Yahoo Lifestyle They met on Metro, got engaged on Amtrak and will ride forward together
The first thing Andy Palumbo noticed about Elizabeth Goldberg was the teal-colored hair cascading down her shoulders. She was sitting on a Green Line Metro train car doing a crossword puzzle. He was lingering on the platform at Gallery Place-Chinatown, contemplating which car to board. He chose hers.
The sparsely-populated train car was bumping along its route around 9 p.m. when a group of kids flicked on a boom box and began breakdancing, struggling to maintain their balance as the train jostled through the tunnels. It was a perfect excuse for the strangers to lock eyes. At Columbia Heights, both Palumbo and Goldberg got off the train, hopped on the escalator and broke into laughter.
They both took a fateful left out of the station and chatted together street after street until they reached 15th and Fuller, preparing to go their separate ways across Malcolm X Park. Goldberg, a massage therapist, thought about giving Palumbo, who works in tech, her business card, but she stopped herself, she said. “This is too D.C.” she thought. So they punched her number into his phone instead, titling her contact “Liz From the Train.”
That February 2017 ride became the first of countless public transportation adventures together for “Liz From the Train” and “Andy From the Train,” or LFT and AFT, as they refer to each other.
The transit enthusiasts went on to roll through Reykjavík, blaze through Britain and cruise around California - navigating every kink in the track, enduring each interminable delay and rerouting around changes in service side by side (including, to them, the heartbreaking closure of D.C.'s Circulator bus in December).
As they’ve traversed the city, country and world via train, bus, shuttle and funicular, they’ve found that they navigate new neighborhoods well together. In foreign countries, Goldberg puzzles out how to get from place to place by studying train maps while Palumbo’s knack for languages helps them ask for directions when they’re lost. They often opt for public transit whenever they're in a new city, saying that it gives them a feel for how locals live.
“Turns out we make a good team,” Palumbo said.
Goldberg, who grew up in the New York City area, doesn’t have a driver’s license, partly due to her epilepsy, and has long relied on public transit to get around. Andy moved into the city after a snowstorm locked the roads into bumper to bumper traffic, generating a five-hour commute from Northern Virginia he vowed to never experience again.
Goldberg encouraged Palumbo’s quirky fashion and creative spirit. Palumbo supported Goldberg’s advocacy work protecting D.C.’s cultural heritage.
“Something I really love about Andy is that when something interests him, he goes all in on learning about it and builds a huge curiosity for something,” Goldberg, now 40, said.
“She’s very kind and very authentic and very welcoming - bringing people together,” Palumbo, also 40, said.
“The longer they were around each other, I saw a side of Liz I hadn’t really seen before,” said Ian Churchill, Goldberg’s roommate when she met Palumbo. “Everyone has a little inner weirdness that they usually hide from the world, but the way that they would just be together and laughing constantly and making weird voices at each other - I was like, ‘Oh she’s genuinely really comfortable with Andy and she can be herself.’”
Goldberg and Palumbo spent much of the pandemic together. At “camp covid,” as they called it, they developed their cooking and mixology skills. When lockdowns lifted, they thrust open the doors, hosting parties and turning their home into an all inclusive cafe car for friends and family.
On a late November morning in 2023, the couple were on an Amtrak heading from D.C. to Massachusetts to see Goldberg’s family for Thanksgiving. The Vermonter route became the marriage express around Baltimore when Palumbo popped open a ring box. Goldberg upgraded her status from travel companion to fiancé.
“I thought it would be on theme,” Palumbo said of the proposal location.
“You asked me if I wanted to be on the train of life [with you],” added Goldberg.
Though the couple enjoys exploring new cities, one of their strongest shared passions is a love for the District. Their wedding was designed as a love letter to the city, with invitations depicting a silhouette of row homes in their Adams Morgan neighborhood, pre-wedding tours of Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan and Go-Go music queued on the reception playlist.
“We wanted to show our guests our D.C.,” Goldberg said. “Come see different neighborhoods. Go exploring.”
The D.C. welcome wagon kicked off with a wedding eve gathering on Friday, fittingly hosted inside a decommissioned Metro car at Metrobar on Rhode Island Avenue.
TV screens scattered throughout the railcar flipped through photos of the couple as waiters circulated appetizers. Family and friends sipped cocktails and reminisced about the couple’s meet-cute, back when Goldberg’s blue hair would make the shower “look like they murdered a smurf,” according to Churchill, Goldberg’s roommate, and Palumbo was just an anonymous start-up bro in oversize headphones on the Green Line.
As the evening set in and the party bus became more of a quiet car, the couple gazed at their guests, the passengers they’d picked up along their journey. Tomorrow, they would ride full steam ahead toward forever.
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Rachel Weiner contributed to this report.
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