Thursday, January 13, 2005, 4:11pm
Thursday, January 13, 2005, 4:11pm
“This is the 4:10 Express. This is NOT the local train. Please have your tickets ready for collection.”
Getting underway this afternoon it occurs to me how the old notion of buying tickets at a window and seeing them collected by a train conductor aboard a train is the exception these days rather than the rule. Perhaps half of all boarding passengers order a monthly pass over the Internet. Others buy 12-rides cards that are tagged by the conductor’s unique paper punch symbol and handed back to the rider. The 12-rides are punched and returned. Credit-card-sized monthly rail passes are given a passing gaze and otherwise ignored.
Actual paper tickets can still be purchased at the main stations and these are hand-punched by the conductor inside grid lines containing numbers for the date, travel zone, and dollar amount paid. Other boxes can be punched to indicate whether the ticket is for service from South Station or North Station and another box to indicate if the ticket is good for a round trip or one-way. Paper tickets are routinely sold by conductors aboard the trains who charge an extra two bucks during commuting hours if the ticket could have been bought locally beforehand. In this way they’ll often sell and collect a ticket in the same transaction.
Mostly the conductors do not ‘collect’ much of anything except an office receipt and a little bit of money. When punching out a paper ticket they’ll keep the top layer for the office and hand the bottom layer to the rider. If bought as a round-trip ticket, the rider’s portion can be used as a return trip ticket later in the day. On the return trip, the conductor will collect this receipt if the rider wants, though at this point the conductor has no use for it and takes it as a convenience. Considering how most people don’t buy tickets on the train, the conductors mostly come away empty-handed.
From beneath the Pike overpass Cambridge is barely visible under a fog that’s begun to thicken from the morning’s mists. Comparing this to the morning’s description of netherworld gloom, I must admit that what I saw inbound hardly qualifies by comparison. This gloom has its own sort of simplistic beauty and the net effect is to further cramp the channeling sensation.
The gloom has no effect of the society of the train – this late afternoon 4:10 express being the most sociable of runs that I ever see. It seems that once there is enough ambient conversation it grants permission for even more chatter. I rarely experience this directly since I hardly ever socialize and prefer usually to close into a familiar bubble like most riders during the rest of the week. This is not because I am fundamentally anti-social. It’s more along the lines of dissatisfaction with chit-chat used mainly to kill time with little real or emotion content. If killing time is the objective – which is almost always the case aboard a passenger train – then I can kill time in more entertaining and useful ways.
In the world beyond, vague silhouettes arise where the gray whiteness of a wet snow background surrounds blackened forms reflecting almost no light themselves. The snow itself defines what is not there like how the white spaces on this page define the letters which do not cast any noticeable light. Outside my window there is no color of any kind to be seen other than the pall of twilight blue – noticed only because of how the lights inside the train have a much warmer underlying hue.
Except for meager high pressure sodium and mercury vapor street lighting and the occasional headlights and taillights of moving and halted cars I see nothing but a lithographic black and white world with no sense of gray tones in between. Even under the outrageously bright lights of a car dealership the scene is nearly swallowed whole by the surrounding gloom, and except for the bright spots cast by the lamps themselves there is no evidence of their existence atop their unseen poles.
Then it only grows more intensely inhumane where for nearly a mile we pass house after house unseen, and in this entire mile I count only four dots of light that manage to share any noticeable photons – two streetlights and two car tail lamps. Only after we are nearly to West Natick do I realize how we’re rolling along the shores of Lake Cochituate where I can see only thin trees trunks beside the tracks illuminated by the train itself and behind them a flat white screen of fog masking the nearby ice and patches of still-open water.
Darkness arrives only in the form of an amorphous sense of whiteness fading into a state of imperceptibility. The fading white does not turn gray. It stays white and is simply harder and harder to see until it can be seen no longer in the losing battle against the much brighter interior lights of this carriage.
Rolling into Framingham the night has not so much arrived as the daylight has released its ghost into arms of the Old Man.
