Thanks to everyone who went out to ride trains for up to 6 days, both in New York State and up to Toronto. We had a total of 6 people involved, although there were never more than 4 together at once. Three (Steve, Jishnu, and I) participated from start to finish. That fourth slot was filled in shifts, first by Bruce, then by Mike, and finally by Penny.
I appreciate those who join the group and travel from afar, especially when longer train trips or even flying is involved. It shows dedication to our interest in trains. In addition, those who went into Toronto spent a lot to ride the trains, judging by the fortunes we put on Presto cards our first night there. The blow was softened by the ~76% exchange rate (which is excellent for Americans and not so great for Canadians).
If you haven't already done so, please remember to post your Amtrak mileage for the official Fest trips as well as any other Amtrak trains you may have ridden to get there or back.
While this was not a large group, and we did not venture across the continent, we still had a good time. We reinforced our knowledge of the border crossing procedure on Amtrak, and got to ride a lot of trains within the Toronto area, including round trips on 3 different commuter rail lines, the train between downtown and the airport (3 round trips), the intra-airport people mover, and sampled some streetcar lines we had and hadn't ridden before. We also got new trackage on the subway that was added recently up to the city of Vaughan.
Our group is getting smaller having lost a few key people over the years, so we won't be attracting the groups we used to have. Our record remains 28 people involved in the SoCal Fest ten years ago in 2009. I counted 5 on that list I know are unfortunately deceased; there could be more. The realization that life is short and that people may not get to do everything in life they wish, combined with the remaining people being unable to attend at certain times of the year, may result in us having more than 2 Fests per year, maybe 3, with smaller groups like we just had.
Over the coming days I will be updating various pages and sites to reflect what we did on this past Fest. Already I updated the Fest Scorecard indicating we rode everything on TTC, rode the single route UP Express, and added some new miles on GO Transit. The latter will likely be impossible to ever complete since there are still some rush hour-only services that are impossible to make a same-day round trip on. I'll post here further as more stuff is brought up to date.
