Thanksgiving Day ’24 and we’re off to a gloomy, wet start; the rain gradually turning to snow as we approach Albany-Rensselaer. Our leisurely halt there includes the customary locomotive swap, and by the time we pull away, there’s a full-blown snowstorm in the making – the season’s first, apparently. The mighty Hudson is crossed, and we get up to line speed eventually, but ~30-minutes later, in the middle of nowhere, we grind to a halt. The snow, meanwhile, showing no signs of abating. Back in the summer of ’09, I had attempted to take this very train from New York to Montreal, but my plans were thwarted by “track work north of Albany”, with Amtrak offering a sorry substitute for the onward journey, a bus. After all these years, surely I wasn’t out of luck again? The PA system finally comes alive and our conductor explains the hold up – there’s a lengthy freight train ahead of us, switching over to a siding to let us through. Twenty excruciating minutes after halting, we’re rolling north again. I breathe a sigh of relief.