CHRISTMAS: Take the NEW YORK CENTRAL for cheer

Want to have a good time traveling over Christmas? Want to visit family and friends who live far away and arrive feeling rested and happy? You do? Well...good luck with that. Unless you can time travel to 1953 I think you're out of luck.

Click on image to see it larger.

Alas, the New York Central doesn't even run anymore.

The New York Central Railroad (reporting mark NYC), known simply as the New York Central in its publicity, was a railroad operating in the Northeastern United States. Headquartered in New York, the railroad served most of the Northeast, including extensive trackage in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Massachusetts, plus additional trackage in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

The New York Central was known as the "Water Level Route", as its mainline to New York City followed the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, and the Lake Erie shoreline.

The railroad primarily connected greater New York and Boston in the east with Chicago and St.Louis in the midwest along with the intermediate cities of Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit. The NYC's Grand Central Terminal in New York City is one of its best known extant landmarks.

In 1968 the NYC merged with its former rival, the Pennsylvania Railroad, to form Penn Central (the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad joined in 1969). That company went bankrupt in 1970 and was taken over by the federal government and merged into Conrail in 1976. Conrail was broken up in 1998, and portions of its system was transferred to the newly formed New York Central Lines LLC, a subsidiary leased to and eventually absorbed by CSX and Norfolk Southern. Those companies' lines included the original New York Central main line, but outside that area it included lines that were never part of the New York Central system. CSX was able to take one of the most important main lines in the nation, which runs from New York City and Boston to Cleveland, Ohio, as part of the Water Level Route, while Norfolk Southern gained the Cleveland, Ohio to Chicago, Illinois portion of the line called the Chicago line.

The famous Water Level Route of the NYC, from New York City to upstate New York, was the first four-track long-distance railroad in the world. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

Click on the Wikipedia link above to read more about the New York Central.