Navigating Philadelphia’s regional rail system after a winter storm
is rarely easy.
On the morning of March 4 I left my house in
Fishtown and prepared to take three modes of transportation to Wayne,
Pennsylvania, where I was to tape a cable TV show. The weather forecast the previous day had
called for 6 to 12 inches of snow after a harsh battering of sleet and rain,
but one cannot always depend on ACCU weather. As it turned out, there was no
snow accumulation at all although the ground contained very thin patches of
frozen sleet. Otherwise there were blue skies and a sun unencumbered by clouds,
enough to make anyone ask, “What storm?”
On that bright morning the Septa 15 bus was
on time, as was the Frankford El. In fact, the Girard station stop platform was
filled to capacity with 9 to 5 workers, many of them millennials--this despite
the fact that all city public and Catholic schools had been cancelled.
It
was, as they say, another “Much ado about nothing” storm of the century.
Yet what I thought would be an easy trek to the
Main Line changed once I got to Jefferson Station to board the 8:32 Paoli-Thorndale line.
The first red flag: all the digital departure billboards weren’t
working. That was also true on the lower boarding platform area. Passengers
waited for trains but the look in their eyes suggested that something had gone
terribly wrong. For a good twenty minutes or so no trains pulled into the
station; there were also no conductors or trainmen in sight.
Given
the absence of conductors, I asked a fellow passenger about the 8:32 Paoli train and was told that it hadn’t arrived yet. There
was some relief hearing this news especially since it was 8:40 but another twenty minutes passed without any train
coming into the station.
Finally a train finally pulled into the
station. It was from Germantown and a conductor from that train got out and told passengers
on the platform that the train was only continuing to 30th Street Station. A friend of mine was among the hordes
exiting the train and told me that the train was so crowded that he had to
stand all the way from Chelten Avenue. The faces of the passengers leaving the train had an
overdrawn Monday depressed look. It was a look of pure existential pain,
proving to me that this was not one of those mornings where you’d ever hear
someone shout, “It’s great to be alive,” or “life is worth living.”
I sensed transportation trouble ahead; I
also knew that I’d be late for my Main Line interview.
All I could do was study the faces around me—all of them sad and stress filled. Everyone was feeling the same thing so I
could no longer feel bad for myself when so many others were sharing in the
misery. The collective angst was like one big ocean wave. The only solution was
to let go of worry and go with the flow of the calamity… to embrace the
calamity and see if by embracing it that somehow it would get better.
I
headed up to the Information Desk where two frenzied looking controllers were
manually scrolling through computer train schedules.
They
told me that Septa had put everything on a Saturday schedule. “Because of the
Saturday schedule all the trains are overloaded. We’re trying to piece this
together. We’re having a hard time of it,” one of the men said.
I
was given a new departure time for the Paoli train but once on the lower
platform the only train that seemed to be running was the Airport line. It did
not become immediately apparent to passengers that all trains coming into the
station were only going to 30th Street. A rare conductor on an arriving train announced this
fact, while most did not. In most cases there were no conductors visible so
waiting passengers could not ID incoming trains. The trains had no signage so
passengers asked passengers what train was what. Then, like a belated parting
of the Red Sea, the station intercom system began announcing
incoming trains. A degree of normality returned even if everything was still
stopping at 30th
Street.
Having embraced the calamity head on, I had
no worries. “I get there when I get there,” was my mantra.
At 30th Street Station there were some conductors in view, although
where your “we’re only going to 30th Street” train left you off was not necessarily where you had
to be for your real departure train. The discombobulated reconfiguration of
schedules had the effect of disorientating many passengers, so many stood on
the platform where the “only to 30th Street” train left them off
while their real trains left on the track on the far side of the station. The
scene became a vintage Charlie Chaplin movie with passengers running this way
and that in a mad dash to have something go right.
My “real” departure train was also on the
track on the far side of the station, but all the fancy footwork in the world
did no good. One would have thought that the conductors in charge of the “real”
trains would have waited a couple of extra minutes given what everybody had just
been through, but oh no, the “real” departure trains operated as if it were a
normal Monday.
As a
result, I missed the Paoli train, watching as it faded away in front of me like
the uncomfortable ending of a Hitchcock film. My embrace of the Calamity at
that point had turned into something like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Other
Paoli passengers like me who had to walk to the far track to board also missed
the train.
The TV station, in deference to The Calamity,
rescheduled the interview for Noon,
which meant that I could take the next train and still have an hour to spare in
case there was another calamity. Calamities sometimes breed like rats; one
inspires another and before you know it, you have a regular calamity orchestra.
A few days later I discussed the Monday
fiasco with a friend who used to work for Amtrak. This friend, whom I’ll call Ajax, worked on long distance Amtrak trains for almost a
decade.
“Years ago, before the dawn of the
technological digital age, weather disasters on the railroad were handled
manually. Each station had a stationmaster, and often the stationmaster lived
above the station in an apartment. There were also towers every so often on the
tracks where there were always workers who would clear crucial switches of snow
and ice. Today that’s all done digitally. These (digital) elements are exposed
to the elements so when we get a storm like we had on Monday the circuits
freeze or become impaired and they have to be fixed digitally. And it’s not as
easy. to fix things digitally. It shuts down communication; things go blank.”
I thought of the station master who used to
live above the Paoli station when I was a boy. He usually sold tickets to
passengers during the day. He was a thin man with spectacles and he always wore
a white shirt and tie. Selling train tickets then was serious business, as was
the running of the trains themselves. Ajax said that the system used to be run like the military
with a strict hierarchical system. In those days if a conductor, trainman or
breakman called in sick during a bad weather day he was given an instant warning
notice.
Ajax, it should be noted, made up berths in Pullman sleeping cars, making and unmaking scores of beds and often getting
jostled by the movements of the train in the process. He hit his head several
times as the train lurched this way and that.
Our train talk morphed into some pretty
heady stuff. He spoke of witnessing a small pickup truck somewhere in Florida racing to beat the train at a railroad crossing. The
pickup truck did not make it, was hit by the train which demolished the car and
then turned it into a square looking container that flew backwards in the air
in a semi circle past the dining car where Ajak was looking out the window in
horror.
“You didn’t want to look at it,” he said. “A
father and his teenage son died in that one,” he said.
In another instance, an overnight train he
was on ran into a cow while racing through farmland. “Parts of the cow were all
over the front of the train,” he said.
Another time he happened to be looking out onto
the tracks from the dining car when he spotted another car trying to beat the
oncoming train at a railroad crossing. This driver was lucky, however, because
the train clipped off her car’s front section. She emerged from the accident unhurt.
She thanked God for her life by standing beside the tracks and screaming at the
train for hitting her car.
Calamities run the gamut from high to low,
but a low calamity is always preferable.
Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor
Philadelphia Free Press
