We have previously written about an attempt to match or better a bus trip from Delaware to Old Saybrook. Then we wrote an update on commuter rail between Delaware & Old Saybrook.
Now here is the same kind of Northeast Corridor trip between Washington and New York.
Josh Kucera sent an article to the Washington Post on May 7, 2008. Here are some highlights:

It’s no wonder that Amtrak is very popular  between the Washington and New York.
It’s fast, the stations are conveniently located, and it’s comfortable. But costly: $97 for the regular train and $188 for the high-speed Acela.

Instead many take the bus ($38 round-tip Greyhound ticket). But traffic on I-95, which can add several hours to the trip. And Greyhound’s first-come-first-serve policy on getting a bus can mean you wait a couple of hours on busy days.

Was there any other option, he wondered? Something cheaper than Amtrak and less of a hassle than the bus?

Next trip  he left on a train pulling out of Union Station. Just to the left, below the tracks, was the Greyhound station, with its rows of buses and the sorry lot of travelers about to board them and brave the traffic of I-95. Not him. he had found my other option.

MARC train number 506 to Perryville, stops in New Carrollton, Odenton, BWI airport,
Baltimore Penn Station and every stop north of Baltimore. Many passengers had luggage, heading to flights at BWI. Most of the others were dressed for work, on their way to jobs in
Baltimore. Only one MARC train per morning, the 7:12, goes all the way to Perryville, in far northern Maryland near the Delaware border. There were only 15 people in his car leaving Union Station, and he was able to stretch out—something that’s pretty much impossible on Greyhound. It was as quiet as the quiet car on Amtrak, and for just $11 to Perryville, a bargain.
After Baltimore, the scenery quickly became rural, with pickup trucks parked in front of split-level ranches. This is not an obvious market for mass transit.

At 8:53 they pulled into Perryville, the end of the line for MARC, and this is where things got tricky. There is no commuter train service between Perryville and Wilmington, Del., 30 miles away.

Into this public transportation void has stepped the Cecil County Department of Senior Services and Community Transit. It operates a bus service called “The Bus,” which conveniently stops at the MARC station. Less conveniently, the next bus wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 10:15, so he had an hour and 20 minutes to kill in Perryville. Apparently, Cecil County tried to coordinate the bus with the MARC schedule, but there wasn’t enough transfer traffic to make it worth it.

Finally the bus came. Despite its apparent origins as a service for seniors—evidenced by scheduled stops at senior centers and dialysis clinics—the passengers were of all ages. The itinerary of “The Bus” is clearly designed for those for whom time is not money. At 11:50, they pulled into People’s Plaza in Glasgow, Del., 17 miles from Perryville.

This is where you catch the DART bus into Wilmington. The DART bus, he learned to his disappointment, was no quicker than “The Bus,” and it took another hour to make it into Wilmington, stopping to let passengers on and off every two blocks.

From Wilmington, there is a Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) train to Philadelphia, and from here on it’s no more buses, just trains all the way to New York. But when he arrived at the station he found that he had just missed a train to Philadelphia and would have to wait an hour and a half—until 2:45—for the next one. That makes a total of six hours after arriving in Perryville that he left Wilmington.

In Philadelphia, the trains were more frequent, and he only lost about 20 minutes. The next SEPTA train, to Trenton, was the only one of my entire trip that was remotely full—by now it was a little after 4 p.m..Two sorts of landscape alternate on this trip north: urban/industrial blight and semi-rural strip malls.

At 5:24, they got to Trenton, with just enough time to get off, buy a ticket from the kiosk, and jump on the New Jersey Transit train to Penn Station. They passed from rural areas around Princeton Junction to the exurban and then suburban New Brunswick, Edison, Elizabeth, and Newark, and finally pulled into Penn Station at 6:59, 11 hours and 47 minutes after he left Union Station. It was, however, a bargain compared to Amtrak: he paid $11 for the MARC train, a total of $4.50 for two “The Bus” buses, $1.15 on the Delaware DART bus, $9 on SEPTA, and $12.50 on NJ Transit, for a total of $38.15.

And if it weren’t for that 30-mile gap in Maryland and Delaware, it would come close to a reasonable option. Say, for example, the MARC train went all the way to Wilmington. you could have also caught the 9:15 a.m. SEPTA to Philadelphia, and the connections would have gotten me to New York by 1:36 p.m., for a 6-hour-24-minute trip. Yes, that’s more than double the length of an Acela trip and a couple of hours longer than Greyhound should be.

And only for a short time—just north of Philadelphia—were any of the trains more than 10 percent full, which made it a far more comfortable experience than the bus. There are no current plans to expand MARC service to Delaware, according to MARC. But the Pentagon’s Base Realignment and Closure plans, which will shift about 4,400 net new jobs to the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds near Perryville, may change the outlook. Another possibility is that MARC and SEPTA would each expand to Elkton; that’s something that state Delegate David Rudolph is trying to broker.