I first rode the “two-three” about six years ago. At the time I was commuting more than an hour each way to New York City on Metro North. The trip was so painful that I fell into a minor depression for months. My brother, a longtime Westport commuter, obviously concerned for my health, suggested I ride the train with him. It added 20 minutes to an already interminable commute, but as it turned out, the two-three was worth it.

The two-three is the 5:23 p.m. Metro North train from Grand Central Terminal that snakes northward along the coast en route to Bridgeport. For most commuters, it’s just another train providing an hour of idle time. There are books, magazines, and open laptops for weary travelers staving off the madness of their commute. 

But for some, the two-three is a one-hour frat party, a draught of adolescence, a demilitarized zone that separates their high-pressured professional lives from their high-pressured family lives. You see, the two-three has a bar car. “Thank you,” gushes one grateful patron, to no one in particular, hustling down the platform ramp, as he spies the tattered cardboard sign indicating the bar car is open. “Thank you for the bar car.”

The bar car is a vestige of older times, when all that was expected of dutiful husbands and fathers was to work hard and drink harder. Offered only on a handful of trains on the New Haven line, the bar car serves up beer, wine, and mixed drinks as it rocks and lurches its way homeward. It’s a one-hour a day, beer-soaked sanctuary. It’s a place where the beer and jokes are as cheap as they are plentiful—$2.75 tall boys of domestic brews.

The bar itself is tiny, but does include a narrow surface upon which to rest drinks or play cards. The traditional vertical support poles that riders would normally use to steady themselves are instead ringed with cupholders. And rather than rows of seats, the bar car favors open space and 1970s-era vinyl benches lining the walls. The vestibule, where the doors open and shut, is among the most highly prized real estate on the car.

It’s an unreliable, endangered species (on the schedule there are several different bar car trains, but in reality they appear only at the whim of Metro North, though the bartender will text message you the times each afternoon if you treat him right).

Those that ride the bar car are a rare breed. They are the attorneys, advertising executives, brokers and bankers that make Manhattan money for their Connecticut lifestyles. They are the new old generation of career (mostly) men, known to each other only through their limited conversation, which consists of raucous jokes about sports, politics, jobs, and drinking. They buy drinks by the armload, and hand them freely to whoever is nearby. They are left to speculate, should they even care to, about each others’ varying levels of dedication to career and family. Their lives intersect only in this protected place, where neither work nor family can touch them. They are always happy here.

The rules of the bar car are not well known, if they exist at all. But there is an implicit mandate on the car: be entertaining. Everyone that rides the bar car is there to be entertained, and if nothing is happening, there is an unspoken obligation to say or do something entertaining. For example, a bar-car regular once took bets on whether he could do 100 pushups consecutively—right there in the vestibule. Suit jacket tossed aside, tie flung over his shoulder, he ended up registering about 65. But whether or not he could do it was hardly the point. What did matter was that he managed to engage the entire car for several minutes. And on a long ride home, that is high-end entertainment.

While I no longer commute to the city, I do miss the bar car. Commuting to New York is a brutal grind. And the bar car gave me something to look forward to at the end of the day (aside from seeing my wife and kids, of course). 

Some will criticize the bar car as indulgent or regressive. But I consider myself neither. And when I was lucky enough to catch the right train, I cracked my 16-ounce Coors Light proudly. n