the United States. In some places, the detail is extraordinary, such as this frosted and gridded ceiling on the stairways down to the platform.

I would love to see it during the day, with sunlight flooding not only the stairwells, but streaming through the giant windows and down from the glass cupola set way up in the ceiling, like some kind of oversized lighthouse.

So take a lesson from Albany, other cities. A passenger rail station erected in our lifetime does NOT have to have the inspiration and ambiance of a Quonset hut. No indeed – it can be an inviting beacon of light and space, which is certainly was when I passed through.

Union Station, Washington, D.C.: Pardon Our Appearance

Union Station in Washington, D.C. is one of the nation's great downtown train and transport terminals. An easy walk to the U.S. Capitol and the White House, it offers long-distance service to New York and New England as well as Chicago, Atlanta, Florida, and New Orleans. And the exterior of the 1907 structure (see above and below) is as impressive as it gets.


But the interior, alas, is currently a mess. A visit to the station's massive waiting room on Wednesday, Dec. 1 found endless stretches of black netting hanging from the vaulted ceiling, creating the effect of walking underneath an enormous trampoline. In other places, scaffolding is going up, obstructing passages and obscuring views. Check out these less-than-inspiring vistas:




The reason, of course, is that Union Station was among those landmarks that sustained damage in an earthquake this past August. (The Washington Monument was another, and remains closed to visitors.) At Union Station, the quake prompted repair work that's expected to take up to 10 months to complete.

So the entrance lobby, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling curving nearly 100 feet overhead, now looks as if a trapeze act is about to take place there. Well, with chunks of the plaster ceiling either fallen away or getting ready to let go, what choice did they have? And if you can't wait to experience the station's full grandeur, a sense of it is still provided by the station's "Western Hall," which remains undamaged:


And I've just read an item in the Washington Post from Dec. 7 (after my visit) reporting that crews are beginning to erect yet more scaffolding to make the repairs. That's on top what was already there when I passed through, such as this in one of the passageways from the waiting room to the ticket area:


This doesn't help the ticket area, which was once an impressive space just like the waiting room until it was filled with two levels of retail shops. Not only do these obscure the space's original proportions, but they make it hard to find the actual Amtrak ticket counters, which are buried somewhere underneath all this.


What's the point of having a vaulted roof when the space below it is filled with several levels of stores? While there's not much that can be done to restore the ticket area's proportions anytime soon, at least the netting and scaffolding will eventually go away.

In the meantime, one other thing that I also hope goes away is the practice of the station's retail outlets playing loud pop music to attract customers. This may be okay in a mall location, but it destroys the ambiance of a large and historic transportation terminal. It's a real distraction, and seems completely at odds with a century-old edifice.

In this case, the culprit was 'Little Miss Matched,' a small store along one side of the terminals's main waiting room. It wasn't even 11 a.m., and the store manager had a bouncy, hypnotic pop dance number going at moderate volume, which was enough for it to echo all around the big space—so much so that it was hard to know where it was coming from. (It took me several minutes to trace the source.)

It was bothersome enough for me to go into the store and ask the manager if it was corporate policy to play loud music during business hours. He said yes, so I told him: this terminal is a masterpiece of Beaux Arts design, and it was a shame that one retailer should be allowed to diminish it with noise pollution.

I got a blank stare, which was what I expected, but at least I told someone what I truly thought. How ironic that the name of the business is derived from the term "mismatched."

Regarding Amtrak, the station's main tenant: other than the hidden counters in the ticketing hall, Amtrak has surprisingly little presence in the station's signature spaces. Most of the railroad's passenger functions take place behind the back wall of the historic station, in a dismal concrete-and-steel space that sports a small curving roof to let in some natural light but not much else to distinguish itself.


Sad that Amtrak is treated by a poor step-child in the station's current layout, stuck out back in a seemingly unfinished space (though no work seemed to be in progress) that has all the ambiance of a warehouse outlet. Weird: the latticework supporting the roof harmonizes well with the temporary scaffolding in the station's other parts. I suppose we should be grateful that at least a few of the original station gateways are still in place, standing tall among the station's fast food outlets, though not serving any purpose:


Washington Union is also served by the city's Metro, so what about that? Here's one opinion I pulled off a blog, which describes the Metro as the "most iconic" transport system in the U.S.: "Like the monuments and museums of Washington D.C., the Washington Metro is a landmark of design, history and progress in America. For visitors to The Beltway, a trip on the Washington Metro often inspires as much awe and wonderment as the trip’s destination."

Huh? Who in their right mind would ever regard the Washington Metro as inspiring? The service may do its job, but the underground stations themselves are outstandingly ugly and oppressive. Shaped like squashed tubes and surfaced in a concrete brutalist waffle pattern, the dimly lit platforms would seem right at home as part of the dreary underground workers' city in 'Metropolis,' the German sci-fi silent film.


So these stations, all designed in the same dehumanizing way by modernist architect Harry Weese, are supposed to be inspiring? All I can say is that the only inspiration I'd expect from spending time in places such as this would be to jump in front of the next train and end it all.

And yet here's more crap from the same blog: "The underground stations of the Washington Metro are a captivating sight, a collection of grand caverns with curved, patterned ceilings and no direct light. There’s an almost alien feel to their design, one that inspires silent appreciation while the trains rumble in the distance."

Well, to get that taste out of our mouth, let's end with a shot of what a train station can and should look like—in this case, another exterior shot of Union Station, currently sporting some seasonal decorator touches.


Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. Except if you work for Little Miss Matched in Union Station, that is.

What can we learn from Penn Station?

This blog is about airline terminals, but today's topic is a railroad station. It doesn't exist anymore, but I just visited it. Confused? Read on, and let's see what we can learn.

It's the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City—the monumental Beaux Arts masterpiece of architect Charles McKim that was unceremoniously demolished in the mid-1960s to make way for the then-new Madison Square Garden.

While the station's above-ground buildings were torn down, all the railroad tracks and platforms remain in place deep underground, pretty much as they were when the original station opened in 1910. Trains still rumble in and out—enough so that the place remains the busiest passenger rail station in the country.

What's above the platforms, however, ain't what it used to be.

In McKim's original station, passengers alighted from trains onto platforms flooded with natural light that streamed in from a vaulted glass ceiling more than 100 feet above. Ornate brass and iron staircases carried arriving passengers to the upper level of the magnificent glass and iron concourse, designed as an homage to the great European trainsheds. It provided a grand welcome to one of the world's great cities.

Today, passengers step off trains onto those same platforms, only to cower underneath a grimy concrete ceiling that looms a few feet above. Claustrophobia-inducing pipes and ducts hang from it. Lighting is harsh—you can't tell whether it's day or night. The air is still. It's noisy, but you can't tell where the noise is coming from.

It's also not clear where you go next. Eventually you're herded up cramped escalators to a confusing warren of yet more low-ceiled passages, with no windows and no light until you finally emerge onto the street much later, assuming you ever do. It's like arriving in New York through the service entrance.

In one area, it's a masterpiece—efficiency, because it inspires an overwhelming desire to get the heck out of there as fast as possible.

The difference between the original terminal and what replaced it—does it matter? Yes. The original was a great public space, a constant inspiration to travellers, a gateway that enobled all who passed through it, and helped make New York City a kick-ass place, whether you were coming or going.

The replacement is fit for hamsters, but not humans, and certainly not for a place known for its superlatives. In short, it's a bust.

It's so dreadful that Amtrak (successor to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which built the original station and then allowed it to be torn down) has been considering a hugely expensive plan to transform the equally monumental former post office building (next door, also designed by Charles McKim at the same time) into a newly reborn Penn Station. It'll cost billions, if it ever gets done, and my guess is it won't.

I never got to experience the original Penn Station. Never used it to board a train, never walked through it, never got to hear the constant manmade murmur that I'm told bounced off its marble walls. So it's easy for me to romanticize it as the “greatest of all train terminals.”

And true, I sometimes think that if there is an afterlife and it's a nice place and if I'm somehow qualified to be there, I imagine it would look something like the concourse of the original Penn Station.

As beautiful as the station was, it had problems. Some say it was too overwhelming. Some cursed the vast scale that had to be covered to reach the train platforms, and the lack of anyplace at all to sit in the vast main hall. The main dining hall and the separate waiting rooms for men and women weren't thought out well. And, most importantly, the facility was hugely expensive to maintain and even to keep clean, which made it easier for the Pennsy to say buh-bye when the railroad fell on hard times.

So this raises the question: What happens when a private company builds a grand public space such as a train terminal, but then can't maintain it? One answer is what happened to Penn Station. But another is what happened to New York City's other big train station, Grand Central Terminal. That nearly got demolished, too, but eventually the run-down property came under government management (specifically, the MTA), which mounted a massive restoration effort supported by public money.

Today, Grand Central is celebrated as a city icon, still in use as a very busy railroad station but also a magnet for tourists. Penn Station is a magnet for lunatics, who feel right at home in its Rubik's cube-like tunnels.

Ironically, Grand Central only serves commuter lines; all long-distance trains now use Penn. Gone are the days when Cary Grant, as in the Hitchcock thriller 'North by Northwest ,' could duck into Grand Central and slip aboard the 20th Century Limited to get out of town.

So what does this all have to do with airport terminals?

Well, in terms of design, the original Pennsylvania made a sound case for terminal as modern-day cathedral, a fitting setting for departures and arrivals that marked important moments in countless lives. It enriched everyone who encountered it, and that's something that airline terminals (the train stations of our day) ought to aspire to. Penn Station showed the way.

However, the original Penn Station was built by an incredibly rich private corporation, the Pennsylvania Railroad, at the height of its power, in the early 20th century. Its main visionary, railroad president Alexander Cassett, was in a position to spare no expense in creating a station that would serve as a physical symbol of the railroad's influence and success.

Well, that position was only a very short window. Railroads were soon in decline in the U.S., the Pennsy included. So the huge effort required to build such a grand edifice was similar to, say, the Apollo effort to put a man on the moon: the result of a special confluence of circumstances that enabled it to happen, and which may not happen again for a long time, if ever.

Can we build the equivalent of Penn Station today? Well, the airline business is subject to more fast-moving turmoil than any railroad ever was. Airlines come and go, hubs are built and taken apart, great carriers merge and disappear from their hometowns.

So it's easy to understand why airlines themselves often aren't willing to put a lot of effort into facilities. Look at the abandoned concourses in St. Louis (former TWA hub), Cincinnati (former Delta hub), and especially Pittsburgh, where a new midfield concourse was built for USAirways, large portions of which are now walled-off and abandoned since the carrier de-hubbed.

Yes, it's a different model today. Airlines, which are for-profit businesses, do put money into terminals where they know they're going to be around for awhile. It's money well spent. But otherwise, it's up to government (meaning the public) to rise to the challenge of building and maintaining a terminal that enobles the traveller. And in an age of austerity budgets, there's a temptation to take the cheapest, most expeditious route—to go the way of the “new” Penn Station, which everyone agrees is a monstrosity. Is that the best we can do?

But I think the basic lesson still stands (unlike the original Penn Station): that our public spaces say a lot about who we are, and it's worth the effort to make them distinctive and memorable. In other words, old Penn Station, not new Penn Station, to whatever extent possible.

Postscript: Though the original Penn Station has been gone for nearly 50 years, a few traces still survive in the current subway-station-like facility, if you know where to look. Coming across them, still doing their jobs amid all the blandness, is like finding an old wheat cent in change. It's a survivor from another era, not that long gone but absolutely gone for good.

The most obvious leftovers are two original brass and iron staircases that still take travelers up from the platforms. While most platforms are jammed with chunky escalators and elevators, for some reason these graceful survivors soldier on.

One is on the east end of the platform for Tracks 13 and 14; it's short, going up just one level to the “arrivals” concourse, and is now partially covered in battleship gray. But it's there, complete with the gateway grille at the base of the steps and the original iron support pillar under the first landing. I used it to exit from my train.

The other is on the platform between Tracks 5 and 6. It's a complete multi-landing original staircase bringing travelers from the main ticketing level (the floor of the former concourse) all the way down to the platform. It's now hemmed in by tiled walls, and the ornate ironwork at the bottom is damaged and partially missing, but it's ready to carry passengers just as in photos taken prior to the station's 1910 grand opening.

Access to to most platforms at Penn Station are controlled by gate agents and tickets are required, so I was surprised to find the old staircase (behind glass doors) open. So down I went, taking pictures, marveling at the original brass handrails and also the irony of the photos of the old Penn Station decorating the stairwell.

The original Pennsylvania Station was built for the ages. Instead, it lasted barely 50 years. Its loss was one of the world's great acts of architectural vandalism, and led to new rules protecting similar landmarks in New York City and elsewhere. In terms of terminals, it showed us what's possible. Would that we had the wisdom, the resources, and the long-term outlook to learn and profit from its example.

Amtrak notes: My recent trip was a good reminder about the importance of public announcements in any form of transit. Our train, Northeast Regional 174, was scheduled to depart Penn Station at 2 p.m., but was a few minutes late. No problem. But along the way, we made repeated stops between station, and the delay began to grow.

By the time we left New Haven, we were at least a half-hour behind, maybe more. I don't know for sure because throughout all of this, not a single annoucement was made to anyone about it. And the stops continued. Anytime a conductor came through, people asked what time we were due in such-and-such a stop, and the answers seemed to vary wildly.

Amtrak's online train status feature had us as 28 minutes behind as we pulled into Providence, so at least that was something. But the train crew made no announcements whatsoever, leaving people grumbling and shaking their heads and generally unhappy. Some kind of announcement about the nature of the delay would have gone a looooong way toward keeping people happy, but we got bupkiss.

I do think it depends on the crews, which seem to vary widely. Sometimes you get thorough and coherent explanations; other times they make an effort, but a malfunctioning P.A. system renders it unintelligible. And other times, like today, you get nothing at all, which is unacceptable.

On Northeast Regional 174 on Friday, May 20, the crew seemed to be by turns belligerent, combative, uninformed, or entirely absent. And it really makes a difference. Across from me was a woman going to Bridgeport, Conn. who was burdened with a huge piece of luggage and who had never travelled by train ever before. I helped her with the bag (no problem there), but the real fun happened when Bridgeport was the next stop.

At one point, the train began to slow and enter a station, but we had no announcement, so the woman assumed it had to be Bridgeport. She hastily got up, hauled her bag out on her own, and then went into the vestibule at the end of the car to detrain.

The problem was, we weren't at Bridgeport, but at another station, South Norwalk, where we were halting for apparently yet another delay, and on an inside “express track,” with a commuter train on one side of us blocking the view. Our train finally did stop, and we were at a station, and this poor woman began panicking in the vestibule because she wasn't sure how to get off.

Other people were standing in the aisle and I finally asked a woman to tell her that her stop wasn't until a bit later. What confusion, where a few clear announcements could have made all the difference. Talk note, Amtrak. Might want to brush up on the customer service skills.

And that takes us to Amtrak's so-called “quiet” cars. These are designed for passengers who want a refuge from loud conversations or serial cell-phone yakkers. It's a nice idea, and it's amazing that they even try to do this in a country such as America, and especially in the Northeast, where people can be amazingly clueless about public behavior.

But they do, and the crew members really do make an effort—sometimes. On some trains, I've sat in the quiet car, and crews go to the trouble to make special “sotto voci” announcements just for the occupants, explaining that it's a library-like atmosphere and they're serious about no cell phone use—if you must yak, please sit in another car. (On Northeast Regional 174, there were no announcements whatsoever, either about the quiet car or where the cafe car was or about upcoming stops, which seems downright irresponsible. Not sure what the story is with that.)

Still, I like sitting in the Quiet Car, not because I necessarily crave quiet, but because there's always drama when some clueless schlub sits down and immediately start chatting loudly on his or her cell phone. (In practice, though, it's usually a guy.) Sometimes a crew member will be right there, telling the person to leave the car, and sometimes the reactions are priceless.

Other times, passengers themselves enforce the code of silence. On today's Northeast Regional 174, two old acquaintances passing the Quiet Car through discovered each other, and a loud mini-reunion ensued right here in the aisle, almost directly below a 'Quiet Car' sign. No crew members were present, and even if they were I doubt they'd have said anything, since there was no mention of the quiet car at any time during the run; in fact, crew members would march through, loudly talking among themselves or fielding questions about the delays. With the mini-reunion, it finally fell to yours truly to politely inform the ladies that they were in what was supposed to be the Quiet Car. They had no idea, of course, and the immediately decamped after thanking me.

I think I should get an honorary crew badge from Amtrak, but I don't hold out much hope.