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 44th street by 2:00?
We decided to bail at 125th
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 44th
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 125th 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 125th.
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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Thank you those in Spain, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Philippines, Portugal and Ukraine for reading this blog. How I would love to hear from you. Thanks to those in the USA of course!
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Thank you those in Spain, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Philippines, Portugal and Ukraine for reading this blog. How I would love to hear from you. Thanks to those in the USA of course!
