Tag Archives: trains

Found: Limits

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Events, Fail, Living History

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I try to have good sense, but I am sometimes overwhelmed by my intentions. On Saturday, I was supposed to go up to Boston to the Paul Revere House, and I was planning to take the train. It’s an easy trip between the commuter rail and the Orange Line, followed by a short walk. How hard is that?

Too hard, it seems. I’m not sure how it happened, but I missed the commuter train, and made it to Smith and Canal just in time to see the train pulling away from the platform. Regular work day? Forget 11:20, try 11:23. You have a cushion. Weekend? Those trains run right on time, but still about 90 minutes apart, which means missing the train will make you three hours late for a three hour event, and then you are not “really reliable and right on time.” The guys had the car for the day, so it was train or nothing.

I had a period lunch, and planned to take my stool. I had shirts-in-progress packed into a knapsack along with documents about what garments soldiers were issued, the average cost of those garments, as well as a finished blue check shirt typical of those worn by New England men in the last quarter of the 18th century. I’d re-read the The Needles’ Eye, and was prepared to talk about the difference between seamstresses, tailors, mantua makers and milliners.

Take some time to snooze under the sofa– Mr Whiskers

Instead, I went back home and slept most of the afternoon. Mr Whiskers had the right idea, as usual.  You cannot burn the tallow candle at both ends while the farm cat gnaws the middle. I feel bad about missing that train, but I think I’ve learned my limits. At least for this month.

Adventures in Public Transit

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Museums

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The backdrop for Imran Qureshi’s piece

Occasionally, I get a slightly wild idea and actually act upon it. My son probably has the best sense of when this is about to happen, so I no longer tell him my wild ideas plans. Of course, if the MetroNorth train collision hadn’t happened just in front of my Amtrak train, I wouldn’t have had the extra eight-block walk and the two-and-a-half hour line wait for the bus…and then I wouldn’t have ended up leaving the MFA two hours earlier than I wanted to on Tuesday.

Qureshi

Credit: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

It began with the trip to New York: a slightly whimsical, spur-of-the-moment trip to see Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity before it closed, and everything else I could manage, including lunch on the roof. (It is weird to see children, babies, sitting, sobbing, on Imran Qureshi’s bloody chrysanthemum painting. The work itself is beautiful, though a reviewer asked if it is out of place. If you have ever walked past the site of a murder or bar fight and seen the stained pavement, this piece might creep you out. And once upon a time in Providence, I saw the blood-stained pavement near the bus stop whilst taking my dog to a vet…)

So, trip: all good, hop on the 6:42 Acela and get into Penn at 9:42, up to the Met by 10. That leaves all day for exploring, until about 4:15, when I had to beat it for the M1 back to Penn. One unfortunate act of vandalism of a Beaux-Arts railroad station later, we’re chugging along on the 5:43 Regional back up to Providence. We’re not even to New Rochelle when the train stops…and remains stopped. By 7:11 I’d figured out that there would be no trains up, and had purchased a bus ticket online thanks to my iPad with a rapidly depleting charge. By 8:00, we were back at Penn and I was fast-walking up to 40th Street where I got in line, got the ticket printed, and then trotted downstairs to get into another line: the line of no movement.

Eventually, a bus appeared. And then another bus appeared. The first bus left for a town in Pennsylvania that sounded like “West Coastville” but was probably Coatesville. A third bus appeared: rumor spread that this was the bus from Providence.

“Where have you been?” we interrogated the disembarked. “What took so long?”
“Bumper to bumper traffic,” someone said. And the line of no movement groaned.

No one dared move out of line if they did not have a blood relative to hold their place. Scouts from family groups were sent out to discover which gate had a bus, and intrepid men with girlfriends to hold their place went forth to count the line. I was in the low 40s, thank you, with about 60 people stretching behind my spot. Agitation behind me rose as line-cutting appeared to happen. Scenes from Lord of the Flies came to mind as I heard a mild wheeze from a fellow-stander. Cell phones began to die.

A typical Green Chariot, in Kennedy Plaza.

But, at last, 75 minutes after the alleged 9:30 PM departure, we were able to board the bus. I found a seat in nearly the last row, but it was a seat. At 10:56, I called home to report that we did in fact have forward movement, and were now leaving the PABT…for a short tour of Harlem. Eventually, we were on the highway (I love the quaintness of the sign for New England) and by 3:15 AM I was home, 22 and a half hours after I’d gotten up to start my day.

Now, just because I wrote the story in this tone doesn’t mean I don’t think that the people injured in MetroNorth accident, and inconvenienced in their commute since Friday, have had a far worse time than I did—I do. I’m both stunned and pleased with how quickly train service has been restored, and I have real sympathy for the anxiety of people who take the train to work every day, thanks to my husband’s daily 100-mile-roundtrip on the MBTA. Which, in a fitting moment of transit ironyy, found him delayed last night behind a broken-down Amtrak train, finally headed south…

Remembrance of Transit Past

02 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in History, Museums

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Yesterday was staff day at work.  We went, by donated careening bus ride, to the Essex Steam Train & Riverboat. We did not get a ride in a steam-powered seaplane, but the combination of bus, train and boat was pretty entertaining. More sitting than most of us care for; one member of our party said, “This is an old person’s tour–it’s all sitting.” She’s practically a professional shopper, so she’s good on her feet in fairly high heels.

But what struck me, standing by the platform at the station is Essex, was that we were in a museum of transport past, and that it was somehow very strange to be in a place that historicized a means of getting around that many people still use every day. Except for the 6 tons of coal part, my husband takes the train to Boston every day, and has for more than 10 years. And when we first moved back East, I rode the train, too. In the dark ages of grad school, I commuted by rail. The last year at RISD, I had a job in Natick, MA, teaching at a boarding school as a visiting artist, and the question was, how to get there?

The answer was easy, the MBTA of course. I took the commuter rail to Back Bay or South Station, caught the Framingham line out to Natick and walked up the hill from the station to school. Sometimes I’d get there early enough for lunch, and pack extra grilled cheese sandwiches into my tool bag.

I liked the train commute and some of my favorite memories of pulling into Providence are from that year. The conductors were more lax, then, and would let me ride in the vestibule with them while the car door was open, watching the sunset over the west side of town. This was pre-Home Depot and Providence Place Mall and the 6-10 connector, pre-development along Royal Little Drive, pre-development in Pawtucket, so the view was a lot better. The Citizens Bank building was still under construction, it was just a steel frame that the sun would shine through at the end of the day.

All through school, I took the train to New York and then to Philly, enjoying the view of the CT coastline, its loneliness and isolation, the kind of romantic juxtaposition of the marshes and wetlands with the harsh rocks and cold grey skies of the coast. There was a little house the train passed, and every time I saw it I would think, “Someday I’d like to live in that house.”

That never happened, but when I got the job in RI, and we moved east from St. Louis, my father was working in Boston and New York, but living in Noank, CT,  just down the road from the little house. Providence was 45 minutes away by car, but Mr S and the Young Mr (then known as the Monkey) needed the car to get anywhere outside of Noank. The grocery wasn’t very big there and they needed to be able to get into Groton and Mystic, so how was I to get to work? On the train.

I took Amtrak from New London to Providence, and the train would get in around 9:10 (supposedly) and end up back in New London around 6. There were schedule changes, and the bridge at Old Saybrook tended to freeze, and there were coworkers who  didn’t get me to the station on time, and evenings spent at the RISD Library on the laptop waiting for the next train. It worked out, though, since I was writing a book at the time.

The monthly pass that was definitely cheaper than driving, and I walked around Providence when I needed anything. The conductors all knew me, and were very kind. Here’s a tip: be nice to the conductors, and you can ride free if you forget your pass. I’ve even gotten free trips to Boston when they were on duty. The view from the window was pretty much the same, though now there were McMansions and condos in Stonington. The wetlands were still there, and the coves, the nesting raptors and the shore birds. One morning I even saw a harbor seal swimming in a cove, whiskers poking up above the surface. That is definitely the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on a commute.

And then there was a museum to set all that in the past, as if to say that way of life is over. The train we were on was truly steam-powered, and that is a thing of the past. The car was from 1914, with seats that switched direction, though I remember riding on seats like that either on the MBTA back in the dawn of time, or else in Chicago.

What will I do next? Why, make a 1914-1919 traveling costume and go back to Essex to ride the train again, of course. Might as well be a museum exhibit if you’re going to travel temporally.