“All aboard the Niagara Limited!”
It’s a grey and rainy Sunday and we didn’t get any sleep last night (more when we catch up about Savannah and Philly) but for now we’re Shuffling Off To Buffalo on Amtrak’s Empire State to Niagara Falls. We’re going up the river and the scenery is splendid if wet (I kinda like it that way) and we’ll be in Niagara Falls by nightfall, which promises to be wet, too…I mean rainy, you dope.
In the meantime, here’s the famous 1933 “Shuffle Off To Buffalo” dance number from “42nd Street” where Ruby Keeler and her Broadway groom Clarence Nordstrom tapdance their way up the train car to their honeymoon cabin. FYI, the conductors still wear the same peaked caps and punch your tickets with a hand punch (remind me to get a darling bias cut dancing dress and flowered beanie cap the next time I board this train!)
The reveal of the train interior is fantastic and keep an eye out for the young Ginger Rogers and Una Merkel in a top bunk eating bananas and waxing cynical about matrimony.
The clip is prefaced by Warner Baxter’s impassioned speech to Ruby Keeler, which has become a much-lampooned trope but here’s the original in all its melodramatic glory. “You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve GOTTA come back a STAR!”
Enjoy!
Oh yeah, I love how the train tracks go right up the Hudson. I’ve taken Amtrak many a time from New York-Philly (when I was in college) and from Albany-New York (after my parents moved to Vermont) and even Albany-Philly (when I was in college after my parents moved to Vermont). But it sure makes you realize why there was a “Hudson River School” of painting!
That stretch is really beautiful. What’s kind of surprising is how much of the Hudson Valley I felt like I recognized just from reading Washington Irving’s stories about the area. Now I want to take that same train ride in autumn, when the leaves are turning!
If you ever do, be sure to go to Sleepy Hollow and the Washington Irving House and Philipseburg Manor and of course, just Up the River, Sing-Sing and my aunt and uncle (not all at the same GPS location).