click to enlarge - Sasha Goldstein ©️ Seven Days
- An Amtrak station sign in Burlington
All aboard!
Amtrak will begin long-awaited passenger rail service from Burlington on Friday, July 29, with stops in Vergennes and Middlebury en route to New York City.
Opening day will feature a celebration at Burlington's Union Station at 9 a.m., before the Ethan Allen Express train departs at 10:10 a.m., the Vermont Agency of Transportation said Thursday in a press release.
“This new service will benefit Vermonters in countless ways, all while helping to grow our economy," Gov. Phil Scott was quoted as saying in the release.
The new service will run daily, with departures from Burlington at 10:10 a.m. and an estimated arrival of 5:45 p.m. at New York's Penn Station. Northbound trips leave Penn Station at 2:21 p.m. and arrive in Burlington at 9:55 p.m., according to the release. Fares will begin at $75 each way, though the agency teased promotional pricing, including 50 percent fare discounts over the summer.
Ticket sales have yet to begin.
"This long-desired service will give a boost to our economic recovery at a critical time, and give travelers a new, lower-carbon connection to New York and the rest of the Amtrak system," Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger said in a statement.
Burlington hasn't had a passenger rail link to the outside world since June 26, 1953, though efforts to restore it date back decades. The northern terminus for the Ethan Allen Express is currently in Rutland, though that will change in late July. The state and feds have spent tens of millions of dollars improving the railway between Rutland and Burlington to allow the Amtrak train to run at 59 mph.
Another train, the Vermonter, also connects the Green Mountain State to NYC. But its route, which starts in St. Albans, stops in Essex Junction and heads through Massachusetts and Connecticut, takes more than nine hours. That's at least an hour and a half more than the new Burlington-Manhattan route on the expanded Ethan Allen Express line, which will cut over to Albany, N.Y., before heading south through the Hudson Valley.
Correction, July 8, 2022: A previous version of this story misreported where the Vermonter train begins its route south.