No AC-No Lights-Stuck in Tunnels and in Little Tuna Cans
I know "firsthand" how some of these people must have been feeling after a "power failure" of unknown origin stalled numerous Amtrak and other commuter trains in the Northeast Corridor of the East Coast this morning.
The disruption in power resulted in thousands of people having to wait in sweltering heat in the train cars with no light or AC. And as the story below says, some passengers on the one train that was stuck below the "Hudson River" in NYC were escorted off the train and walked a mile along the tracks to the nearest station. That must have been scary.
A few quotes from a few of the passengers on some of these trains:
At about 11:30 a.m., a NJ Transit train pulled into Penn Station after being stuck, about 100 yards from the station, for more than 3 hours.
One passenger, Gerry Zaffarese, 55, of Washingtonville, NY, said that for most of the delay passengers sat in cars that had no lights and no air conditioning.
"It's been an awful day," he said."We no sooner entered the tunnel than even us non-engineers noticed we were coasting, the air conditioning had gone off and something was very wrong," said Jeff Oppenheim, a New York actor and director on his way to Washington D.C.
"The rumor was that we were going to have to crawl out under the train." Joe Piasecki of Washington Crossing, Pa. was among 100 passengers who climbed down out of a stalled train near Elizabeth, N.J. to walk nearly a mile to the nearest station."It's a kind of eerie, end-of-the-world feel," said Piasecki, who boarded the train in Trenton.
"You have these two trains sitting here dead, not moving. You can't see any cars or anything else moving. It's like the world died." He said of the 100 who got off the train, 20 to 30 were walking along the track bed toward the north Elizabeth station. The others were still milling around on the tracks, while many others remained on the train, where air conditioning had failed hours earlier and toilets were backing up.
......Last spring on the way back from California, I was on the "California Zephyr" and we lost power just after leaving Denver, CO. and sat there on the tracks in the middle of nowhere without lights or AC or power of any sort for over two hours. We could not leave the train and people were getting irritable, the toilets started backing up and the smell of all the body heat (and some people's body odor) started to get a little overwhelming. I just spread out across one of the seats in the observation car and napped while trying not to listen to all the people around me bitching about "not ever taking a train again"...ect. At one point I blurted out to a guy that he was lucky he wasn't on a plane when something like this happened!!!"...ha ha.
Oh well, I am sure that with the level of kindness and social skills that New Yorkers and other East Coast human beings possess that everyone just stayed calm cool and collected and tried to help their fellow passengers (the preceding sentence was a joke by the way).
I still plan on making the Amtrak Trains my preferred method of travel this year when I take a few of my vacations. There is nothing sweeter then the views out your window while reading a biook or watching a movie on the laptop and being lulled into a nap by the constant "click click click" of the tracks below the car as it is moving along the tracks.
Read the story as ABC reports it below:
ABC News: Power Restored to Northeast Rail System
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