The Downeaster is a 116-mile (187 km) regional passenger train service managed by the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority (NNEPRA) and operated by Amtrak, connecting North Station in Boston, Massachusetts, to Portland, Maine. With five daily round trips, the route carries 500,000 passengers annually, and was Amtrak's fastest-growing service in fiscal years 2006 and 2008.

The Downeaster runs northeast from Boston's North Station through southeastern New Hampshire into southern Maine, terminating at Portland. Plans are in place and platform construction complete to extend the service to Brunswick in November 2012.

The Downeaster uses the MBTA’s Lowell Line from North Station to Wilmington, the Wildcat Branch to Wilmington Junction, and the Haverhill/Reading Line to the Massachusetts-New Hampshire state line. From there to Portland, it uses the Pan Am Railways Freight Main Line. All of these lines were once part of the Boston and Maine Railroad; the part south of Wilmington Junction was once the mainline and a branch of the Boston and Lowell Railroad, and the rest was the mainline of the B&M.

William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.

Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006), and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Billy Joel positioned at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," Joel stopped recording pop/rock material after 1993's River of Dreams, but he continued to tour extensively until 2010.

Itzhak Perlman (Hebrew: יצחק פרלמן‎; born August 31, 1945) is an Israeli-born violinist, conductor, and instructor of master classes. He is regarded as one of the preeminent violinists of the 20th and early-21st centuries.

Perlman was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine. His parents, Chaim and Shoshana Perlman, were natives of Poland and had independently immigrated to Palestine in the mid-1930s before they met and got married. Perlman first became interested in the violin after hearing a classical music performance on the radio. At the age of three, he was denied entrance to the Shulamit Conservatory for being too small to hold a violin. He instead taught himself how to play the instrument using a toy fiddle until he was old enough to study with Rivka Goldgart at the Shulamit Conservatory and at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, where he gave his first recital at age 10, before moving to the United States to study at the Juilliard School with the violin pedagogue, Ivan Galamian, and his assistant Dorothy Delay.