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Orange Line falls apart at rush hour

Jenn Stewart learns why some people hate Mondays: She gets to work 30 minutes late because a fire at Roxbury Crossing meant all Orange Line service toward Forest Hills came to a halt just as her train was pulling into Downtown Crossing:

... And after about 5 announcements about how there's a fire emergency of some sort at Roxbury Crossing, the conductor finally just gives up and tells the commuters that walking over to the Green Line might be the best available option.

And so you walk over to the Green Line, with the other 83 gazillion disgruntled Orange Line commuters, and you squeeze in like a sardine but you have no adequate place to hang on, so you crash into the same wee little person twice, and marvel that you have not killed them in the process. ...

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Comments

Thats the MBTA for you. Don't bother complaining because nothing will change. Service is far worst than years before. Actually what the MBTA does is decrease service like done before last fare hike, and then for the first few days you see buses, you're on time for work, everything is pleasant. Another issue, is during the school day you can't catch a bus because it is too crowded. Young kids go to school to learn don't but merely go to socialize. Some even have records before they even graduate. It's a sad time out here. People dying. And you know it doesn't seem to bother you until it hit close to home. Boston is not going to get better for anyone. The sooner you people realize that the better life will be.

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or even know what they were. Some of them have iPods, but they shouldn't bring them to school.

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Don't make me come over there.

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I meant to blog this myself last week but forgot all about it until reading about Jen's post. So sometime the week before last, maybe 2 in the afternoon, I'm on the Red Line going from Harvard to Kendall. At Harvard, there'd been an announcement that there were delays; no details given. At Central, the train pulls in, doors open, and we sit there. And sit there. And finally after maybe ten minutes, the conductor comes on and says there's fire on the Red Line; I think it was at Andrew. Regardless, traffic is going nowhere until further notice. Under normal circumstances, I'd blame the MBTA.

But I happen to be sitting next to an empty driver compartment where somebody left the radio on, and I can hear all the communication from some guy at MBTA HQ or central dispatch or whereever people like that are, giving information down the line to all the trains on the Red Line. And the information is basically this: he tells the drivers to tell the passengers there's a fire at Andrew, and all traffic is stopped. Then he goes off for another ten minutes saying "I can't give you any more information than that. The fire department isn't telling us what's going on! Can somebody get me in touch with anybody at the fire department who can give us some information on what's going on down there?" Eventually I got up and off the train and walked from Central to Kendall, but listening to the radio gave me the distinct impression that all this time after 9/11, agencies still haven't figured out how to communicate with each other in an emergency.

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