Totally. There are actual people who take Amtrak from Albany at 5AM every day to Manhattan as a commute. Not many, but they exist!

It's amazing/depressing what patterns of living these megarich metropolises end up creating. There are people who live in Ireland and commute by boat and train to London for half the week in order to work.

The seat of state government is Albany and the seat of commerce/finance is in Manhattan. A couple where one worked in each place would naturally have something like that arise (and I'd think it wouldn't even be particularly rare).

I suspect for the majority of those couples, living in/near Albany would be vastly preferable to NYC, even before you consider the after-hours of political work is probably benefited more by locality.

How long would a 90 mile commute take, in a best case scenario?

My commute from Poughkeepsie NY to my office in midtown Manhattan was 2:15 door to door. That included the ~10 minute walk to and from the train stations at each end.

There are a LOT of people that do that commute and many of them drive from much further away and work much further away from Grand Central Terminal.

It was better than the 15-1:30 commute I used to have from Seattle to Bellevue in a car though, just because there was almost no variability and I wasn't driving.

So 4.5h for commuting, 9h of work, 8h of sleep, that leaves just 2.5h for everything else in your day, including enjoying your rural lifestyle. That would drive me absolutely crazy.

Remember, 4 of those hours of commuting are sitting on a train. You can watch movies, read books, take a nap, play games, get work done, etc.

I usually was at work from 10-5 and usually sleep closer to 6 hours a night. That gave me about 6.5 hours of free time. I also worked from home twice a week.

I personally hated it and only lasted at the job for a little over a year, but I could understand how some people could make it work.

I don't know how you'd get 90 miles with Metro North or NJ Transit. The furthest you can go on Metro North is NYC<->New Haven, which is 70 miles and takes 2 hours 7 minutes, one way.

That is interesting I regularly used to do a 65 mile commute to London which can take just over an hour on the slower train and 35 min on the intercity. (Bedford to St Pancras)

Not sure id have done one at double the time.

New Haven isn't the furthest, Poughkeepsie is. I was a little off with my mileage though, since Poughkeepsie is 80 miles north, not 90.

There are hundreds (thousands even) of people that drive from further north to get to the Poughkeepsie train station every day. It's bananas.

Technically you can transfer to the Shoreline East in New Haven and go all the way to the Connecticut River.