When the Maple Leaf was inaugurated by Amtrak in the early 1980s the national passenger carrier already offered a train over much of the route known as the Empire Service between New York City and Buffalo. However, with growing demand to reestablish service with Toronto spurred the train's establishment and it works in conjunction with Canada's VIA Rail to reach that city. Interestingly, the history of the Leaf dates back to the Grand Trunk Western Railroad, a system owned by Canadian National and served the upper Midwest, although it never reached either New York City or New York state. The GTW's passenger services were quite sparse, just a few named trains that connected to CN at Port Huron and Detroit. Today, Amtrak's Leaf offers fairly basic on board services considering that it is only a regional train although its ridership continues to grow.
Under the Grand Trunk Western the Maple Leaf was a 511-mile regional service that connected Chicago with Toronto, operating out of busy Dearborn Station (whose most famous tenant was the Santa Fe). Travel time on the train was between 11 and 14 hours. Overall, the GTW featured four trains in conjunction with CN that reached Chicago including the Maple Leaf, International Limited, Inter-City Limited and LaSalle. The former two survived all of the way until the start of Amtrak on May 1, 1971 while the latter were discontinued some years earlier. During its final years in service the Leaf (train numbers 158 and 159) provided quite standard amenities that included coach and club cars, with light cafe service also available.
Although somewhat confusing there was also a second Leaf, operated between CN and Lehigh Valley to connect Toronto with New York City on an overnight run. This was dropped in early February, 1961. Today, the former route of the original train is now part of Amtrak's Blue Water Service, while New York Central's former Lake Shore Limited route is now known as the Maple Leaf. The train was inaugurated by Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada on April 26, 1981 with station stops at New York (Penn Station, Croton-on-Hudson, Poughkeepsie, Rhinecliff, Hudson, Rensselaer, Albany, Schenectady, Amsterdam, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Rochester, Depew, Buffalo, Niagara Falls (New York and Ontario, where crews from VIA Rail take the train), St. Catharines, Grimsby, Aldershot, Oakville, and finally Toronto.
As with Amtrak's Empire Service, much of the route the Leaf uses today on the former New York Central's main line hosted the Lake Shore Limited
that connected Buffalo and the Big Apple. The train was upgraded twice
prior to the streamliner era, first in 1905 with more modern equipment
although it still utilized 4-4-0s (albeit more powerful); then in 1920
it was updated again with all-steel, "heavyweight" Pullman cars and non-streamlined J Class 4-6-4 Hudsons. A typical run for the train to cover the 436 miles between New York and Buffalo, even during its early years, was just over seven hours. In 1941 the Empire
truly came of age when the NYC decided to completely streamline the
train with new equipment from the Budd Company. Using its patented
fluted stainless steel the equipment included mostly coaches but also
offered new amenities like air-conditioning.
The Empire State Express was officially christened as a streamliner on Sunday, December 7, 1941 and unfortunately, as the NYC would soon learn the company could not have chosen a worse date to inaugurate the train. While the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii completely overshadowed the Empire's inauguration it went on to remain a successful dayliner for the New York Central. The train lost its name in 1967 and many of the high class amenities that made it popular during its heyday. After this time it was simply known as the Empire Service by successor Penn Central, which continued to operate it until the start of Amtrak on May 1, 1971. From the beginning on this routing the Leaf has never offered lots of accommodations and has always used Amfleet cars for coach and business class service as well as a cafe/snack car.
Until the early 2000s the train operated with EMD F40PHs, one of the
last to do so. Interestingly, while Amtrak began receiving General
Electric's new Genesis models as
early as the mid-1990s VIAs crews were unfamiliar with them. As such,
the train did not begin using them until 2002, today operating primarily
either a P42DC or P32AC-DM. With the Amtrak and the state of New York looking to upgrade the Empire Service corridor with train speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour (high speed rail) it is hoped that the Leaf
will be able to reduced its operating times immensely in the near
future and likely see increased demand (as of now it carries about
400,000 riders annually).
Header Photo: Drew Jacksich
A popular pastime for many is studying and/or exploring abandoned rights-of-way. Today, there are tens of thousands of miles scattered throughout the country. Many were pulled up in the 1970's and 1980's although others were removed long before that. If you are researching active or abandoned corridors you might want to check out the United States Geological Survey's (USGS) Historical Topographic Map Explorer. It is an excellent resource with thousands of historic maps on file throughout the country. Just type in a town or city and click on the timeline of maps at the bottom of the page!
You will be hard pressed at finding a better online resource regarding diesel locomotives than Craig Rutherford's TheDieselShop.us. The website contains everything from historic (fallen flags) to contemporary (Class I's, regionals, short lines, and even some museums/tourist lines) rosters, locomotive production information, technical data, all notable models cataloged by the five major builders (American Locomotive, Electro-Motive, General Electric, Fairbanks-Morse, and Baldwin), and much more. A highly recommended database!
In 1998 a gentleman by the name of Andre Kristopans put together a web page highlighting virtually every unit every out-shopped by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division. Alas, in 2013 the site closed by thankfully Don Strack rescued the data and transferred it over to his UtahRails.net site (another fine resource). If you are researching anything EMD related please visit this page first. The information includes original numbers, serials, and order numbers.