Darienite (https://darienite.com/tag/cameron-on-railroads-2022)
It’s been a helluva summer for air travel. Federal Aviation Administration staff shortages, flight cancellations, delays and crowding — combined with air fares soaring higher than the planes themselves. Is this any way to travel? Steve Fainer thinks not. He’s a “train guy” whose passion makes me look like a wannabe.
Airplanes have Wi-Fi. Even Connecticut’s CTfastrak commuter bus system from New Britain to Hartford gives its passengers free Wi-Fi. Commuter railroads across the US offer Wi-Fi, including Boston’s MBTA. Wi-Fi is everywhere — but not on Metro-North. So the Connecticut legislature has just budgeted $23 million to install 5G technology on the railroad’s M8 cars.
I love getting email, especially from frustrated Metro-North commuters. Consider this thoughtful email I received a week ago from a six-day-a-week rider, Scott Mikita, who works on Broadway:
“I am actually on a train into work right now and Googled ‘Metro North conductor claims he can’t enforce mask mandate’ and your article from September 2021 popped up. I take 12 train rides per week and have seen ridership increase since coming back to work in September 2021. I have also noticed that trains are often shorter than before and some conductors reluctant to open empty cars, even on busy, crowded trains. “Just now, I asked the conductor if the mask mandate is still in effect (there is a couple sitting on the train, maskless) and he said yes, but that he ‘couldn’t enforce it.’
It was a huge mistake, one that commuters and planners have regretted for over 60 years. For it was in 1959 that the last electric locomotive pulled a train on the Danbury branch. Yes, that meandering 24 miles of single track railroad connecting South Norwalk and Danbury was once electrified. For 34 years, long before the invention of diesel locomotives, it saw electric trains running “under the wire.”. Why did that change?
In the waning days of World War II, the Americans sent a special unit into Germany to find one man, not to bring him to justice but to eventually put him in charge of the U.S. space program. His name was Werner von Braun. Now I think, whatever the outcome of the Ukraine conflict, a similar effort should be made to rescue Oleksander Pertsovskyi. Not familiar with his work? Well, two million Ukrainians are benefiting from his skills.
As we celebrate Black History month, let’s remember that the path to civil rights began long before the march to Selma. It happened on city buses in 1955 in Montgomery Alabama and for decades before that on railroads across America. In the history of American transportation, there is one crucial intersection between railroads and civil rights: the formation in 1925 of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car porters by A. Phillip Randolph. This was the first predominantly African-American labor union in the US. Pullman Cars
It was in 1859 that George Pullman launched the first deluxe railroad sleeping cars bearing his name.
You think you have a bad commute? Try doing Maclean Sarr’s hour and a half trip each way — in a wheelchair. Unable to walk since contracting cerebral palsy as an infant, the 22-year-old Sarr is now a student at Gateway Community College in New Haven but lives in Westbrook. That means a 28-mile trip each way, in his motorized wheelchair, in a bus, a train and another bus. Sarr lives within “walking distance” of the Westbrook station serving Shore Line East trains, but there are no sidewalks and too much traffic, so the Nine Towns Transit bus is his best option.