Hill and Dale: Bike Touring by Train: The Vermonter

The Vermonter, which runs daily between St. Albans, Vermont and Washington's Union Station.

This will be my third bike tour using trains to get there and back, for at least part of the journey. In 2013, my biking partner Pat and I took the Capitol Limited to Pittsburg back from Washington, D.C., after riding 300+ miles on the Great Allegheny Passage and the C.&O. Canal towpath trails from Pittsburg to Washington.

Somewhere along the C&O Canal towpath, May 2013. The trail was quite rough in spots, with protruding rocks and tree trunks, a condition exacerbated by the park closures caused by Republicans (who else?).

Somewhere along the Great Allegheny Passage trail, probably in Ohio, May 2013.

The second such tour happened in 2014, when Pat and I rode the Empire Builder from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Portland, Oregon and back for a week-long 500-mile tour. That trip included a trip down the Oregon coast, a haul over the mountains from Florence to Eugene, and a return to Portland up the Willamette Valley. Both times we were required to take off our pedals and bags, turn our handlebars 90 degrees, and box up our bikes. That has all changed as Amtrak now allows roll-on service on nearly all of its routes. And I must say, the Empire Builder, which shares the track with freight trains, was quite late both out and back as we people had to give the right-of-way to cargo. Ain't capitalism great?

After arriving in Portland, Oregon, we waited a couple hours for the bus to Astoria, on the very northernmost coast, to begin our tour the next morning.

One of the $5/night hiker-biker campgrounds that dot the Oregon Coast. We were the only campers that night. The jam-packed RV campground next door (where we showered) was luckily out of earshot, especially with the sounds of crashing waves that lulled us to sleep.

During our trip from Florence to Eugene, about a 90 mile day, before we hit the mountain climbs.

This trip, we'll board the train in Galesburg, Illinois (my buddy Dean lives in Bettendorf, an hour north) and switch to the Capitol Limited at Chicago's Union Station. We'll spend an overnight in Washington, staying with relatives in Bethesda, Maryland. Then, the next morning early, we'll ride back down to Union Station, hang our bikes in separate cars on the Vermonter (one bike allowed per passenger car for a total of three per train), and enjoy the 12-hour+ ride to Essex Junction (Burlington). I hope to get a lot of reading in on this trip.