Leave it to the Long Island Railroad and Mother Nature — or, rather, the LIRR’s complete inability to cope with any little thing Mother Nature throws at it — to take what was an ordinary, even boring day and turn it into something special.
It rained this afternoon. Weather in New York has been weird lately, making me all the more nostalgic for the fall weather I experienced in Alberta. The very early fall weather, warm by local standards, but it’s just about October and we’re still walking around in short sleeves here in New York. We had a week when I wasn’t uncomfortable wearing a long-sleeve shirt, maybe even a light jacket early in the morning or late at night. But that changed, and it’s been almost as humid as it was a month ago. We’ve had heavy fog, and today, I’m still running the air conditioner.
So it rained, a lot, but not for long, and not so much that you would expect it to cause any issues with the evening commute. It had stopped altogether by the time I actually left the office at 5 PM.
Oh, but you say, you’re not taking into account lightning. You don’t need a lot of rain for lightning. Well I just need the LIRR to take lightning into account…but apparently that’s asking too much. Because you’re right, it was lightning that screwed tonight’s commute.
I got to Penn Station, same as usual, to find it particularly crowded — especially considering that the trains had been less crowded this morning, thanks possibly to a number of people staying home for Rosh Hashanah. It quickly became apparent that no trains were leaving, except maybe to Port Washington, thanks to signal trouble between Manhattan and Jamaica Station in Queens. (The Port Washington line doesn’t go through Jamaica and so wasn’t affected.) But I wasn’t taking an over-crowded train to Port Washington, which, without traffic, is easily a half hour’s drive from home.
I eventually squeezed my way through to the 8th Avenue subway, after the transit cops started shutting the gates and blocking other entrances/exits. And I took a very long subway to Jamaica, where I managed to get onto a very crowded train headed to my station — and only just managed to squeeze myself off when we reached that station.
All told, it only took about an extra hour for me to reach my destination, but it was a long evening that involved way too much pushing through crowds and way too much of the Long Island Railroad being its usual self. (This isn’t exactly the first time this has happened. Or even the first time it’s happened recently.) Word is, they’ve since fixed the situation, manually resetting all the affected signals and re-opening Penn Station, so hopefully tomorrow morning’s commute will be nothing special.
But I dunno, with the weather we’ve been having… We could go right from summer into winter’s heavy snow. And the LIRR has proven they’re none too good at dealing with snow.
