Metro North Tells No one and Goes Nowhere.

A friend and I took Metro North to New York on Wednesday. We had lunch reservations and tickets to see The Humans.

My Train Time app informed me of ALERTS in great red letters, but also declared our 10:24AM train to Grand Central to be on time.

They were right. The New York bound train was exactly on time. On the dot.

 But somewhere in Westchester we came to a halt.  Stopped dead. And we sat there: for perhaps an hour. No announcements were made. Passengers cast puzzled looks around the car. Every now and then the train moved forward slightly, raising our hopes, only to dash them as we came to a stop once more.

Finally the conductor spoke quite unintelligibly on the loud speaker, something about our being “in line” for a track.

 It turned out that the fire the night before had imperiled tracks and that both outgoing and incoming New York trains were alternately sharing a single functioning track.

My friend, Alice, gathered the above information not from Metro North, but instead, from texting her son who commutes daily.

Any further information given on board was also inaudibly spoken and boiled down inconclusively to “waiting for an up date.”

We were two and a half hours on that train. People, frantic on their phones, were cancelling lunch meetings and doctor appointments and God knows what else. We cancelled our lunch reservations.

But what about our theater tickets? Could we possibly get to West 44^th street by 2:00?

We decided to bail at 125^th Street-- if we ever got there. And we did, finally.  We, and dozens of others could not get off that train fast enough. A kind man in the mob told us where to find the Lexington subway for downtown and we bolted. Soon we were speeding to Grand Central. We charged to the Shuttle for the West Side, jumped out at 42nd and raced up to 44^th street.

 Having stopped at a tiny shop to grab a banana, we arrived at the theater  at 1:45, panting, exhilarated, and congratulating ourselves.

Two points here. Shame on Metro North! No warning, no explanation. They took the money of all those thousands of passengers—we were by no means the only train delayed, as you can imagine—and never warned us? Trapped in the train, I found myself wishing that I were the CEO of UBS or such like so that I could seriously and effectively rattle the rails of the CEO of Metro North.

Point two: When the conductor was mumbling his useless information, we, strangers, began to catch each other’s eyes. We began to connect. “Could you hear him?” I asked the grey haired man across the aisle from me.

He smiled. “I only got something about an update.”

A line formed in front of the bathroom and we chatted, ”Did you know? ”No one had known, except that there “might be delays.”

The man who instructed us about the Lexington line also assisted two women who were headed for the ballet at Lincoln Center. We poured gratitude all over him for his get- about- the- city know-how. Stuck and powerless, strangers became friendly and helpful. We became comrades.

The man from across the aisle stood beside me waiting to get off at 125^th St. He asked what play we were going to see. We chatted about The Humans, which he had seen the week before. I asked him where he was headed and he told me, pointing back toward Connecticut. "Home.”

“You are getting off here and then . . .?”

“I’ll just wait for a train to come the other way. I’ve missed my lunch meeting anyway.” he confided, as he smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“Good luck!” I shouted as the train screeched to a halt at 125^th.

 No question about it, on Metro North that Wednesday, thousands of passengers’ plans went topsy-turvy.

Still, when you think about it, considering all that can go wrong on mass transit in today’s world, although it was certainly annoying and inconvenient, the man from across the aisle had it right. It was a shrug- your- shoulders event.
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