Hey, there! Log in / Register
Workday ends on the Red Line much like it began
By adamg on Fri, 02/11/2011 - 5:40pm
Dead train and signal problems mean the last refugees on the line before the T switched to buses got to enjoy 50 minutes staring at tunnel walls while their trains moved to the next stop. But there's an added bonus for commuters headed to Alewife: An angry turkey is now patrolling the garage.
Park Street photo that will remind you of Tokyo. Well, if Tokyo had trains that didn't run.
Tom Bruno did find one silver lining in it all: Despite an hour delay on the Red Line, he didn't miss his Rockport train at North Station - because it was late, too.
Topics:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Davis South OK
I had business and pleasure at Davis this morning and afternoon. I dreaded the trip after seeing the down notes.
I've been off my bike because of the icy spots on the streets and took the trolley and Red Line.
Mirabile dictu! From Mattapan to Ashmont, then to Davis, and back all was swell. The Alewife ills were not contagious.
Business and pleasure?
You can buy hookers in Davis?
You can buy a pint
When you get put off a train at Harvard and end up taking a bus because the train on the other track you have to board is going to sit there for 20 minutes.
Hooray!
Your sophomoric and irreverent sense of humor and, indeed, personality, is going to fit right in at the Boston City Council. Wait, no it isn't.
You seem to be new here.
Welcome to the Internet. We hope you enjoy your stay.
Oh,
I wish...
Rugby/ Irish football teams
Maybe one of the local ones has hookers available in Davis Square. They are probably working as bar backs in the Burren, Joshua Tree or Sligo Pub when they aren't training.
God bless you 83 bus at
God bless you 83 bus at Rindge.
MCFA
The new name: Massive Cluster F%$@ Authority. The word "transit" shouldn't enter into it.
1 hour, 45 minutes to cover about 6 miles as the crow flies. Trains stopped at Harvard, where people were asked to "go upstairs" to continue to Alewife. Meanwhile, the train that I had been on turned around loaded up to head back to Braintree.
The train sat and we were told that it would be 15-20 minutes as it filled and filled and filled up and something about switches at Alewife being manually thown and traffic ahead and trains at every station blah blah excuse lame fail blah. I got off and took the 96 to Davis, and had a pint at the Burren before I could deal with the 94, which was also late late late and packed packed packed.
If it weren't for the small matter of where my job is located and my nuclear family never having lived anywhere else, I wouldn't even think twice about which car and which house in which city I will be selling soon.
Well...
At least they were blah blah blah-ing you? I'd much rather get updates about what's going wrong than just kind of hang out underground wondering if zombies ate the dude/tte who was supposed to be driving the train.
Agreed
Since they were letting us know what was up, a goodly number of people headed for Porter decided to hoof it.
All the same, there is no substitute for not having the system break down at each and every rush hour - particularly in a system that has pared everything back to its idea of when rush hour should happen. The T is symbolic of how even a decent and caring GM can't run a working system because the cities, towns, and state are designed to fail in the modern world.
Do MBTA trains have any redundancy?
I've never understood why the MBTA needs to 'disable' an entire train just because one car has some sort of power problem. Is it not possible to drive the train with power to only some of the cars, or if necessary drive it from a car other than the front one?
If one car has bad motors,
If one car has bad motors, the motors can be cut on that car and the train can continue in service. If an entire train has low brake pressure, then then the train has to be unloaded, if the train has pressure so low that the brakes won't release, then another train has to couple on and push the train (after the brakes on the first train have been manually released). It is possible to operate a six-car train from th 3rd or 5th cars if the lead pair has brake or propulsion problems, and crews will try and do that first before having to resort to coupling on another train to push.
Putting the "red" in Red Line
I arrived at Downtown Crossing from the Orange Line at around 7:45 yesterday morning and once they announced that the Red Line was running with "significant delays" I took the escalator upstairs, walked to Summer and Otis streets, and then took the 504 to Watertown Yard and made my connections there.
Then, last night, I was ready to take the Red Line back to South Station, but I ended up getting off at Central and took the Route 1 bus to Mass Ave and Boylston. The traffic between MIT and Boylston Street was atrocious, but I walked between Boylston and Mass Av station and there was hardly any traffic at all.
So glad I work at home
I've been working at home the past year. Don't miss the Alewife to Kendall commute AT ALL.
Public transportation - the
Public transportation - the wave of the future.
Get out much?
It is the wave of the future - when it isn't neglected or saddled with debt from highway building orgies.
Oh, but we built our way out of a traffic jam with that big dig thing? Right. There's plenty of room for more pavement? Um. Yeah. Boston used to have a lot more people in it, and managed to move those people around more efficiently. There are cities that used to have a lot fewer people in them, but have managed to reduce traffic and car ownership while nearly doubling in population by extensively investing in public transit. You can't do that with cars.
Back to the Future?
It's amazing to think that at one time there was an extensive network of trolleys that got people all over Metropolitan Boston back at the turn of the century..like two turn o' the centuries back. A trolley from Lynn could get you through Malden and down into Boston. Somerville...riddled with trolleys. Sure they were being pulled by horses, but still. Granted, the system got overwhelmed by its success and they had to put in new fangled non-horse driven trolleys, but I can't help thinking that it all worked better back then. Just smelled worse.
not even sure it smelled worse either....
...after being stuck on some of those crowded red line trains recently, I think I might have easily traded musty-winter-coat-and-B.O. for fresh-air-and-horse-shit quite gladly.
(edited for spelling)
Really?
Ever smell 20 thousand horses crapping and urinating in the streets? Add in the smell of lye and the flies and it is not a pretty picture. And BO? People bathed once a week back then- maybe.
20 thousand horses?
I've heard of 20 mule team, but 20 thousand horses all together at once? No, I haven't smelled that. Have you?
However, I do ride an enclosed, jam crowded train every day-with at least one horse's ass on every car. IN addition to myself, that is..
Do you have any . . .
. . . idea what the streets were like back then? You know what was outside of every house- and every store- sometimes in the store? Metal stirrup looking things so people could wipe the horse crap off their shoes from the streets. It was everywhere. It was disgusting. Not to mention the total lack of zoning and refrigeration- so that every day- animals were taken into cities to be slaughtered and held in pens until they were slaughtered- where they also crapped and pee-ed.
I'd rather live in the worst days now- than the best days then. Hands down.
When automobiles began to hit
When automobiles began to hit the streets, it was a huge environmental improvement. Not only were the streets full of rivers of horse manure when it rained, but during dry weather, it turned to dust and blew in your face and in your windows. Sometimes your eyes would be full of the powdery mess. And then there were the dead horses. Horses were worked very hard, and frequently died in the streets. It could take many hours for someone to come and pick up a carcass, and in the meantime it would block traffic and begin to stink. The removal of dead draft horses was a major problem for cities that the automobile and truck eliminated. The era of horses was an era of filth.
And those horsecars, criss-crossing the Metro Boston area? The horses walked - and the horsecar traveled at walking speed. Not exactly rapid transit.
Yes I have an idea what the streets were like..
...but not the firsthand account that you are providing -- "it was disgusting". Okay you must have been there. I'm here to tell you my multiple subway rides, one in particular, were a different breed of disgusting.
Those metal scrape-y things, bootscrapers, are still there at the entrances to old buildings. People nowadays brush snow and dog shit off with them, I suppose. And yes, there were animals peeing and pooping and getting slaughtered left and right in the old days. Fer instance, Brighton had huge amounts of livestock. That's why that crappy steakhouse restaurant on market street at the Pike is called "The Stockyard"--I've read that there was a cattle stockyard on that very site with 100s of thousands of head of cattle. My current work commute does not involve Market Street in Brighton, or any other superconcentrated area of slaughter I know of.
In my original post I was comparing being in that overcrowded poorly ventilated subway car, underground, for an hour, sitting near several people with various odors--one of whom apparently crapped their pants, to being directly above ground in the fresh air (for my purposes, Mass Ave in Cambridge) with horses pulling carts and crapping on the street, and possibly some cattle dropping patties while grazing on the Cambridge Common. In that example, I"ll still take the fresh air and farm animal shit over the stale air and human shit. I must be claustrophobic and weird that way, but that's who I am.
For the record, I'd rather live now than back then too....I was only commenting on travel on my specific route home.
(edited for a typo---fixing my run-on sentences would be too much effort!)
No . . .
... You are just a whiner. Get lost.
hahaha
run out of material, did you?
better luck next time.