Fun Is Getting There on This Rail Line

Posh parlor cars with wide windows and a private mahogany bar may be just the ticket to lure people to ride trains rather than cars to crowded Cape Cod, says a man trying to put the rail service on track.

“Getting there should be part of the fun,” says Mark Snider, a 30-year-old railroad buff and owner of the 6-year-old Cape Cod & Hyannis Railroad Inc.

Since it began as a passenger service between cape towns on a one-year experimental basis in 1981, the railroad has grown to a service that carried more than 28,000 summer visitors last year between the Boston area and the cape, where the population triples in the summer.

This year, the five-month seasonal service ends Oct. 18.

“There aren’t many railroads left,” said Snider’s wife, Gwenn, who works as marketing director to promote the railroad. Only 1% of Americans ride railroads, and persuading people to give the grinding wheels a try can be difficult, she said.

“To be quite honest, I never thought much about trains before I married Mark,” Gwenn Snider said.

The Sniders try to attract riders with cars that hark back to the days when rail travel was America’s popular mode of transportation.

For $21, Boston riders can take a round-trip ride to the cape on the “Nobska”--a Pullman parlor car with glass chandeliers, mahogany dining tables, plush chairs and antique brass fixtures--that was built in 1912 for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The “Presidential,” built in 1926, was once the observation lounge for the president of the Bessemer & Lake Erie Railroad. It has 40 armchairs, wide observation windows and a private mahogany bar.

“We like to think that we’re showcasing the heyday of railroads,” Gwenn Snider said. “There’s something very special about riding in trains besides getting where you’re going.”

The private railroad that follows winding tracks through scenic wetlands on the cape is a combination commuter and excursion service, Snider said. It allows weekend visitors to leave their cars home and year-round residents to travel between towns without the hassles of summer traffic, he said.

Snider, who grew up in Newton but spent his summers on the cape, began dreaming of cape rail service after getting stuck in a typical cape traffic jam while a freight train was moving across Route 28 in the summer of 1980.

“That’s the first time I noticed the tracks,” he recalled.

After seven months spent obtaining permission to use the state-owned tracks and operate the service, Snider began running his trains the 13 miles between Hyannis and Sandwich.

Three years later, the service expanded to Braintree, a suburb south of Boston, as state officials looked for alternatives for people on the South Shore who wanted to drive to the cape during an expressway reconstruction project.

The first year of expanded service was “nostalgic, but clearly there were some problems,” Gwenn Snider said.

It attracted riders fed up with traffic jams on Interstate 93, but the train took 3 1/2 hours to make the 70-mile trip to Hyannis.

A $30-million state project to improve the tracks helped to cut the travel time to two hours, but insurance problems plagued the railroad, forcing it to delay its 1986 service until July.

The Sniders declined to discuss the private railroad’s finances but said it could not exist without the state’s help.

The state’s subsidy of the service, for which it contracts with the railroad, is expected to cost $1.8 million this year, including $550,000 for liability insurance, said Jennifer Watson, a state Department of Transportation spokeswoman.