Hope you weren't headed to Maine

[dmaze]

Another casualty of the DNC madness: the Amtrak Downeaster (Boston North Station to Portland, Maine) isn't running. At all. Not even, say, with bustitution from South Station to Anderson/Woburn the same way the commuter rail is and then through train service from there. (Are the equipment moves involved just too hard, maybe? Is there enough room to turn a train consisting of a Genesis engine, three coaches, a cafe car, and a cabbage on the north side of the drawbridge? Or is that inside the Secret Service exclusion zone? It still feels like you could do something complicated involving getting on the freight track on the Lowell line through Somerville, from there wind up behind the Boston Engine Terminal, and from there cross on the Grand Junction, but this may just be too much effort for them.)

Reports I've seen so far is that the T's "searches" consist only of swab tests for explosive residue, and that they're not looking for anything else, and that security in general will be more relaxed than the literature has been making it sound (they understand that people want to take their luggage on the T to the airport, and that people in Roxbury and JP might take the Orange Line to downtown for their jobs without going near the convention).

Comments

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Is there enough room to turn a train consisting of a Genesis engine, three coaches, a cafe car, and a cabbage on the north side of the drawbridge? Or is that inside the Secret Service exclusion zone?

Clearly, the cabbage is just too much for anyone to handle. They'd have to replace it with a brussel sprout instead, and you know how people feel about brussel sprouts.


Took the T today to indulge my son (green line to red line to Alewife), and there was a very noticable police presence, including a guy in a day-glo vest riding on the train itself. No one made us submit to search, but we weren't carrying anything, and I suspect women with small children are generally not subject to profiling.