Friday, March 11, 2005, 8:14am
Friday, March 11, 2005, 8:14am
Past the long concrete warehouse we creep through the first freight yards of this day with their multiple lanes of rails fanning from the Ashland line until converging once more as we roll to a stop at Framingham Station. Beside me on this three-seater sits today’s free Metro newspaper detailing Gov Romney’s 20-year plan to rebuild bridges and roads. In keeping with his Silver Line news conference he also plans to upgrade the MBTA with new buses and trains, revamped rail stations, and expanded lines into Fall River, New Bedford, and Lynn – all places ‘economically challenged’ to mine from the double-speak euphemisms of the day.
To make his announcement Governor Romney chose the Silver Line Courthouse Station concourse as a backdrop for its wonderful symbolic value as an image of renewal and expansion. This is one place where the T is being extended and service improved even if the Silver Line was build as much to pay lip-service to some notion of ‘balance’ between Big Dig road traffic and public transportation.
The thinly veiled point is how the massive dollar-sucking Big Dig highway project caused a domino effect of downstream neglect. While the Big Dig was being dug and built, other projects had to wait. After too many years of this, the rest of the state is suffering as a consequence – though somehow not in Ashland with all three railroad bridges replaced during this same time frame.
It is Mr. Romney’s apparent ability to think big and manage well that brought him the fame that got him elected governor, and its nice to see him worrying about the future condition of the Commonwealth instead of raising those hot-button and divisive issues so commonly raised by more senior members of his own party. Unfortunately it’s taken nearly three years in office for him to distance himself from the muddy waters of ‘family values’ politics — tailored to drive fear into the hearts of weak-minded fundamentalists. Perhaps only when he realized how few fundamentalists live in Massachusetts did he realize how supporting the national party line was costing him goodwill at home.
“Wellesley Farms…. Correction … Wellesley Square” I raise my thumb in agreement without thinking about it. I suppose I’m rooting for the kid, and I’m glad he caught himself before his own credibility was lost.
One other note on credibility… the train is holding tight to it’s schedule this morning for the second day in a row with the engineer maintaining speed far into each station giving himself a little more platform dwell time with the added scheduling benefit of fewer boarding passengers. By arriving on time — or more to the point, leaving on time — he can outrace stragglers unwise enough to expect delays — or that the engineer will wait. I see little cause for alarm when trains roar into a station like this. The engineers lean on the horn long an hard so nobody is taken by surprise.
An experienced engineer can haul 250 tons to a stop from a speed of 60mph in 25 seconds – or thereabouts – stopping dead nuts on the mark for where the coach doors line up with platform markers and signs. A rookie trying this might overshoot which is bad, or undershoot which is worse. Once the train is drifting short of the mark the only likely result will be the hideous lurching collision of coach couplings sorting out the pilot’s hesitation.
If I didn’t see these entrances happening all the time, it wouldn’t make much sense. When repeatedly confronted with odd mechanical happenstances after a while a model will form in my mind. Aboard the trains it was only a matter of time before I’d see the train carriages as one giant slinky spring, ice stuck in the doorway runners as congealed hot-melt adhesive, and fallen snow between the rails little more than thick fiberglass sound-absorbent.
As I contemplate underlying forms and mechanical analogies we pass an east-facing clock atop the decorative northwest tower of the Allston Super Stop-N-Shop. It reads 8:55 — a good seven minutes fast, though well within the expected margin of error for most public clocks in this country. If needs be, in Switzerland you can use any public display for source data in calibrating an atomic clock. By contrast, Ashland, where the original electric clock was invented by Henry Warren, the clocks atop those towers have been dead for as long as I can remember.
Switzerland is really one giant timepiece with public clocks, long-haul railroads, local street trolleys, and those cute yellow post buses plying the countryside all one interlocking timekeeping machine. In this country the relationship between timekeeping and public transportation is little more than the erratic chemistry of dysfunctional organisms independently driven as much by happenstance and coincidence as by design.
“South Station next and Final Stop!”
The kid sounds confident now and I’m happy for him. By the time we reach South Station he may have seen the best of what these train rides can deliver and possibly keep the experience of this on-time run as one more reason to trudge further into his career as a conductor.
We make the last sweeping turn into South Station and for only the second time I can recall since last summer we are arriving with wheels stopped exactly according to the schedule at 8:58am.
