Broken Switch

Go figure; they let the stairs at Ruggles crumble for three years (or at least two), and as soon as I make a post about it and bring my camera along to take a picture...they finish fixing them! The chain link fence was gone today. I didn't check to see if the top doors were open, but the whole staircase has been rebuilt.

But this is the MBCR, so naturally things couldn't stay right for long. Tonight on the #715 Franklin train, there was a switch problem. It happened right after the Ruggles stop, and we sat there for more than half an hour waiting for the switch-repair guy.

I spent that half hour standing, of course, along with eight other passengers. It was a pretty angry bunch, and understandably so. There was quite a lot of grousing about the service on the line. One woman loudly reminded everyone to put in for free tickets on the MBTA website. I added the information that those tickets could be exchanged for cash at South Station or Back Bay. A couple of people volunteered that the exact same thing had happened on the same line exactly one week earlier - that on Tuesday the 7th, the #715 Franklin had also been stuck due to a switch problem. I got a ride home that night, so I couldn't say.

As it was, things could have been worse - and they were, for the people in the next coach. That was coach #644, and it was the fourth hot car I've personally seen since the announcement by the MBCR two weeks ago that they only had a single hot car in their entire fleet. The outside temperature today was in the 80s, so it wasn't as hideously hot as the other cars. But it was sitting still for half an hour, without even a breeze through the doors to cool things off. The conductors announced to the people in that coach that if they were overheated they could move into other coaches, and I saw several people leave in obvious discomfort.

Eventually someone fixed the switch and we were moving along again. I arrived at Franklin/Dean 32 minutes late.