davidn

Let me tell you about the horrors of yesterday evening.

As usual, I came down to Davis Square station, which was unusually crowded for 6:30. This sometimes happens when there hasn't been a train on for a while, but isn't anything special in itself, and it wasn't long before one came and we all squeezed on.

It wasn't until it took us ten minutes to get to the next station (a short walk down the road) that it emerged that something was dreadfully wrong. We stood paralyzed in a tunnel just before the platform for a while, then the announcer came on and said that they had some traffic problems ahead because of a fire at Park Street, the central station where I change over to another line. This was when I began to get worried, but stayed on the train because of the constant reassurances that we would be moving "momentarily" - this added grammatical torture to the experience as well, but was unfortunately quite accurate because from that point to the next station, we never succeeded in limping more than about a carriage length at a time.

It was then that I got a bit fed up, and decided that if I was going to make it home before Sunday evening, I would have to overcome my fear and hatred of buses (a condition brought on by taking a sleeper-bus to England a few times and being on too many when I used to travel between Dundee and Aberdeen in first and second year of university). So I left the train and went up to the surface, where I waited about twenty minutes for a bus to bother arriving. (Nevertheless, I would later find out that this was a very good choice).

As the bus tried with difficulty to navigate through the traffic (nobody knows how to drive in this city, there are no road signs and everyone is on the wrong side of the road), I had a decent conversation about Doom with the skater dude next to me, who recognized what I was playing on my laptop. Apparently, even though the bus seemed as slow as the train, that was its perfectly normal operational state. With some guidance as to where to get off to be nearest the Green Line, I eventually got to Coolidge Corner to see an entire pilgrimage worth of people stranded there waiting for a train to arrive. At that point it felt best to walk home - another journey that had taken me double the normal time.

But when I looked up the various Boston news communities, it turned out that I was the one of the people that had made a good decision. Later on its journey, when crossing the bridge from Kendall to Charles/MGH over the river, the train had stopped for about forty-five minutes, doors locked, with only the constant reassurances from the driver that they would eventually move. After an hour of this, driven mad by the heat, cramp and her misuse of "momentarily", the passengers formed an uprising against the MBTA oppression, forced the doors open and walked to freedom. (The story behind the link happened in the morning - so it's rather incredible that a repeat of the situation happened hours later).

Now, if Park Street had been a blazing inferno, I could possibly have understood the reason for this complete breakdown. But according to the news sites that I looked at, the gigantic incident at Park Street was a small fire in a bin that a station employee stamped out with his foot. Apparently there was also a bit of smouldering plastic that found its way on to the line, so they had to turn the power off and on again, but this hardly accounts for the delays that they were experiencing last night - something else must have been going on while the MBTA officials were cheerfully saying to the media that service was never affected. Unless Boston is now genuinely this scared of terrorism, light boards, batteries, fire and twigs. We might as well just give up and hide under blankets.