The scene in the Metro-North bathroom Saturday night.
I added one vacated vessel to this rogue’s gallery of empties.
Hint: It wasn’t the Bud Light, the Bud Light tallboy, the Four Loko or the toilet paper.
It was a beer brewed a few miles from my house.
With our elected leaders seeing fit to expand the amount of pay we can deduct for transit expenses, I was poking around the Metro-North site, finding out precisely how much I cough up for my monthly ticket.
Well, that apparently depends on which page I access on the Metro-North site.
According to this one, we Zone 5′ers, including commuters out of Tarrytown, Ossining, Chappaqua and Hawthorne, pay $266 a month.
But I have to say–I like this one better, where the Zone 5 peeps pay a mere $163 a month.
With Metro-North is playing up its 30 year anniversary this month, I can’t help but wonder what year it was where a monthly ticket out of Hawthorne cost just $163.
1998? ’99? Earlier?
The squash Tournament of Champions begins in Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall tomorrow.
Ramy Ashour of Egypt is favored.
This could be the lamest anniversary celebration ever.
Late last week Trainjotting quietly turned six. We honestly just figured this out.
In years past, we made a big deal out of our milestone, even publishing a note from Metro-North that called the site “a marvel of minutia.”
We’ve lost some steam, and for that we are sorry.
We can owe our recent slackerly output to more work, more family commitments (Scouts! Pinewood Derby weigh in tonight! If we don’t make weight, Little G will kill me!), and most damningly, less enthusiasm for the maximilist detailing of the daily dramas on the rails.
We’re not big on New Year’s resolutions. For five years running, we vowed in the dawning days of January to master the one-handed egg-cracking seen most mornings at the deli. Never did it.
More recently, we resolved to master taking money from the ATM without turning off our iPod. Still working on it.
But we will promise to be a better blogger. To serve you, dear riders of the rails, with our Metro-North musings that range from the silly and stupid to the really silly and stupid.
I am forking over 18 bucks to commit to the URL for another year. And dammit, I plan to get my money’s worth.
Speaking of better bloggers, you simply have to check out what Emily at I Ride the Harlem Line is doing to mark the Grand Central Terminal centennial.
It’s awesome.
Her enthusiasm for commuter-related blogging reminds me of a guy I used to know.
Sometimes the high point of your day happens quite early, and everything else is anti-climatic.
For me, it was seeing my neighbor’s young son as I locked up my bike at the train station, then watching him perform Gangnam Style at his dad’s request.
Indeed, all downhill from there.
Here’s a commuter dilemma I’ve wondered about more than once.
You’re on the train home. Your stop is approaching.
The people from your station rise. They put on coats, if it is that time of year. They fold up newspapers and seal up bags.
You see a guy from your stop that you’ve been seeing for years, though custom dictates that you do not say hello. (For a delicious treatise on this bizarre commuter custom, check out what Ted Berg has to say here.) He’s sleeping. Or he’s engrossed in a particularly compelling book.
Either way, he’s making no effort to exit at your stop.
Do you give him the courtesy tap on the shoulder? Keep in mind, you’ve never met him, never spoke to him, perhaps do not care to meet him.
Or do you leave him alone, assuming, well, maybe he had to drop his dog off at the dog-sitter’s and parked at a different station–even if it means the dude pulls an Accidental Tourist and has to cab it back to his home station?
Happened to me yesterday.
I left the dude to keep reading all the way to Pleasantville.
A 3 1/2 mile stretch of rusted track is being reconceived as the “QueensWay.”
Writes the Times:
It has been abandoned for five decades, a railway relic that once served Queens passengers on the old Rockaway Beach branch of the Long Island Rail
Road. For all those years, no one paid much notice to the ghostly
tracks, long overgrown with trees and vines, as they ran silently behind
tidy houses in Rego Park, dipped through ravines in Forest Park and
hovered above big-box stores in Glendale.
That is, until the High Line expanded the possibilities of a public park.
Former NYC parks commish Adrian Benepe is on board with the project.
Here’s another wacky idea for an old train line that runs to Rockaway Beach: Fix it so that people can take the train to the beach.
Of course, if that had happened 35 years ago, Joey Ramone and his faux brothers perhaps never would’ve hitched a ride to Rockaway Beach–and rock music history would forever be altered.
Metro-North has reached 30 years on the rails as of today, notes Theresa Juva-Brown at the Journal News, and the service is vastly improved over what they were offering Westchester riders back in ’83.
“The service was horrible,” recalled Metro-North president Howard Permut, an Ossining resident who has held various titles with Metro-North since its inception. “On-time performance was like 80 percent. The amount of service was 50 to 60 percent of what we have today. It was awful. (The train) was hot in the summer and cold in the winter.”
The price has gone up along with the degree of service. A White Plains commuter paid 88 bucks for a monthly in ’83, reports Juva-Brown, which is $229 now–and $249 as of this March.
The paper was kind enough to quote a certain gimlet-eyed railroad blogger…and even spell “Trainjotting” correctly.
The woman who picked me up and gave me a ride this morning.
First off, thank you.
You didn’t know me, and I didn’t know you. Yet you stopped, rolled down your window (or whatever the verb is for power windows) and generously offered up your passenger seat.
It was at the crazy spot where Rte. 141 and Memorial and the entrance to the Bronx River Parkway all meet. I opted to walk because the forecast called for rain all day, and I have my annual black tie Waldorf wingding this eve, joining the seasonal March of the Penguins, and didn’t fancy riding the bike tonight in a rented tux.
I left late. I was half jogging. You saw this and selflessly offered a hand.
You said you never pick up strange men. I assured you I was not crazy. These are sensitive times; you almost can’t even joke about that stuff, at least right now.
We turned right onto 141. We joked about me being late for the late train, and how I got my workout in already. Seconds later, we caught the light at Cross Street and Broadway. (Isn’t it lame that, six years after moving up here, I still have to check Google Maps to make sure I have the street names correct?)
I did the math in my head: Jump out at the light, and walk the final few hundred yards along Broadway, past the old church and the boneyard, to the back entrance of the station. I suggested this.
It was a bit awkward. After all, you, kind neighbor, made the decision, and potentially a risky one, to offer me a ride. To do me a favor. To put my needs–making the 8:40–ahead of your own well being. You wanted to know that what you were doing was meaningful for me–saved me a tongue lashing from the boss, that sort of thing.
But here I was, jumping out 30 seconds after jumping in, like a guest, invited for dinner, leaving after the bowl of nuts and crudite are put out.
I did appreciate the ride, Woman Who Picked Me Up This Morning. Even more than the ride, which may have been the difference between making and missing my train, and certainly was the difference between me sprinting and me jogging, I appreciate your gesture. Your effort to be a good neighbor, to promote unity, when it is sorely needed–I dug that. So thank you.
Sincerely,
Trainjotting
PS: Sorry about getting mud on your floor mat.
I haven’t plugged my New York Commuter’s Glossary in months, so allow me this indulgence.
If someone you love, or even merely like, rides the rails into our fair city each and every day, or even each week, the book is perfect for them.
I dropped the price, now under $10. The ebook? $2.99.
My old pal Robert Klara, hard at work on a new book about the Cold War, said this about it:
Straight from the agony of the middle seat comes this extremely funny and genuinely insightful lexicon drawn from the unique, socio-psychological experience that is commuting by train. I was a commuter for nearly 10 years and experienced things like “Seatenfreude” in the company of many “Assengers” but never knew what in hell to call it. Thanks, Mike Malone, for illuminating the dark tunnels of commuter ignorance with this extremely clever stuff.
Order now, and you’ll have it in time to stuff into a stocking.
Thank you.
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