The Cellar - View Single Post

glatt · 02-13-2010, 07:33 AM

Thanks for that info tw. I hadn't gotten around to looking up further reports about why that train derailed.

I rode metro yesterday, and it was really bizarre what they were doing. They were running trains every 25 minutes, instead of every 5 minutes, due to some problem with the snow, so they only had a 5th of their normal capacity. There were dark trains parked in a couple of the stations underground, so they were switching the live, passenger carrying, trains around the dead ones. When I arrived at my normal station in the suburbs to begin my commute, they had cones set up to force all passengers to the tracks that are normally outbound. So when the crowded train came 25 minutes later, it was coming from the "wrong" direction for that track.

The frustrating thing was that they could have been running 8 car trains so that more people would fit on each one, but the trains were only 6 car trains.

I left work 2 hours early to beat the inevitable horror show that was obviously coming at the end of the day, and got home fine, but the paper this morning has front page news of the horrible evening commute. The federal workers who went in at staggered times on a delayed opening in the morning all left at exactly the same time at the end of the day and gridlocked the city and overwhelmed the Metro.

02-13-2010, 07:33 AM	#74
glatt ™ Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Arlington, VA Posts: 27,717	Thanks for that info tw. I hadn't gotten around to looking up further reports about why that train derailed. I rode metro yesterday, and it was really bizarre what they were doing. They were running trains every 25 minutes, instead of every 5 minutes, due to some problem with the snow, so they only had a 5th of their normal capacity. There were dark trains parked in a couple of the stations underground, so they were switching the live, passenger carrying, trains around the dead ones. When I arrived at my normal station in the suburbs to begin my commute, they had cones set up to force all passengers to the tracks that are normally outbound. So when the crowded train came 25 minutes later, it was coming from the "wrong" direction for that track. The frustrating thing was that they could have been running 8 car trains so that more people would fit on each one, but the trains were only 6 car trains. I left work 2 hours early to beat the inevitable horror show that was obviously coming at the end of the day, and got home fine, but the paper this morning has front page news of the horrible evening commute. The federal workers who went in at staggered times on a delayed opening in the morning all left at exactly the same time at the end of the day and gridlocked the city and overwhelmed the Metro.