Choo-choo fall down go boom
Jan. 21st, 2009 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmazeI'll regularly take the commuter rail home, "because I can"; at a 20-minute walk to North Station, 10 minutes on the train, and 10 minutes home from Porter, it's as fast as the subway, and slower but more pleasant than the bus, and knowing that I need to be on a train at exactly 5:20 or 5:40 helps me actually leave work. Yesterday I got to North Station at 5:39, ran across to (unusual) track 3, and was the last person on the train as it left. The conductor muttered something about "express" that I didn't catch but I didn't think much of it, since even the 4:40 "no stops" train stops at Porter before going direct to South Acton.
We pulled out of the station, and stopped, and waited for about another 10 minutes attributed to switch problems. (Probably at CP-1, which is to say, the switches "at North Station" as opposed to on the far side of the drawbridge.) The conductor kept making annoucements...yup, still switch problems...there's a crew working on it, we're talking over the radio...we're really sorry...in case you were thinking of getting off, they say they're not going to release the 5:40 train until we go, this is the 5:20 express, stopping at Porter, Waltham, Lincoln.
It was at this point that I realized that the train that I had run to catch, and that left North Station at almost exactly 5:40, was in fact the 5:20 delayed by 20 minutes. Oops.
We got to Porter at 6:05, 35 minutes late for that train and 15 minutes later than I expected. Somewhat to my surprise we didn't seem to do anything unusual with switching (using the left-hand track through Somerville is acceptable and signaled), and the next train wasn't trailing right behind. So now I'm kind of wondering what went wrong, if they caught up, and what options they do have if they get behind (can they plausibly cancel the 5:20 and run a 5:40 train that's twice as long?).
We pulled out of the station, and stopped, and waited for about another 10 minutes attributed to switch problems. (Probably at CP-1, which is to say, the switches "at North Station" as opposed to on the far side of the drawbridge.) The conductor kept making annoucements...yup, still switch problems...there's a crew working on it, we're talking over the radio...we're really sorry...in case you were thinking of getting off, they say they're not going to release the 5:40 train until we go, this is the 5:20 express, stopping at Porter, Waltham, Lincoln.
It was at this point that I realized that the train that I had run to catch, and that left North Station at almost exactly 5:40, was in fact the 5:20 delayed by 20 minutes. Oops.
We got to Porter at 6:05, 35 minutes late for that train and 15 minutes later than I expected. Somewhat to my surprise we didn't seem to do anything unusual with switching (using the left-hand track through Somerville is acceptable and signaled), and the next train wasn't trailing right behind. So now I'm kind of wondering what went wrong, if they caught up, and what options they do have if they get behind (can they plausibly cancel the 5:20 and run a 5:40 train that's twice as long?).
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-21 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-22 12:19 pm (UTC)Also, remember the article in Trains about snow in British Columbia? The next issue someone wrote in with a picture saying "it's not just frigid Canada"; the letter (and picture) was about an irritating-looking derailment on the north side of the drawbridge here where an inbound train kind of went straight through the snow where the switches were set to "turn right". Oops. But now any sort of winter trouble around North Station makes me think of that.