We had some snow yesterday and today, so I stayed home and drank cocoa and gaslighted the dog. But other people had places to go and tried to get to them on Metro North, which turned out to be a big mistake.
Here's the story: The 8:49 train from Port Jervis to Hoboken departed at 11:48, so right away you know there was a problem. Nevertheless, there were 8 passengers and 3 crew on board. The train was trundling along through the snow and sleet, and then a tree fell across the tracks. So the crew decided to back the train all the way back to Port Jervis, but then another tree had fallen on the tracks behind them, so they couldn't go backwards, either. Instead, they just sat there—FOR 11 HOURS—until some firemen from a nearby town came along and dug them all out the next afternoon.
I mean, wtf, okay? All the reports I've been able to find on this say that everybody was stuck on the train "with no communications." Does that mean not one passenger had a cell phone? What about the crew? Don't they have radios or walkie-talkies or something? Plus, excuse me, but doesn't anyone at Metro North notice when one of their trains just doesn't show up? How come none of the reporters on this story think this is odd? What about the passengers' families? Didn't anyone try to find any of these missing people?
A train can just disappear, and there's no way for the crew to contact anyone—Is this common knowledge? Am I the only one who wasn't aware of this? Or does this sort of thing only happen on the New Jersey lines? At least that's an explanation I could accept.
Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and thanks to B. Sansverie for the nice photo of Metro North tracks.
UPDATE: I think some Listener-Readers may be missing the point just a little bit. So how 'bout this: A Greyhound Bus was stolen from Manhattan last Sunday and sat at a bus stop in Queens for three days before it was "found." Queens=the New Jersey of the Boroughs?
With all the trees down all over the place, many in more dangerous situations, it was wise for the railroad just to keep the passengers on the stuck train and wait until their trees could be cleared. Safe, warm, toilets...
Posted by: toober | February 27, 2010 at 11:15 AM
it's like that movie sunshine...
Posted by: jared | February 27, 2010 at 12:21 PM
If it were possible that catenary lines were down I can see why they would hold people on the train that long. I've seen those things arc. There aren't enough dryer sheets in all of Port Jervis to insure safety under such conditions.
Posted by: bartleby | February 28, 2010 at 02:10 AM
The train also had a severed hydraulic line. Took hours for a mechanic to get there with weather and road conditions what they were. Then the fire department had to get a backhoe there to clean out a path for people to walk off the train. Unless those passengers were heart surgeons they should have stayed home. It's not like the storm was a surprise.
Posted by: Dale | February 28, 2010 at 09:54 AM
Don't you mean Fimbulvetr?
Posted by: Listener Jormungand | March 01, 2010 at 09:50 AM
I sat on an Amtrak train south of Trenton for 4 hours without lights or heat on a Saturday night a couple of weeks ago. A NJ transit train on our track had caught fire and the fire department cut power to our track. There seemed to be no contingency plans for such an event because the crew tried several different strategies before an engineer showed up and had us towed to the nearest station. It took me 7 hours to get from Philly to New York. Nothing surprises me anymore. I refuse to believe this kind of thing would happen in Japan or Germany or Korea or France. America seems like a banana republic.
Posted by: Lepidus vir | March 02, 2010 at 09:36 AM
It's not like the train disappeared into a vortex of time and space. It's just that the weather prevented anyone from getting to it. And it was snowing really hard. I lost a lot of TV channels off my antenna, so cell service might have been compromised.
As far as the bus is concerned, that does seem weird. You'd think they'd have some kind of GPS or Lojack system so someone could track flow of the bus route.
Posted by: Dale | March 02, 2010 at 10:20 AM
It's just that the weather prevented anyone from getting to it. And it was snowing really hard. I lost a lot of TV channels off my antenna, so cell service might have been compromised. vibram five fingers
Posted by: glauke | April 24, 2010 at 10:36 AM