If you haven’t already, it’s probably best to start with Part 1.
My leisurely ambling East had almost succeeded in filling in the time until my rendezvous in Syracuse. I had one spare day up my sleeve and three different ideas about how to fill it:
- I could stay in Buffalo another night and get tickets to see Jagged Little Pill, the Alanis Morissette Broadway musical that was in town that night in the aforementioned theatre district,
- I could head to Rochester and check out the drag scene there that I had heard so much about,
- Or I could go straight to Syracuse and spend an extra day there while I awaited the arrival of my compadre.
For reasons I will come to shortly, after much deliberation I settled on Option 3.
Leaving Buffalo
In a story that will surprise absolutely no one Buffalo, like Detroit…and Cleveland…and countless other rustbelt towns and cities, no longer has rail service to its grand old train station. Instead, Amtrak trains call at one or both of two different stations (spoiler: not for your convenience).
Trains coming-from/bound-for Canada and Niagara call at Buffalo Exchange Street, a classic Amshack located directly under the I-190 flyover which is, at least, centrally located Downtown and close to the LRT.
The Lakeshore Limited coming-from/bound-for Chicago sadly doesn’t pass by this section of track and has instead been relegated to the distant suburban Buffalo Depew Amshack. Depew is in a light industrial area on the Buffalo urban fringe a few miles from Buffalo Niagara International Airport. It has plenty of parking but is sadly barely connected to Downtown by Buffalo’s transit system.
Getting from Depew to Downtown on transit requires two buses and somewhere between 80 and 120 minutes, depending on your enthusiasm for navigating American stroads on foot. That’s for a trip that is 20 minutes by car or under 3 hours if you fancy the walk. Tempting.
This lack of connectivity was yet another reason I gave the Lakeshore Limited a miss coming from Detroit.
Buffalo’s answer to Michigan Central: Buffalo Central Terminal
Opened in 1929, the grandiose Buffalo Central Terminal brought all the trains stopping in Buffalo together at a brand new union station. The building is epic, built as it was at the height of the golden era of rail travel. 1929 is actually really unfortunate timing as the Great Depression and subsequent road building spree made it just about the high water mark for intercity rail travel in the United States. The terminal is located a bit out of Downtown so that trains passing through the city from New York to Chicago could call there as well.
Like Detroit’s Michigan Central Station she is a grand old dame. Unlike Detroit’s Michigan Central Station she is ‘an unrenovated gem’ (would suit a motivated buyer looking to add value) and the rows of abandoned platforms give a strong dystopic energy. Horror film directors take note!
Thankfully the community of Buffalo seems well aware of what they have in the building and there are efforts being made to the restore the building in some capacity, although that vision is unlikely to include rail travel.
The New York State Empire Service
4 trains a day head from Buffalo downstate to New York City, via Syracuse.
Two ‘Empire Services’ running from Niagara Falls that leave at 4:30am and 7:30am, mainly designed to get people to business (or pleasure) in the state capital Albany or NYC.
The aforementioned Lakeshore Limited leaves at a more leisurely 9am, but from the largely inaccessible Depew station.
The last option is the Maple Leaf that, like the name suggests, connects New York state with Canada, running daily between Toronto and NYC. The Maple Leaf leaves Buffalo heading South at 12:30pm, so I opted for that one. Apparently this is a risky choice because delays at the border crossing often mean the train runs late, and once an Amtrak train runs late it often gets really late as it can be held for extended periods in sidings to keep freight and other passenger services on-time.
4 trains a day might not wow international observers, but for regional America it’s basically incredible. Even better, the journey time of 2 hours 20 minutes is as fast as driving on the interstate.
Like most rail journeys a trip on the Empire Service is a beautiful one. Thanks to the topography of the Adirondack and Catskill mountain ranges, highways, railways and canals (more on that later!) are wedged into the valleys on their way across Upstate New York. This is great news for leisure rail passengers as for most of the journey from Buffalo to New York City the trains run alongside either the Mohawk or Hudson Rivers.
This makes choosing the correct seat essential to maximising the views, a process that takes place onboard the train rather than ahead of time like it might on a flight or in Australia or Europe. The Man in Seat 61 has some good suggestions on that.
I was only going to Syracuse though so my seat selection was based on one thing and one thing only: an uninterrupted view of the Buffalo Central Terminal as we motored by!
Syracuse, New York
The Amtrak station at Syracuse is yet another wonderful example of how far American railways have fallen.
The train line through Downtown was dismantled to make way for a (you guessed it!) freeway, so the new station is a greyhound terminal/train station combo kind of near a mall and a stadium but mainly behind a huge warehouse.
Syracuse itself is very cool. America has a wonderful abundance of midsize towns and cities that just ooze potential. I’m sure some people like them just how they are, but in the large swathes of vacant land and gorgeous art deco buildings I see the makings of brilliance. I suppose there are just so many towns and cities like that that there isn’t the demand to kick things up a gear so they just kind of sit.
I come from a country where housing is so scarce that you literally cannot buy a house for less than 6 figures and if you want to live somewhere that has, you know, bars and buses and a university and a stadium and, like, things, you’re going to need at least half a million dollars. Going from that to seeing what is on offer in the Rustbelt I must say, I was tempted to bag my very own fixer upper then and there. The weather is a bit of a downer, though.
I was there in summer so didn’t have to put up with brutal winter these parts are famous for, but the weather wasn’t great either because Canada was on FIRE and New York (City) was getting smoked out, so of course it became international news. Guys, climate change can officially begin now because it has affected the centre of the known universe. The smoke was just as bad Upstate but the people there don’t make as big of a fuss about such things, and no one would listen even if they did.
If you’re wondering why my photos from Syracuse have such a handy apocalyptic vibe, well that’s partly just the rustbelt, but the thick smoke choking the air and making my eyes water probably helped as well.
So you’re probably thinking something like, yes, yes, nice old buildings, sad train station, but you could’ve been seeing the Alanis musical or Rochester drag! Why the rush to Syracuse?
Well, dear reader, because of one little incredibly important piece of nation building infrastructure; the Erie Canal.
The Erie Canal: America’s First Superhighway
If you aren’t familiar with the Erie Canal, I’ll let the opening paragraph from the Wikipedia article on it set the scene:
The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east–west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing the costs of transporting people and goods across the Appalachians. In effect, the canal accelerated the settlement of the Great Lakes region, the westward expansion of the United States, and the economic ascendancy of New York State. It has been called “The Nation’s First Superhighway.”
People like to froth railways, highways and the like, but the importance of those early canals on America’s industrial development can hardly be overstated.
These days the canal is still in existence and if you own a craft with a sufficiently narrow draught you can still navigate the waterway approximately 4 months of the year. There seems to be some limited opportunities for tourism on the canal and I’m sorely tempted to pack it all up, do up an old canal-boat and start plying the canal from Albany to Buffalo in the summer months.
Exploring the Erie Canal
If you want to explore the Erie Canal on foot or bike it is pretty easy. The old canal boats made their way along the canal being pulled by horses that walked on an embankment alongside the canal called the towpath.
New York State has been particularly motivated about repurposing the no longer required towpaths into public trails. Thanks to a mix of rail trails, towpath trails and a bit of on-road cycling you can ride your bike all the way from Buffalo to New York City on a wonderful right of way that the government has named the Empire State Trail. Given that the rivers, canal and then, later, the railways, led development of upstate New York (and much of the rest of the world besides) these trails run right through small towns and into major cities. It’s all very European.
Syracuse not only includes some excellent spots to stroll along the canal it is also home to the Erie Canal Museum – the main motivating factor for my extra day in Syracuse. I was also keen to check out Onondaga Lake: ‘the most polluted lake in North America’ but given the aforementioned air quality I figured it wasn’t a good day for a cycling trip around the lake. Although perhaps fitting for its epitaph?
The Erie Canal Museum
The Erie Canal Museum is pretty much the ideal small museum. It’s right downtown and partially in an old building that was originally built as a weighbridge for the canal. Canalboats would pull into a lock that housed a giant scale, the water would be drained out and the toll to be paid calculated based on the weight and type of the goods contained within the boat.
The city has long since filled in this abandoned section of canal, but the mere existence of this one remaining sign helps a visitor better get a feel for what downtown Syracuse would’ve been like in the canal heyday.
I had a wonderful time exploring the Museum and chatting with the volunteers there and then took a bus out of town to walk a section of the old towpath.
You can still see a lot of original works along the way and the Syracuse bus system is just substantial enough that with a little bit of planning I could take a bus to a bleak strip mall/highway interchange, walk along the canal for half a dozen miles and jump back on a different bus in a quaint old canal village. I couldn’t argue with those $1 flat rate bus fares, either.
The Barge Canal
The larger Barge Canal is the more modern iteration of the Erie Canal, built in the early 20th century roughly halfway in time between the opening of the Erie Canal and today. The Barge Canal could carry larger barges and allowed the heavily degraded sections of downtown canalway to be filled in for development. It bypasses Syracuse quite a few miles to the north.
I didn’t visit the Barge Canal, but if you were to actually boat your way from the Hudson to the Great Lakes this is the canal you would go down.
It’s easy in the 21st century to think of the canals of Amsterdam or the like and think of what an asset they are to an urban area but in the pre-sewerage and heavily industrial downtowns of the Rustbelt a canal was definitely not a tourist attraction. It must’ve been a huge relief to locals when the Barge Canal was opened and the polluted gutter running through Downtown Syracuse was filled in.
Onward Bound
The next day my buddy arrived into Syracuse airport and my watering eyes and headache from the previous days exertions had just about passed. Sadly the outdoor concert we were in town to see was cancelled thanks to the air quality, but we had just as good of a time pub crawling our way through this fun little city.
The following morning before sunrise we were bleary eyed and heavy headed making our way back down the hill to the Syracuse Transit Centre to board the Empire Service for New York City’s Penn Station. This time I made sure we sat on the right hand side to get the best of those expansive Hudson River vistas.
That wraps up my adventures travelling by transit across the Rustbelt. If you’d like to get emailed when I blog please sign up below: