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Riders braced for the long haul: Red Line continues to crawl
By adamg on Tue, 06/18/2019 - 8:51am
Chris Chazinski reports on his Red Line ride this morning:
Just inching along on the red line today. And when you do get to the next stop, you just sit there for 10 mins. So my normal 15 min commute is looking for like 50 today.
EMS adds it took 35 minutes to get from Ashmont to Andrew.
MBTA officials have yet to provide an estimate on when they expect to have all those destroyed and damaged signal components at JFK/UMass repaired or replaced.
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Comments
It’s sad, isn’t it?
Miserable, hot, bored, frustrated, all because of the incompetence of a broken public institution stuck in a system and society that will never work. And why do it? So you can continue climbing the career ladder doing paperwork whereby you will have adequate capital to one day retire and go traveling where you can have an authentic meal in Tuscany where you will have No Sex and instead go back to the hotel early because you are tired and your back is sore.
You never create anything. You never get any respect from anyone except for a few peers. You start to envy the blue collar folk who build things and have more freedom, who don’t respect you and don’t even know the difference between an investment banking associate and a bank teller. Move way out to the burbs and have kids, or increasingly common, be an aging kid yourself by living childless in the city (micro brews, adult swings, kickball leagues, bands nobody has heard of, trivia nights).
I suspect people will keep doing it because.... what else are they going to do? Adam figured it out. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has broken free.
Good lord this is bleak
You (and everyone giving this a thumbs-up) really need to consider seeing a therapist if this is your real outlook on life.
Just spitballing here
But since this is a bit of a crisis, why doesn't the T create blocks on the line between stations, put staff on the platforms of each station with radios, and let them control the trains by noting when a block is clear. Not the most efficient system, and the trains will most likely not go as quick as they did 2 weeks ago, but a train should be able to get from Ashmont to Andrew in under 35 minutes.
Interesting idea. Maybe they
Interesting idea. Maybe they can dust off some railroad signal engineering textbooks from 130 years ago, when signal men controlled things by hand and maybe with a telephone. The T already has the staff -- look at how many stations have full-time inspectors on the platform.
That is essentially what they
That is essentially what they are doing, but when you are running a "manual block" you also are restricted on your top speed between the blocks. If they let up on procedures and end up having a rear end collision, the public reaction to that would be far worse than the existing slow rides.
Not a bad idea
Except that is a solution to throughput, and they're doing better. (I think the issue last week may have been that they are completely inept in turning trains at Ashmont, where trains have to pull past the platform, and the operator then has to walk back the train, and then it has to pull out, which could easily be solved with "drop back crews" where an operator boards the back end of the train, it pulls past the platform, changes ends, and the operator now in the back gets out, which is how a lot of agencies do things, but I digress.)
Another solution would be to put a second operator in the cab to allow faster operation. Right now the trains are operating at slow speeds, and one of the reasons is so that if something goes wrong with a train not protected by signals it isn't going very fast. I'm not sure how fast trains can go outside of signal protection, but from the runaway train of a couple years ago, it seems to be 25 mph, which should be fast enough to go Ashmont to Andrew in 15 minutes or so.
Too bad Charlie Baker doesn't take the Red Line, he could have figured out a solution just like he solved the traffic coming into the Sumner Tunnel, where, from what I hear, traffic has never been better.