Wednesday, March 9, 2005, 8:21am
Wednesday, March 9, 2005, 8:21am
Except for brief wisps of blowing snow my view of Framingham Station belies the umbrage with which the Old Man has returned to pay his respects on those hoping for creeping mud. The howling wind from last evening into the early morning hours spoke of a blizzard more than this dusting. In an ongoing squall only a few white inches fell.
Yesterday all day long the temperature had fallen like a rock from the low forties into the low teens. When the snow finally did arrive it was the dry sort that acts much like how desert sand marches with the wind blowing and re-blowing sideways until skipping to a halt across some frozen dune.
Still at Framingham, Frank has announced our delay. The Boston to Framingham local must first arrive to clear the tracks ahead – which has just now happened. This, we are told, opens a path for the inbound train ahead of us to rescue the train ahead of it where the two trains will hook together. From the other day when I saw 8:07 rescue the 7:37 the preferred configuration has the rescuing train pulling ahead then switching tracks to take the lead in the overall assemblage.
“Ah folks, looks like they have the two trains hooked together, and once they finish the brake test we’ll be on our way…”
After a pause… “It’s all Bob’s fault, by the way…”
Okay, so they’re not always 100% professional. But we need the entertainment almost as much we need a safe ride to into the city and I’ll never complain.
Soon after this indeed we are underway, and though several passengers grumble in concert about the delay, at least that super train ahead of us will scoop up the stranded hordes who might otherwise pack our own train.
A guy talking on a cell phone renders his assessment… “Yeah, some sort of mechanical problem. The trains have been running late a lot lately. But it’s gotten a lot better – today we have heat!”
Something about the bright sunlight, the new snow on the ground and the lack of snow in the trees allows me to see farther into the woods than usual. Parked in rows among the trees behind a Civil War era facility across the lake from the Natick Labs I spy a bunch of older military trucks and other vehicles. Most seem abandoned, and the reason for this is not clear. Stacked in the mix I also see an old school bus, so perhaps this is simply a secure place to park abandoned government property of various types.
Behind the super train we crawl at pace that may put us into Boston just in time for the evening commute. From downtown Framingham it has taken us 35 minutes to reach downtown Natick – a distance of about five miles. Surprisingly passengers are boarding the train at Natick, so I wonder if we are now picking up those waiting for what would normally be the 8:45 out of Ashland.
I can occupy myself with the laptop, so I don’t feel any particular time pressure or boredom, but I know how these seats are only good for an hour and at this rate we’ll reach Wellesley College just about when my butt begins to sign off.
On thing I know is how a diesel-electric locomotive is one of the more reliable designs ever conceived – so these beasts breaking down is almost always the result of lax maintenance, poor operating procedures, or simple age and overuse.
“Sorry for the delay, this is really getting to be a real pain. The only thing I can say is to click on customer satisfaction on the MBTA website. This is train 512 and if you go there the T will send you a pair of free tickets since we’re going to be more than a half hour late – eventually.”
Along the shores of Moose Pond into Wellesley astride the Natick/Wellesley town line I notice a house there with a spiraling red brick chimney that makes a full 360 degree turn from where it exits the roof to where it is decorously capped. Lakeside homes are like this. More common than might be found amongst executive rows in more orderly and planned neighborhoods, I often notice a more relaxed attitude with freeform motifs near natural bodies of water like this.
At Wellesley Hills Station my butt detector has ‘gone high’ as we might say in digital logic discussion. Amazingly it’s been exactly one hour since I landed this two-seater. So it’s time to stretch out a bit and hope that nobody joins me at Wellesley Farms — our last stop before the long crawl to Back Bay.
Now the young trainee conductor is making the station stop announcements, and I suspect this is because Frank knows that he might editorialize himself out of job if he takes the mike one more time – for example…
“Back Bay -should be- next!”
Given Frank’s tendency to call them the way he sees them, any announcement from him also comes with proper leavening in the form of wry uncertainty because he likely knows how added bullshit atop any announcement merely to “frame the message” according to an MBTA party line is the best way to toss all informational credibility out the window.
“That’s ten cars at Auburndale station….”
“Ten cars. Auburndale. Okay”
Likely this radio chatter implies the arrival of the super train at the first of the Newton stops. Since one portion of that train is probably a local, it seems that we’ll be dragged through Newton one station at a time while the super train collects the frozen outcast of would-be passengers tangled amongst today’s commuting fiasco.
“We can’t go past this red signal until the train ahead of us clears this block. It shouldn’t be more than a minute.”
True to Frank’s word we are inching along again – clawing past the small beige office buildings on approach to Route 128. The guy across the aisle who’d been happy for heat is napping now. Others pull work from various briefcases while others tap away at laptop keyboards or read the same newspapers a third time through. Bright sun pours through the south-facing windows building a cheery warmth while the occasional cell phone owner logs more minutes — dissipating the warmth somehow. Most callers predict a South Station arrival time of 9:30. Yet it’s already 9:30 and we’ve barely reached the Newton stops. On a good day from the last of these at Newtonville it’s still another 12 minutes to Back Bay. So I’m guessing more like 9:50 or even 10:00am. At least there won’t be much of a boarding line waiting on the Silver Line!
Somewhere west of the Mass Pike crisscross we lurch to a brief stop then continue. At each stop light the engineer isn’t bothering to gain a lot of speed only to make another a hard stop just down the tracks. Instead we cruise downstream like an lazy steamboat running atop a meandering river of cold steel.
With all of this time on hand, thoughts rise to the surface on the topic of uncertainty – that bugaboo concept that drives so much of human activity and this journal.
No matter how well defined, a given particular risk does not exist except in a sea of other risks, some more related than others. Had the MBTA spent more on locomotive upkeep we might not be running late today. Yet if millions of dollars were needed and if this required higher ticket prices, it might become noticeably more expensive to ride the rails leading lower ridership and in total less income overall even with trains running more reliably. With the present financial state such efforts at improvement might fully undermine the economics of the entire commuter rail system leaving no ride into Boston for me at all.
The MBTA has outsourced much of its operations to contractors, and though this limits their own risks, this may not limit the risks they face from the riders of the system who still blame the T even though the T has washed their hands of many details. The theory of outsourcing comes from the notion of how contractors are motivated by profit to operate efficiently along with an institutional survival instinct to keep the business. Ideally, institutional waste is pulled out and the resulting value of excised fat is evenly divided between better service and pocket money to the contractor (at the very least).
Yet in the wonderful reality of the American business mind the level of service provided by the contractor is defined solely in terms of minimizing the risks of losing the next contract bid while maximizing profits along the way. Their slogans and PR bullshit speaks incessantly of customer care, but behind the scenes any effort to truly please the customer beyond a minimal level of satisfaction is considered a waste because riders don’t really expect much.l
Public transit does not run on diesel fuel, electricity, gasoline, and propane – it runs on cash. So long as riders aren’t pissed off enough to tackle the Pike or Routes 1, 2, 3, or I-93 then spending money on better rail service makes little sense. Businesses do not exist to over-please their customers only their stockholders, and perhaps that more than anything else explains this contract-managed commuter railroad.
It is 9:50am and behind the the BU campus we are just now rolling into the Allston freight yards. As the minutes tick by we roll on behind the ‘left field’ fence at Nickerson Field, past a snowy scene looking far more like mid-January than mid-March, then past the cold yet open waters of the Charles, then beneath the Pike overpass, then under the Commonwealth Avenue bridge to rejoin the Pike as it drops from it’s own heights, then past the BU Photonics Center and unnamed brick apartment buildings. We lumber and creep and finally roll to a halt only to lurch ahead once more past giant dormitory towers and a red “Boston University” sign labeling full parking lots, then past innocuous concrete retaining walls, beneath more overpasses into Yawkey Station near Fenway Park without stopping, past more unlabeled buildings this time with blacked out and painted over windows. We roll to a stop again – or almost – inching one inch closer to Back Bay with each tick of my wrist watch second hand until picking up speed past the giant Citco sign and the backs of red brick buildings and ugly parking towers at Kenmore Square, past the half-frozen Fens with looping walkways and arching stone bridgeworks, lurching and halting again just shy of the Back Bay Tunnel, then lurching ahead again. Blue sky rains down upon us without comment and only the battery manager of this PC seems concerned about the length of this trek. After two hours aboard this goddamn train the humans are wrung out. We will soon arrive at South Station. It will be 10:00am instead of of the expected 9:00. South Station today will not be the departure point for hell. It will be where hell this day finally comes to an end.
Crawling into the Back Bay Tunnel is enough for the Back Bay crowd to make for the doorways. It is a comforting habit to stand like this because it is one of the last things we do aboard a train, and even though it may be no faster to stand the last ten minutes, it feels like the ordeal is over.
My battery manager says that I have 18 minutes left before the laptop shuts down. This might be 18 minutes, or zero. So I’m shutting down by my own choice before the computer dies.
As recorded later – We finally arrived at South Station at 10:25am, two hours and 19 minutes after leaving Ashland Station for a ride scheduled to last 51 minutes. In this journey we have averaged less than 11 MPH.
