![]() Now, you can spend days poring over the Amtrak Cardinal schedule (we did), but you won’t be able to make the math work because, basically, after 6 p.m., West Virginia shuts down. (an hour made all-the-more ungodly by the fact that there’s nowhere to sit at the Moynihan Train Hall) and arrives at Hinton (the first stop inside the national park) at 6:06 p.m. The train leaves Moynihan station at 6:45 a.m. The Cardinal costs just $82-$108 each way ( group discounts apply, too), but the price alone is not going to make many converts out of Americans, who typically equate tourism with the words “road trip!” And here’s why: But the tracks remained, still hauling freight, but also offering a new way of thinking about tourism in America: the new freight is passengers. It’s important to note that one of the reasons the Cardinal even exists is because freight rail was so crucial to the region’s initial exploitation - rails and coal mines financed by Wall Street sucked all the riches out of West Virginia, and when the riches were gone, investors sucked elsewhere. ![]() This is not your train if you want to go directly to Chicago. Three times per week, it cuts a bizarre arc between New York and Chicago: The route of the Amtrak Cardinal. To get to the New River Gorge National Park without a car, you’ll need the Amtrak Cardinal, which, unfortunately is the red-headed stepchild of our already beleaguered national rail network. You could spend a week in this national park and only explore the union history, which was born in the dust of the mines and the heat of the coke ovens that still pockmark the gorge. #Midtown madness 3 pt cruiser plus#Plus the region remains interesting to the history buff: it is a crucible of the American labor movement, and a reminder of the role Wall Street played a century ago in internally colonizing West Virginia (once reliably blue, now as deep red as anywhere in the nation). The rafting is still top notch, but now tourists flock for the hundreds of miles of hikes along the river, on top of the gorge and from the canyon rim down to ghost coal towns, some of which still have historic structures such as coal conveyors, mine shafts and rail sidings. The gorge created by New River as it makes its weird path from western North Carolina to Gauley Bridge, is a Grand Canyon of the East, albeit covered in lush greenery that reclaimed an area once fully denuded by coal companies. By the 1970s, the gorge was declared a “national river,” and more tourists came, still drawn by the championship-grade rapids of the Gauley River and the less-intense, but still heart-pounding current of the New River (which, despite its name, is one of the oldest rivers in the world). Whitewater rafting enthusiasts have flocked to the gorge since the late 1960s, when commercial rafting companies started operating in a region only a few years removed from the last coal mining exploitation in the region (of course, other parts of West Virginia are still being decimated by coal extraction, which employs almost no one, yet still dominates the political landscape of the Mountain State). And let’s let them keep thinking that way because we don’t need them ruining John Denver’s famous “almost heaven.” Glade Falls is an almost secret swimming hole (and we are not going to help you find it). They say that because simply don’t know what they are talking about. When you tell your fellow New Yorkers that you are headed to West Virginia on vacation, almost all will say, “Why?” The problem is, the new national park isn’t ready for you yet. But now that they are finished exploiting the region, it has rebounded into a paradise - one accessible by direct train from Moynihan Hall in 12 hours. It’s sort of ironic that this corner of West Virginia is so well suited: for decades it was chewed up by the coal and rail industries. This is the story of a stunningly beautiful, deeply historical, and long-exploited region that is poised to capitalize on sustainable tourism in an age when vacationing itself is fraught, thanks to the carbon footprint of all those cars and your planes. Amtrak offers thrice-weekly direct service from Moynihan Hall to three stations inside the park - yet none of the depots offer services that are needed if the New River is indeed to become one of the top, environmentally friendly world destinations.īut enough (for now) about me. ![]() ![]() The hardest thing in the world is getting from the train station in the center of the New River Gorge National Park to a hotel room or rental car.Īnd that, in a nutshell, is the problem for the brand new national park, which reached the elite status only in January of this year. The easiest thing in the world is taking a train from Midtown Manhattan to America’s newest, and possibly most glorious, national park. ![]()
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