Tuesday, March 8, 2005, 6:12pm
Tuesday, March 8, 2005, 6:12pm
Through hearsay and confirmed just now through a belated platform announcement I remain aboard this Worcester train contemplating the only complaint I have about trains berthed at South Station. The engineer and conductors are aboard already, yet in the cold of this day where new rock salt is being spread and sleet rains through thin air, would-be 6:05pm passengers wait and wait and wait until someone in the control center notices how one bothered to announce the damn train. At around 5:55 I gave up waiting and boarded the likeliest candidate. This train had been sitting on track 2 since at least 5:40 and with all other trains already announced, it didn’t require much deduction.
If this happened only once a month I wouldn’t care. Yet more than once or twice a week I’m a detective like this resorting to guesswork — not a passenger boarding via timely information. Of course the pompous, bureaucratic, and soulless MBTA might say that a train is only a train when they say it’s a train. And as a paying passenger reading the finer print of my rail pass I doubt I could argue with such logic. We ride at their pleasure and we are given boarding information at their convenience, and if we are forgotten through confusion, neglect, or laziness – it’s not their problem if we wind up standing outside in an unsympathetic wind.
The fine print, I suppose, goes something like this… “Apart from the cleaver promises we’ve made in a larger and more stylish font, the sum total of this smaller print undermines all obligations such that no legal claim can be made against us. If you wind up on the wrong train, that is your problem; if the train stalls partway home and you have to walk, that’s your problem; if we forget to shovel the snow and you fall on your ass, that’s your problem as well; and if the whole fucking train jumps the tracks, smashes to pieces, and renders your corpse into the form of some over-cooked sausage – that’s the last problem you’ll ever have.”
This is merely my reaction to the institutional side of the railroad. On the other hand, guys like Frank and William and Mark and Norm and all the nameless conductors I see are thoroughly professional, decent, and very often fun to be around. The lost and found attendants come with high regard as well, and the guys who empty the trash left behind aboard these trains by hordes of thoughtless passengers are to be heralded. So if I could just talk to the platform announcers like I can talk with the conductors perhaps then I might see them as human, feel a bit less forgotten and a bit more forgiving in the process.
