Lily, someone in the Mail & Ride department screwed up this month and sent out tickets of the wrong color. If you bought your monthly from a machine or ticket window, it is of a different color than the one sent in the mail to mail and ride subscribers. Both tickets are, however, valid for this month.

Certain monthly tickets had a blank with the month and year, and a sticky surface on which the imprinted ticket was placed. The August 1970 example above may have been that type.

Some bus companies at Port Authority may have used it as well.

And I’ll scan those monthly tickets. I found the design for the early 1995 tickets used the old MTA logo and not the one introduced in 1994.

Come to think of it, another, albeit not all that likely reason Amtrak is not easily able to come back to GCT is due to a lack of cab cars. At the last hurrah of Amtrak’s GCT operations in the late ’80s, Amtrak scheduled many of its routes with the Rohr Turboliners and the rebuilt RTGs. The turboliners had control cabs at both ends, thus Amtrak didn’t need to use the loop below GCT to turn trains around. The playing field is different today as well. Vermont makes use of one of the NYP-ALB Empire Service frequencies for the Ethan Allen Express, which despite being funded by the Vermont Agency of Transportation, makes more stops in New York than Vermont.

Aww, darn! I would have loved to see that!

I know what you mean about Brewster North ;)
You should scan some of your mother’s old tickets for me!

You are right about the wording on the commuter thing. I should say something more along the lines of local trains. Metro-north does have quite a ridership among non commuters, but everyone is local. No more rides to Chicago :(

2) And to say that GCT is strictly a commuter rail station is mostly correct, but if you felt like it you could say (unofficially) that the New Haven Line service to New Haven, Danbury and Waterbury is intercity, (potential through) future New Haven Line service to New London and Hartford might also end up on that list. And you can’t forget service to Poughkeepsie.

I still think that Amtrak could serve GCT with service to Albany without cannibalizing customers from Penn Station. In fact, according to a senior Amtrak official who I met on a southbound Empire Service train in December of 2010, there has been talk for a while in regards to Amtrak serving GCT with a small handful of trains, but Metro-North always complains about how “congested” GCT is, among other things. Amtrak’s P32AC-DM’s (if I recall correctly) were originally going to have a tensioned third rail shoe that could be adjusted for service to both Penn Station and GCT, but it never really came to fruition. But Amtrak, as far as I can tell, has not forgotten GCT (the detours back in 2008 and last year’s National Train Day are examples).

But keep in mind once the East Side Access project, Second Avenue Subway and the IRT Flushing line is extended to the West Side, the dynamics of rail operations into NYC will change forever. LIRR has only 5 dedicated tracks at Penn. At GCT, it will be eight, and those will be strictly for the LIRR only.

Believe it or not, that just came in the mail two nights ago. When I purchased it I didn’t even notice the date… when I pulled it out of the envelope I was like “holy crap!”