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Michael Harmon spent four days exploring Long Island and New England without a car. Hiroko Masuike followed his route.
In America, where cars are king and the hero’s journey is usually a road trip, long-distance train travel remains the realm of romantics — the sort who look down empty tracks and wonder where those rails could take them.
Admittedly, the Long Island Rail Road’s 7:47 a.m. service to Ronkonkoma isn’t typically the stuff of travel fantasies. But on a recent Sunday morning, I was buzzing with anticipation as that train slipped out of Penn Station, launching me on a journey I’d been daydreaming about for years.
Block Island, off the tip of Long Island, was the writer’s destination on his first day of travel.
Over the next four days, I’d be attempting a whistle-stop tour of the Northeast entirely without driving, instead following a carefully plotted-out itinerary of trains, buses and ferries. One missed connection could also imperil the entire odyssey, leaving me vulnerable to obstacles that were, if not exactly Homeric, extremely inconvenient — trains that run only once a day, peak-season New England hotel pricing and, worse, the siren song of the Uber app.
Still, it was hard not to smile as the 7:47 sped me toward all the summertime pleasures of southern New England, its beaches, bivalves and bike trails laid out across the map like a well-set picnic table.
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Sursă: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/travel/long-island-new-england-trip-train-bus-ferry.html