The Parlor Car seating arrangement in a Metroliner looks comfy. Was it?
Very.
While I can’t speak to Metroliner Parlor cars, I recall a family trip from Baltimore to New York sometime after the B&O stopped service East of Baltimore - PRR train and we had Parlor Car seats in both directions - more comfortable than coach.
I was in steerage on my Metroliner ride which was the same as Amfleet. Pretty comfy too. Especially compared to airplanes.
I only ride Parlor car service once on the old IC Panama Ltd. Champaign to Central Station in Chicago. Very comfy and smooth riding at up to 90mph around Paxton.
I was fortunate to have ridden from Penn Station to New London on the old New Haven in a Budd parlor car (Nathan Hale) back in '73 or so.
Doug and Clovis by Edmund, on Flickr
Quite comfortable, indeed, and we had our own attendant that kept the snacks and drinks coming. My one and only Metroliner ride was W.U.T. to Baltimore in coach but I did walk the whole train and check out the parlor seating. Not quite as comfortable as the Heywood ‘Sleepy Hollow’ seats but still better than coach. I think the ‘step up’ charge for the New London trip was about $7.00. Well worth the investment.
Metroliner_4-2-1969 by Edmund, on Flickr
Metroliner_4-2-1969_ob by Edmund, on Flickr
There were a few times while riding ‘the Corridor’ that I asked the conductor if there was any open sleeping car space which could be sold as ‘day parlor’ space for a slight additional charge. This gave me a quiet bedroom or roomette all to myself usually on one of the Florida trains.
Cheers, Ed
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Those non-stop, 2.5 hour Metroliners must have been packed with business guys. Metroclub only $21.55 one way!
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I still remember the commercials with the ‘whoooosh!’ and the “two hours and fifty-nine civilized minutes…”
‘She’s reading Nietzsche’ didn’t hold a candle to it.
I only made one round trip on a Metroliner. In 1970, I was 11 years old and had just become a railfan. We flew on United from Detroit to Newark to visit my aunt and uncle in New Brunswick. We get there and find out that their house is only a half dozen houses away from the NEC! One day, my uncle took us to NYC on a Metroliner. I had my nose pressed against the window the entire way. The first train that passed us in the opposite direction at speed scared the crap out of me.
They weren’t actually. Ridership was lower especially on the southbound run and they cancelled the nonstops just a year later.
With the curved beltline, the windows were RIGHT THERE, and you had no effective warning.
I vastly preferred walking up to the cab and looking out the front, even if the onrushing ties induced a sort of highway hypnosis… much better views of the interesting stuff actually passing you, instead of a rifle-slot-high strip.
There was an article in Trains - [April 1971] by John J. Carmody, “The Case of the Fast-Moving Target” [page 20], about the Metroliners. Title alone says all about the small windows, even up front in the cab.
Metra trains from that era had the same size windows. Thank God that’s not an issue today. Metra windows are about twice the size now, maybe even more. I try to avoid the older cars if I can.
If I recall correctly the larger windows were mandated as allowing rescue workers with air-paks or other equipment to get in or out. Whether that establishes easier passenger ejection or rollover injury , I don’t know.
There was some New Jersey Transit issue about making the emergency windows so they would never pop out in an accident, but be easy for untrained passengers to open … but not vandalize. I think it was beck in the early small-window Comet days, and the last I remember seeing was some multiple-part pullout ring inside the elastomer window seal. Be interesting to see what is state of the art on some of these newer cars.
I’m not sure if they required larger windows but on the old Metra cars those small windows now have emergency exits built in. I was just in one this week. Loved the old pastel colors of the day.
So I don’t know if the law requires bigger windows or not, or whether just requires easily removed emergency exits. The Comet/Horizon cars have the small windows and they were in production up to 2005 if Wikipedia is accurate.
They are tiny though! Here’s a Horizon.
