Monday, July 13, 2009

Metro-North

[Disclaimer: I'm in a bad mood about this. Maybe it won't be as bad as I think. Or maybe it will be worse.]

I think the administrators at Metro-North need a good, swift kick in the pants. They need to make extensive repairs along the Waterbury branch line. Instead of doing the work at night, when the trains aren't running, they've chosen to simply not run the passenger trains for a full month, starting today until August 14. Instead, they're running buses.

The newspaper has run a couple of stories about this which included the suggestion that there might be an express bus between Waterbury and Bridgeport. I don't know if this is true or not. I'll find out tomorrow morning.

What has me very unhappy right now is the posted bus schedule. My normal train for commuting to NYC leaves Waterbury at 6:40. The replacement bus leaves at 6:25 a.m. and, according to the schedule, makes every stop along the way. No express. The same story applies to the return train at the end of the day.



They're doing the same thing to the Danbury line, but only during Off-Peak hours. I'm going to lose half an hour of my day because Metro-North loves to screw over Waterbury.

I can't wait to see what kind of bus they stick us on.

[Update, the next day:]

I take it all back. I'm still not happy about getting up a little earlier, but Metro-North has definitely put a lot of effort into making this as painless as possible. They had ten or twelve representatives on hand this morning to help out, and there were four coach buses, two of which were Peter Pan buses. In addition to which, they did run an express to Bridgeport. I'm willing to concede the earlier departure time is designed to guarantee we avoid getting stuck in traffic (not a problem when we're on the train!).

I had a little bit of motion sickness from the bus, and my toes turned blue because the a/c on the bus was set to an extremely low temperature, but I did get into NYC half an hour earlier than normal.

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