The End?

Perhaps you're wondering why I stopped posting here. Did the MBTA or MBCR suddenly make huge improvements in the Franklin line? Did I die, or flee the country?

No, no, and no. The explanation is much more mundane: I became a telecommuter. After thirteen years in the office, and eight or nine of those years commuting four hours a day from Rhode Island to Boston (round trip), my employer gave me the option to work from home. Deeply as I have always loved the city of Boston, I have to admit that the daily commute was taking a real toll on me. So I agreed.

It's a different life. Instead of waking up to a tortuous alarm clock before the sun rises and forcing my family to get up so they can drive me to the train station, I sleep late and wake up with plenty of time to stroll down the hallway to my work area. I can have lunch with my wife, and see my son as soon as he comes home from school. It's a whole new life, and a better one. I only wish that more people had that option!

But I do take the T in to Boston once in a while for meetings. And on a recent late-night trip home, I took another look at the crumbling staircase at Ruggles. A couple of photos came out clearly enough:

The side of the staircase is deteriorating badly. In this shot, you can actually see through the inner wall all the way through the interior hollow and to the inside of the outer wall. The other side of the outer wall is bulging worse than ever.

On the other side of the staircase, the situation is equally desperate. It's literally falling to pieces, as you can see here. Now, I actually led a T representative physically to this staircase last year and showed him what was going on, and he seemed to realize that there was a real danger. So I can't say why nothing has been done to rectify the situation, although I'd bet a shortage of funds will be blamed.

Other than that, I'm sorry to see that the T's thirty-minute money-back policy is apparently going to be discontinued, if it hasn't been ended already. This is nothing but an encouragement for even worse service.

So...am I glad to be off that train? Well, yes. I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit it. But I'll admit that I miss Boston, and once in a while I miss taking the train. I even miss the comic misadventures, lousy service, and rude conductors (noting, as always, that most conductors are not rude).

I'll continue to keep an eye on things on my rare trips to town, so this isn't the final post. But realistically, there certainly won't be as many posts as I used to make. I just don't have the material any more!

Slow-motion crash

The stairs at Ruggles continue to decay. The morter is crumbling away.

As you can see above, the whole structure has shifted so much that the
internal holes in one of the bricks have been exposed.

The staircase is slowly spreading outward at the base; another effect of this slow-motion collapse has been to pull apart the railing on the left side, as you walk downstairs.

On the outer side of the staircase, you can see that the wall is visibly bowing outward. I can't imagine that this is a safe situation! Would any public safety inspector allow a staircase in this condition to be used by the public? I have to doubt it.

The weird thing, of course, is that those stairs were closed for at least two years for repairs, and only re-opened in August 2007. Will they make it to August 2010? I don't know. Will they be closed for another two years for repairs again? I couldn't say. Will the next set of repairs last longer than three years? I'd like to believe so - but see no reason for hope!

MBCR Comedy

On January 6th I got one of the funnier emails that the MBCR has created so far. It included the following gem:

"Please enter and exit only through a door that is attended by a crewmember."

Apparently whoever writes those emails has never actually ridden the commuter rail. Because if that rule were ever enforced, every train in the entire system would be consistently 20 minutes late, or more, every day. Why? Because each train would have only one working door.

There AREN'T conductors at most doors - ever. I haven't exited a door on the evening train once since I got that letter that had a conductor within two coachlengths. Today I looked around, out of curiousity. For the five-coach train (three singles, two doubles) there was exactly ONE conductor visible.

If they're providing enough conductors to be at each pair of doors on each train, I don't know where those conductors are disappearing to! But it seems more likely that MBCR management is shorting the trains and the public of the staff needed to carry their own rules. This way, when something goes horribly wrong, they can point to this email and say "See? We told people not to use unsupervised doors!".

Strange morning, courtesy of the MBCR

Strange things were happening on the #708 train out of Franklin this morning. It was a double train, with an engine in the middle; I heard that the prior train had broken down, and was being pushed along.

I also saw my first "wrapped" coach, a double that had been turned into a huge advertisement for some bank. Here's a photo:

On the train, a woman had a large brown dog sitting on the seat next to her. It was some sort of hound, and was letting out a near-continuous high-pitched whine. I didn't see anything to indicate that it was a service dog. I couldn't tell if a ticket had been purchased for it, although it was using a full seat and it was VERY crowded on the train that morning. People were jammed in the aisles.

The train was due in at Ruggles at 7:50 AM, but didn't arrive until 8:24. So accordingly I put in for the on-time guarantee. I guess that will make up for the $8.75 I was charged for forgetting to change my pass on the 1st!

The stairway at Ruggles continues to deteriorate. Intriguing deep holes are opening up in the sides of it:

A week ago I saw that the afternoon Providence train (stopping at Ruggles on the outbound trip at roughly 3:56 PM) was incredibly crowded. People were jammed into the vestibule areas, between coaches - the areas with signs that say "PASSENGERS ARE NOT PERMITTED TO RIDE IN THE VESTIBULE". I counted at least ten people in one vestibule, and more than that in two others.

I also had an interesting ride home last week; when I got on the coach, it was pitch black inside. I mean really black; the only light came from a laptop that some guy was using down at the other end of the coach.

It was eerie! The power came back after about fifteen minutes, though.

Mysterious Thing

It's boring, waiting for the train at Ruggles in the evening, so once again I was looking at the stairs. The disintegration continues, but today I saw something new:

What IS that thing? It looks like a heavy cable, almost like a motorcycle lock, clamped around the base of the stair railing - and the other end goes into the concrete. Where the insulation doesn't cover it, it's clearly a multiple-wire cable. It can't be electrical. It doesn't look as if it has any structural purpose - how could it be holding anything in place? It's not tightly attached! Why does it go into the cement? Does anyone know?

There's another cable just like it on the other side of the stairs, by the way.

You might have noticed that there are bricks missing at the left-hand bottom side of the base of the stairs now. Here's a better shot:

Could the cable be some sort of temporary thing, like a clamp to hold things in place? It really doesn't look like it to me.

Crumbling stairs

Last December I wrote about the crumbling stairs to the commuter rail platform at Ruggles.

Here's what they look like today, Thursday July 30th. Click on the photos to enlarge them:

As you can see, the stairs are falling apart. And here's a view of the wall on the other side of the stairs; the damage isn't as obvious, but if you take a close look, I think you'll see signs that the wall is starting to bulge outwards...

That can't be good!

Trouble With A Capital T

Things haven't changed much on the Franklin commuter line.

There've been some late trains, and I've collected a few free tickets. The stairs at the Ruggles station are still crumbling. In the last couple of months there have been several times on the outbound #717 train (departing South Station at 4:20 PM) when no doors were opened on either side of two adjacent cars; twice I saw passengers who weren't able to get off the train at their stops, and ended up being carried along to the next station unwillingly. I tried to help one of them by opening the door and stairs myself, but by the time I'd noticed her plight and gotten the door open, the train was already in motion. There was, of course, no conductor around.

Today was pretty special, though. The morning #708 train was going very slowly. There were a couple of announcements; the #704 was disabled, and the #706 was joining up with it to push it out of the way. We were supposed to arrive at Ruggles at 7:50 AM, but we got there at 8:25 instead.

When we got there, people lined up to get out. But the lines didn't move in my coach. The doors were shut, and the passengers who were trying to open the doors...couldn't. They said they were stuck. I was far back in the line myself, or I would have given it a try. Needless to say, there was no conductor in sight.

We all turned around and started rushing down the coach to the next set of doors. But we hadn't reached them before we all realized that the train was moving, picking up speed. There was a univeral groan.

Fortunately someone reached a conductor, and the train finally stopped. We were well down the long Ruggles platform by then; all but two coaches were past the barrier that blocks off the crumbling, unused half of the platform (I'll get a photo of that soon, if I can - update: got it). We stepped out onto a continuous sheet of thick ice. Since it was an off-limits area, it had never been salted or sanded. We had to squeeze carefully around the wooden barrier, with no more than a few feet of clearance between the barrier and the train. It was a tight fit for some! And it may have been worse for the people on the other side, since if they slipped they wouldn't have the train as a backstop - they'd have ended up falling straight down onto the tracks. Luckily, no one slipped.

Here's a shot that I took of the closed platform that afternoon. It had been a relatively warm day, and the sun had melted some of the ice since that morning. But even so, there was a lot left! By the way, that half of the platform has been closed for as long as I can remember - years, at least. It's crumbling badly.

It could have been worse, of course - we could have been forced to get off at Back Bay instead, and been even more late. As it was, I got into work 40 minutes late. I later heard that people on the #704 train had had a two-hour delay!

P.S. - I've been told a great story that I hope to be able to post soon. The T apparently mailed out some duplicate letters and tickets for their On-Time Guarantee, and they're handling the issue remarkably poorly - even for the T. One suggestion: check your O-TG letters for duplicate numbers. If you find some, don't try to cash in duplicates at the same time. More on this later, I hope!

Ruggles Station: Stairway to Hell?

Sometimes you miss something that's right under your nose. Or I do, anyway.

I was talking to one of the regular riders on the #715 Franklin train, and she pointed out something that jolted me: there's only one staircase and one elevator for the entire commuter rail platform at Ruggles.

There used to be a second staircase, but it started crumbling about three years ago and the T blocked it off. They locked and chained the upper doors, and put up a section of chain link fence to block the bottom of the stairs.

And then they sat back and let it crumble. It's just been decaying for the last three years. The chain link fence is partially broken in, but the whole staircase is clearly a hazard - it's literally falling apart. Chunks of masonry are falling off of it!

This is one of those stories where a picture would be worth more than a thousand words. So tomorrow I'll bring in my camera and take a photo of it to post here.

I wonder...are there any laws about adequate access to commuter rail platforms? If there's ever an emergency that requires passengers to get off the platform and up to the station quickly, that lone staircase would be quite a bottleneck. Which it is every morning, come to think of it.