“Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!”
Walt Whitman sang in praise of the railroad. When he published those lines in
1876, the vast network that connected West to East was being widely hailed as
the muscular marvel of the industrial age. It sped the bounty of farms and
factories across the land, spawned hundreds of towns and cities along its
routes, pioneered in marketing and managerial organization, and employed a huge
and growing labor force. The men who created and ran the transcontinentals —
Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Jay Gould, Mark Hopkins, Charles Francis
Adams Jr., among others — were as famous in their era as such high-tech moguls
as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are today. Their entrepreneurial daring did much to
transform the United States into a prosperous, developed nation.
Richard White will have none of it. “Transcontinental railroads,” he asserts in
“Railroaded,” “were a Gilded Age extravagance that rent holes in the political,
social and environmental fabric of the nation, creating railroads as mismanaged
and corrupt as they were long.” This is a bold indictment, but White supports it
convincingly with lavish detail and prose that swivels easily from denunciation
to irony.
To gain an edge on their corporate rivals, railroad owners built expensive lines
into drought-prone areas that had few settlers and little prospect of attracting
more. To finance their risky endeavors, they routinely bribed politicians and
borrowed money they could not pay back — while publishing mendacious financial
reports. To insure friendly coverage, railroad executives bankrolled local
newspapers and arranged to kill or delay the publication of stories that might
damage their interests. At the helm of a dangerous industry where workplace
accidents were common, they resisted installing air brakes and other devices
that would have sharply reduced the toll of maimings and deaths. “The Northern
Pacific,” White says, “banned unnecessary whistle blowing on the Sabbath and
profane language any day, but it slaughtered workers day in and day out.”
A distinguished historian of the West who teaches at Stanford, White draws some
of his most damning evidence from the private papers of the corporate moguls
themselves. Away from their publicists, they come across as men whose characters
were as flawed — and as captivating — as their industry. Collis P. Huntington of
the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific lines had the soul of a miser. In 1890,
a train pulling his private car hit a young hotel worker as she walked along the
tracks in rural Missouri. Huntington initially offered to pay for her medical
care. But she died after a botched amputation. And when the doctors and
undertaker submitted their bills, he abruptly changed his mind. The millionaire
grumbled that he “could not possibly protect [him]self from swindle so long as
[he] manifested a willingness to show substantial sympathy.” In total, the
expenses came to $622. “Huntington would not have looked twice if these had been
costs of lobbying,” White observes.
In contrast, Charles Francis Adams Jr., the head of the Union Pacific, regarded
himself as a genteel intellectual. The grandson and great-grandson of presidents
was merely dabbling, temporarily, in the biggest industry in the land, which he
vowed to reform. Adams scorned the venality of his fellow railroad bosses. “Our
method of doing business is founded upon lying, cheating and stealing — all bad
things,” he remarked. But such high-mindedness did not prevent Adams from
playing the game as ruthlessly as his competitors, albeit not as effectively.
When the Union Pacific neared bankruptcy in 1890, Adams had to resign his post.
On his way out, he ridiculed the looks and clothes of Jay Gould, his more
cunning successor.
White seems to take particular pleasure in belittling the image of the man who
founded the well-endowed university that currently employs him. Californians
liked Leland Stanford well enough to elect him governor. Later, the State
Legislature graced him with a seat in the United States Senate. But Stanford’s
partners in the railroad business considered him to be a lazy and incompetent
fool. “He could do it,” Mark Hopkins wrote about some corporate task, “but not
without more mental effort than is agreeable to him.” Stanford, Collis
Huntington added, “has never made any money, but has had a good deal made for
him and knows no more of its value when he gets it than he does of the way in
which it was obtained.”
White’s scathing narrative is often reminiscent of older histories and novels
about the Gilded Age that pit clever, if immoral, “robber barons” against a
public that grew increasingly alarmed about the extent of their power and
ill-gotten wealth. “The Octopus,” Frank Norris’s 1901 novel about the Southern
Pacific, is a classic example.
But White calls Huntington and his ilk “men in octopus suits.” He views them as
19th-century equivalents of the profit-mad, short-sighted financiers who
recently undermined economies on both sides of the Atlantic. Both
transcontinental railroad managers then and the Wall Street bankers in our time
ran “highly leveraged operations” that “depended on continued borrowing to meet
their obligations.” Both groups made it rich because they had powerful enablers
in Washington. In the 1870s and 1890s, when panicked investors dumped the
heavily watered stock in their railroad portfolios, the market collapsed, and
long depressions ensued. We seem to have escaped the same fate — with an assist
from “socialist” government bailouts and stimuli.
Federal largess was hardly absent during the Gilded Age. True, the government
was not in the habit of rescuing mismanaged corporations nor, for that matter,
of offering aid to ordinary Americans who lost jobs and homes when the economy
collapsed. Grover Cleveland, the Democrat who sat in the White House during the
depression of the 1890s, intoned, “Though the people support the government, the
government should not support the people.” Yet, in 1894, Cleveland’s attorney
general, Richard Olney, rushed to court to bust a national strike by railroad
workers who were expressing solidarity with a walkout by employees of the
Pullman sleeping car company. With a federal injunction in hand, Cleveland
ordered thousands of American troops to break the strike and arrest its leaders.
At the time, the attorney general was on the payroll of at least one major
railroad company.
At the end of his powerful book, crowded with telling details and shrewd
observations about nearly every aspect of the world the railroad bosses made,
White floats a counterfactual balloon: what if the steel lines that spanned the
continent had been “built as demand required” instead of as part of a
competitive dash that caused as much waste and hardship as progress? Slower,
more rational development would have lessened the damage to the environment,
given Native Americans a chance to adapt to conquest and perhaps saved thousands
of lives. White advises, “We need to think about what did not happen in order to
think historically.”
Such an alternative past would probably require a different country. The history
of American capitalism is stuffed with tales of industries that overbuilt and
overpromised and left bankruptcies and distressed ecosystems in their wake: gold
and silver mining, oil drilling and nuclear power, to name a few. The railroad
barons wielded more power than other businessmen in the Gilded Age. But their
behavior revealed a trait they shared with many of their fellow citizens: too
much was never enough.
Michael Kazin’s latest book,
“American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation,”
The Obama
administration, whose efforts to bring high-speed rail to the United States were
sidetracked by Republican governors in a couple of states, pressed ahead with
its vision of building a national rail network on Tuesday when it called for
spending $53 billion on passenger trains and high-speed rail projects over the
next six years.
The proposal, made by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at 30th Street Station
in Philadelphia, would move the country closer to the president’s goal of making
high-speed rail accessible to 80 percent of Americans within 25 years.
But it comes as President Obama’s efforts to bring bullet trains to America have
gone from the “Yes We Can” optimism of his campaign slogan to the less certain
“I think I can, I think I can” of a certain storybook train engine. Newly
elected Republicans governors have halted new rail projects, and a new
Republican majority in the House has questioned the administration’s rail
strategy.
Many rail proponents cheered the proposal, especially the idea of making rail a
regular part of the nation’s transportation program so that long-term projects
could be planned without uncertainty over whether money would be available
later.
Mr. Biden cast it as an investment in the future. “As a longtime Amtrak rider
and advocate,” he said, “I understand the need to invest in a modern rail system
that will help connect communities, reduce congestion and create quality,
skilled manufacturing jobs that cannot be outsourced.”
But Republicans were wary. They have questioned the projects the administration
selected for the $10.5 billion in rail money that has been approved so far,
noting that much of it was spread around to conventional train service and
questioning the suitability of the two true high-speed projects that are
included: a relatively short 84-mile line in Florida connecting Tampa and
Orlando, and a stretch along the California Central Valley that would eventually
be part of a line from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Representative John L. Mica, Republican of Florida and chairman of the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, expressed “extreme reservations”
about the proposal. “This is like giving Bernie Madoff another chance at
handling your investment portfolio,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Mica favors high-speed rail but would prefer to direct the money to the
corridor that links Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. “Rather than
focusing on the Northeast Corridor, the most congested corridor in the nation
and the only corridor owned by the federal government, the administration
continues to squander limited taxpayer dollars on marginal projects,” he said.
WASHINGTON — A day after the worst Metro subway train accident in the history
of the city’s system, emergency officials continued to comb through the
wreckage, searching for additional victims and indications as to what could have
caused the crash, officials said.
By Tuesday morning, seven people were confirmed killed and 76 wounded, Mayor
Adrian M. Fenty said at a news conference. City officials, speaking on
background to reporters, had earlier Tuesday put the death toll at nine. Two of
the wounded were in critical condition, and there may still be other bodies
entombed in the wreckage, Mr. Fenty said.
“Our first thoughts and efforts are with the families and friends of the
victims,” he said.
Investigators were still treating the accident scene as a rescue operation,
bringing in a crane and other heavy equipment, emergency officials said. Cadaver
dogs and search and rescue dogs were being used in the hunt for any additional
survivors or fatalities, both on the track and in the surrounding wooded area.
Two minor firefighter injuries were reported.
In the accident, one train on the system’s heavily used Red Line rear-ended a
stopped train at considerable speed at about 5 p.m. between the Takoma and Fort
Totten stations, leaving the rear train atop the forward train in a mangled
cluster of metal and glass. The driver of the rear train, Jeanice McMillan, 42,
was among those killed, officials said.
Initial signs pointed to a mixture of technical failures and possible driver
error.
On Tuesday, National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman said that
the agency had raised concerns about the crash-readiness of the older trains
used by the city. The striking train was one of these older trains — Metro’s
1000 series.
The agency had in the past several years recommended that the city’s older
trains be retrofitted with greater safety devices or that they be phased out.
The officials also recommended that all of the older trains be fitted with
“event recorders.” Those recommendations were not addressed, she said.
To prevent trains from colliding, Metro designed a computerized system that
controls speed and braking. If trains get too close to each other, the computers
are supposed to automatically apply the brakes.
“We need to see if that system actually what was being used at the time and if
there were any faults,” Ms. Hersman said. “We’re going to be looking at the
tracks, at the signal system and at the train operation to understand what
happened.”
The investigation will include a “sight distance test” to judge whether the
operator could see the train in front of her, as well an effort to determine how
fast the moving train was going. Ms. McMillan had been a train operator since
2007, officials said.
Nine data recorders were being carried by the train that was struck, which was
made of newer 3000 and 5000-series train cars. All are expected to be recovered
and analyzed. The Safety Board had recommended that all older cars also be
fitted with data recorders, and that recommendation was also not addressed, Ms.
Hersman said.
Cathy Lanier, the city’s police chief, said that officials were in the process
of identifying the dead and that family notifications would begin later Tuesday.
Metro officials warned that they were running limited service on the Red Line
and advised commuters to find another way to work.
In a statement, President Obama said: “Michelle and I were saddened by the
terrible accident in Northeast Washington, D.C., today. Our thoughts and prayers
go out to the families and friends affected by this tragedy. I want to thank the
brave first responders who arrived immediately to save lives.”
The general manager of the Metro system, John B. Catoe Jr., said Monday, that
the crash occurred when one train headed into the center of the city stopped
near a platform and was waiting for permission to proceed. The second train came
from behind and hit it, he said.
Between the Takoma and Fort Totten stations where the crash occurred, there is a
long stretch of track, meaning trains often reach high speeds.
“It was a huge impact,” said Maya Maroto, 31, of Burtonsville, Md., who was in
the third car of the moving train as she headed into the city to see a movie.
“Our first inclination was that we hit another train or car.”
An elderly woman sitting near them flew out of her seat and landed sprawled on
the floor.
Ms. Maroto said she did not realize the seriousness of the accident until she
looked out the door and saw the front of her train wedged on top of the other
one. Minutes later she looked again and saw a body on the tracks.
Passengers said about 15 minutes passed before officials showed up or any
announcements were made.
“It was kind of scary that no one was there,” said Allison Miner, 49, a
nutritionist from Silver Spring, Md., who was in the same car as Ms. Maroto.
Suzanne Motta, who was riding in the fourth car of the moving train, said,
“Anybody standing up got knocked down.”
“A gentleman came in carrying a girl with a laceration on her foot,” Ms. Motta
added. “He had a laceration on his head. Everybody was pretty shook up.”
Jervis Bryant, 39, who lives about two blocks from the crash site, arrived at
the scene soon after he heard a loud boom. He said he saw people inside the
bottom train car. “It was a scene I never thought I’d see,” he said.
After the accident, one subway car sat fully on top of a car from the other
train. The car on top had part of its floor sheared off, and the wreckage was a
jumble of twisted metal. Seats from the smashed cars had spilled onto the
tracks.
Several passengers were carried off on stretchers, and rescue crews used ladders
and heavy equipment to cut into the wreckage and reach passengers stuck inside.
Helicopters buzzed overhead. The police scrambled to coordinate traffic,
onlookers and the rescue workers.
Emergency medical personnel set up a triage site at the nearby Jarboe Printing
Company. Rescue officials said about 75 passengers were treated for injuries. At
least three people were seriously injured and the rest had only minor injuries.
Numerous people walked away from the crash site wearing bandages, slings and in
at least one case, a neck brace.
Much of the Metrorail system, which opened in 1976, runs below ground. Both
trains involved in the accident were above ground.
“This is an aging system and one that needs to be looked at very closely,” said
Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety
Board.
The accident was the second involving passenger fatalities in the system. In
1982, three people died after a train derailed between the Federal Triangle and
Smithsonian stations.
September
14, 2008
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
and MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES
— An engineer who ran a red signal here and crashed head-on into a freight train
likely caused the nation’s deadliest commuter train wreck in nearly four
decades, a spokeswoman for the rail line said Saturday.
The death toll rose to at least 25 from the collision on Friday of the
northbound Metrolink train carrying about 225 passengers and the freight train
in Chatsworth, a mostly residential district in the northwest San Fernando
Valley, officials said. The number of dead may rise, they said, because of the
135 people injured, 40 were in critical condition.
The federal investigation into the crash had just begun, but a rail line
spokeswoman, Denise Tyrrell said, “Our preliminary investigation shows it was a
Metrolink engineer that failed to stop at a red signal and was the probable
cause of the accident.” She acknowledged that it was unusual for the agency to
announce findings before a federal team investigates.
The crash was the deadliest commuter train accident in the nation since 1972,
when 45 people died in Chicago, and the deadliest train crash of any kind since
the 1993 Amtrak crash in Mobile, Ala., in which 47 people died.
At the crash site, firefighters and other rescue workers toiled nonstop
Saturday, sifting through and searching for bodies under tons of twisted metal,
shattered glass, charred seats and engine parts.
The engineer was the only one of five train workers — three on the freight train
and two on the commuter railroad — to die in the crash, Ms. Tyrrell said. She
said the engineer, whom she did not identify, worked for an Amtrak subcontractor
that had been used by Metrolink since 1998.
Ms. Tyrrell said her agency’s preliminary findings determined that the signal on
the track was working properly, and that both trains appeared to be traveling
about 40 miles per hour. The conductor of the train, who gives the commands to
the engineer, was being interviewed by law enforcement officials, she said.
Metrolink disclosed its findings so quickly, she said, because officials of the
rail line, “want to remain on honorable grounds with the community.”
“One way to do that is to be honest and forthright from the beginning,” she
said, adding, “We don’t come to this conclusion lightly.”
National Transportation Safety Board officials were far less conclusive. A
safety board member, Kitty Higgins, said that while the agency could “absolutely
not rule out” human error, it would examine track signals, equipment and many
other factors. Three data recorders taken from the two trains, as well as a
video recorder from the freight train, would be analyzed, she said.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, who arrived at the scene midafternoon,
said, “The investigation, of course, continues on.”
At a news conference, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles said the last
of the dead had just been pulled from the wreckage of the freight train’s 11
boxcars and the three Metrolink cars, which had been traveling from downtown to
the city’s northern suburbs. The mayor quoted a firefighter who he said had told
him: “It was very, very difficult. It was like peeling an onion, to find all the
victims.”
Nearby, the Los Angeles County coroner set up a large tan air-conditioned tent
in the grassy area between the wreck and Chatsworth Hills Academy.
Many passengers described how their quiet commute had been dotted with chatter
about the coming weekend until it was punctured by instant terror and carnage
shortly before 4:30 p.m. Friday.
Passengers flew into one another’s laps; nearly severed limbs became tangled
together, and blood spilled along the cars’ aisles. In some cases, the living
were trapped beneath the bodies of the dead.
The first sound was “a huge explosion,” said Greg Tevis, 59, who regularly rides
the train from his downtown law office.
“People who had their legs under the seats got broken legs,” Mr. Tevis said.
“People were moaning; you had to get them off the train. One lady was trapped
under a seat, and we asked her if she wanted us to pull her out, because we
didn’t know whether her spinal cord was hurt. She said to take her out.”
In the minutes before the first firefighters arrived Friday, passengers who were
able began to drag out the injured, and neighbors ran to the scene to help.
“People were standing around like zombies,” Mr. Tevis said. “You had to get them
off the train. Some guy was coming down the aisle screaming that the train was
on fire and we were all going to die.”
The impact of the crash was so violent that the Metrolink engine was shoved back
into a passenger car, which collapsed on its side. The freight train cars
essentially collapsed like an accordion, and the other Metrolink cars were
derailed.
At the news conference Saturday, a visibly choked up Los Angeles deputy fire
chief, Mario Rueda, described the horrific task of trying gingerly to pull apart
tons of steel with the dead visible in the cars.
The 40 critically injured victims was “a very high number, much higher than we
normally encounter,” Chief Rueda said. “It has been very, very difficult work.”
Among the dead, officials confirmed, was a police officer, Spree Desha, 35. When
her identity was learned, all officers on the scene formed lines, stood at
attention and saluted in silence as her body, covered in a white sheet, was
lifted down a ladder and placed with 10 other victims a short distance from the
tracks.
Families, many praying that their loved ones would be found alive, waited
frantically through the night at hospitals and at nearby Chatsworth High School,
where a triage center was set up. Mr. Villaraigosa said 135 people had been
treated, including 81 who had gone to roughly a dozen hospitals. “Words can’t
explain or in any way console those who have lost loved ones,” he said.
Red Cross volunteers took the names and phone numbers of family members and the
names of those they believed to have been on the train. A man who appeared to be
in his 20s sat for a half hour with his head in his hands, not moving. A woman
with gray hair and a cane stared into the distance and covered her mouth.
Stephanie Greasby, 57, sat on a wooden bench outside and waited for word from
her brother. “I decided to get in the car and find my brother,” she said. “He’s
my baby brother.”
Penny Tunney, who was in the second Metrolink car, called another passenger’s
family with a cellphone she found in the wreckage. Her fellow passenger’s
nephew, R. J. Key 29, raced to the emergency room entrance of Providence Holy
Cross Medical Center, in Mission Hills, where 14 of the more severely injured
were taken. He found his aunt in a triage center, with fairly minor injuries,
and because he had been trained as a lifeguard, was put immediately to work
aiding the injured.
Dr. Thomas Waskiewicz, an emergency room doctor who spoke with the news media in
the driveway of the hospital, about 11 miles west of the crash site, said 16
passengers between ages 17 and 82 were tended to, five of them in critical
condition. Amal K. Obaid, a surgeon who tended to many victims, said: “They have
head injuries, multiple facial fractures, chest trauma, collapsed lungs, rib
fractures, pelvic fractures, leg and arm fractures, cuts in the skin and soft
tissue. Some have blood in the brain.”
Late Saturday, there were widespread news reports in Los Angeles that the
engineer might have been sending text messages within minutes of the crash.
At a news conference, Ms. Higgins, of the transportation safety board, said the
reports would be investigated, but she urged caution. She noted that she had
been involved in the investigation of a commuter train crash in Boston in May in
which rumors that the driver had been using a cellphone were unfounded.
The crash on Friday comes on the heels of the legal conclusion of what had been
the deadliest crash in the history of Metrolink, the regional rail service for
Southern California. That accident occurred in 2005 near Glendale, where 11
people were killed and nearly 200 injured when a Los Angeles man abandoned his
Jeep on railroad tracks, resulting in a crash involving three trains.
The man, Juan M. Alvarez, said he had planned to commit suicide but changed his
mind and tried to move the Jeep before it was struck by the train. He was
charged with 11 counts of murder and convicted last June.
December
30, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER
NEW ORLEANS
— Like the rolling tide to seacoast residents, the low rumbling of the streetcar
is a nearly internal sound for citizens here, its absence since Hurricane
Katrina a painful reminder of civic ill health.
The return in recent weeks of the distinctly urban noise of grinding wheels and
brakes to St. Charles Avenue, with the near completion of post-hurricane
repairs, has been an occasion for joy and not because, as boosters would have
it, one more tourism feather has been added to the city’s cap.
The St. Charles streetcar line is that most valued local commodity, an unbroken
link to the past: the same green tin boxes rocking at the same slow speed down
the same tree-shaded avenue, unchanged since the early 1920s. Only a week ago, a
crucial part of the St. Charles line, from Napoleon Avenue to Carrollton Avenue,
was restored; other less damaged but less historic lines, along the Mississippi
River and Canal Street, have operated for months.
But it is the line that connects Uptown to downtown and the French Quarter, via
St. Charles and Carondelet Street, that is the city’s living, though wayward,
artery. The satisfaction is huge.
“It’s all very, very much the way it’s been, for a very long time,” said Robert
Michiels, a shipbuilding engineer who paid $1.25 to ride it the other day, just
for the pleasure of riding it again, down the avenue.
The streetcar has represented something else besides the connections through
time and space: the city’s living room, a privileged spot for tentative social
encounters across lines of race, class and nationality, in a place not otherwise
given to them. Thanks to an accelerated repair schedule, that meeting place,
absent since the hurricane, is back.
But that raises a question: will there still be people for it in a city missing
much of its population? Less than a quarter of prestorm riders are using the
transit system, buses included. On a recent morning, tourists in town for a
football game packed the streetcar going Uptown. But going downtown, in the
direction of the jobs, the old wooden benches were sparsely filled: a
maintenance man here, a construction worker there, a housewife or two and the
odd professional.
Before the storm, the St. Charles streetcar was at least an image of the social
ideal. Uptown lawyers in seersucker sat by weary-looking housekeepers going to
the downtown hotels. Noisy schoolchildren jostled for space with tourists from
France, Rome and Australia wondering about the solemn fellow on the column at
Lee Circle. (That would be Robert E. Lee.) Prim suburbanites visiting from
Nashville and Atlanta, and encountering public transportation for the first
time, smiled nervously past muttering bums. No other city in the South
entertained such a mix.
In the worn wooden interior, bathed in the smell of sulfur and the soothing
racket of clanging machinery, the fractures in the stratified city melted,
slightly. And what would be deficiencies in other places — improbable premodern
slowness, the occasional surly conductor, unexplained lengthy halts between
stops — were virtues. The conductor sang out, ingeniously mispronounced, the
names of the Greek muses that double as street names here: MEL-Po-MEEN!
(Melpomene) TER-Chicoree!(Terpsichore) You were getting somewhere, slowly.
Complicated reading could be accomplished.
Excellent, as a rider named Cherry Gardon put it the other day, “if you’re not
in a rush to get to work” — a widely held ethic.
Now, the St. Charles line has about half its daily prestorm ridership of 10,000,
transit officials say. It remains distinctly, though recognizably, a shadow of
its former self.
Still, for those who have come back, the memory of the old social model remains
powerful. “The streetcar is not just something convenient,” said Manuel
García-Castellón, riding it recently to his job as a professor of romance
languages at the University of New Orleans.
He struggled to explain why something so irrational could also be so
indispensable. “Sometimes, I think I’m in the salotto of my house,” he said,
using the Italian word for parlor.
In July and August, the streetcar effects a miracle: benign contact with the
superheated New Orleans air. All the windows come down, the sweet, thick air
rushes in, and you are in a truce with the beast of the South Louisiana summer.
The streetcar’s reconquest of St. Charles Avenue after Hurricane Katrina has
been fitful. The storm sent the avenue’s old oak trees crashing down on the
dense network of overhead electric lines that power the cars, destroying nearly
13.5 miles’ worth. These had to be painstakingly rebuilt; one section on
Carrollton of just over a mile, between St. Charles and Claiborne Avenues,
remains out.
About eight of the 1923-24 cars are operating along the line, compared with 15
to 18 before the storm. “Our ridership base — many, many of those people — are
not back in the city,” said Rosalind Blanco Cook, a spokeswoman for the transit
agency, who added that officials were nonetheless pleased at the turnout on the
St. Charles line.
Like other elements that have struggled to come back, this one — in the telling
of the riders, at least — has an intimate connection with the biographies of
everyone who is asked about it.
“Me, personally, I been taking it all my life,” said Derek Batiste, who was
going to his job at Wendy’s. “I took it to school, that’s how long I been taking
it. Not just for tourists, no. The streetcar, it’s like part of my family.” A
computer technician, Samps Taylor, savoring his ride, said, “It brings it back
to where you were.”
In other places, citizens move on, leaving the historic artifacts people here
believe make up the urban fabric. The ties are personal. Past proposals to build
new cars for the line have been vehemently rejected.
“Whole lot of history,” said Henry Carter, riding the streetcar to a
construction job. “I been catching this streetcar since ’69. Been catching it a
long time.”
September 10, 2007
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
On Sept. 10, 1932, one minute after midnight, a 7-year-old boy named Billy
Reilly dropped a nickel into a turnstile and boarded an A train at 42nd Street.
It was a southbound express, and it was Billy’s first ride on an A.
It was the city’s first ride, too — 171,267 passengers rode it that September
day in 1932, its first day of operation. The line, then called the Eighth Avenue
subway, spanned only 12 miles and 28 stations, from the top of Manhattan to the
bottom.
Some 75 years later, the A line stretches farther than it did back then,
literally and culturally.
Over the years, the A line has become less of a train and more of an icon, a
symbol of the nearly 500,000 varied and eclectic New Yorkers and others it
carries through the city daily. The A line is certainly not the oldest run in
New York’s subway system, nor has it ever been the smoothest-running, the most
punctual or even the cleanest. But an argument could be made, thanks in part to
Duke Ellington’s up-tempo stamp of approval, that it is perhaps the coolest.
“There’s no 6 train song or D train song,” said Dr. John Morrow, 33, a
cardiologist who rode a packed A train recently on his way to lunch. “The A
train has a little more cultural significance.”
Today, on the A line’s 75th birthday, transit officials will celebrate with a
ceremony at the start of the line at the Inwood/207th Street station. A special
train made up of six prewar cars is scheduled to provide service along the
line’s original route to the Chambers Street stop in Lower Manhattan.
Back in 1932, the new subway was part of the Independent Subway System, or the
IND, the first city-owned subway network. The IND competed with two private
subway systems, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation and the Interborough
Rapid Transit Company, which opened first, in 1904. The city took control of the
BMT and IRT in 1940.
The Eighth Avenue subway, which took seven years to build, was the IND’s first
line, and it dazzled riders with longer stations to accommodate 10- and 11-car
trains, wider platforms and sleek R1 cars manufactured by Pullman Standard.
“The R1 cars that ran on the A train at that time were phenomenal,” said Stan
Fischler, a subway historian who has written several books about the city’s
subway system. “If you had put air-conditioning into them, they’d be good enough
to run today.”
The A train is the longest line in the system — 31 miles, from northern
Manhattan through Brooklyn to Far Rockaway in Queens. New York City Transit, the
arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that operates the subways, says
it is the longest subway line in the world.
The A often feels like the city’s very own transcontinental railroad, traveling
deep under the ground and soaring high above it, below the bustle of Washington
Heights, past old tombstones in graveyards in Ozone Park, over the waters of
Jamaica Bay. Perhaps the most famous section is the run under Harlem heard
between the notes of Ellington’s recording of “Take the A Train,” which was
written by Billy Strayhorn.
“Think about what a bargain it is,” Mr. Fischler said. “For two bucks you go all
the way to Rockaway. Do you realize what that would cost you in a taxi? You
couldn’t afford the tip.”
There is a strange symmetry to the line. You step on at the 207th Street station
in Inwood in northern Manhattan, and you step off at the Far Rockaway/Mott
Avenue terminal in Queens, near a western Long Island hamlet named Inwood. (Some
trips end in Ozone Park and some in Rockaway Park.)
Those riding the A train the weekend before its anniversary, however, could
hardly enjoy such uninterrupted, long-distance travel: Because of weekend track
work, people had to board shuttle buses to get from Howard Beach to the
Rockaways.
“I did not know I was going to be on a bus, but you kind of expect it on
weekends,” said Shamiyah Brown, 27, who rode the shuttle bus with her seven
children and her niece on Saturday. “I’m not surprised.”
The A train’s first registered complaint was apparently made just minutes after
it began running, when a man at the Chambers Street station became upset because
he had put two nickels into a malfunctioning turnstile.
Since then, the line has gotten mixed reviews from passengers and the
Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. In the group’s latest report
card, which ranks the city’s 22 main subway lines from best to worst, the A
train was tied for 12th place. The group found, among other things, that the
line arrives with below-average regularity.
The A line has been crippled by fires (the January 2005 blaze at the Chambers
Street station, for instance) and has seen its share of tragic and bizarre
occurrences.
The limbs and torso of a 19-year-old Brooklyn man were found in a blue plastic
bag in a tunnel in 2005. Pigeons have been known to step aboard trains at the
outdoor Far Rockaway stop and casually step off at the next station. In May
1993, a man posing as a subway motorman took an A train with hundreds of
passengers for a three-and-a-half-hour ride. He made 85 stops, and arrived on
time at the Ozone Park/Lefferts Boulevard station.
On Saturday afternoon, the line that carried Billy Reilly on its inaugural run —
he moved to the front of the crowd at the 42nd Street station when a
transportation commissioner learned he was born the day of the new subway’s
groundbreaking, March 14, 1925 — carried Dr. Morrow, who sat reading and
listening to a Tom Waits song on his iPod.
It carried Ernest Rivera, 28, an unemployed father of three from Brooklyn. It
carried Gunther, a Manhattan couple’s white puppy. It carried a middle-aged
woman with a tattoo on her chest, a man holding a surfboard and another man who
had remembered to wear his A train T-shirt.
Rudy Worrell, 54, knelt on the floor and played his flute and duct-taped
keyboard. Mr. Worrell remembered taking the A train as a boy, to play hooky from
school. Years later, he would return to the A, unemployed and homeless, playing
his music aboard it for small donations.
“This is my bread and butter,” he said as the train rumbled along. “Ain’t
nothing like the A train.”
CHICAGO, March 25 — The century-old elevated train system here is as much a
city fixture as the towering skyline and the piercing blue waters of Lake
Michigan.
But deteriorating tracks and trains, chronic budget shortfalls and a region ever
more dependent on rail service are forcing Chicagoans to confront the
possibility that the system, commonly known as the El or the L, may be at a
breaking point.
“We’re living on borrowed time,” said Frank Kruesi, the president of the Chicago
Transit Authority, which runs the rail service. “The fact is, there’s no magic
wand when we’re looking at modernizing a system that’s 100 years old in a very
dense urban environment.”
The El, with its 1,190 rail cars and 222 miles of track, is the rail component
of the transit authority, the second-largest public transit system in the
country after New York’s. The C.T.A.’s trains and buses serve the city and 40
suburbs, logging 1.55 million rides daily. The El alone accounted for more than
195 million rides last year.
Many neighborhoods have thrived in recent years in part because they attracted
residents eager to take advantage of the easy access to downtown that the trains
afforded, some riders say. But the rail system is splitting at the seams, having
carried 31 million more riders in 2005 than in 1985 on a fleet of cars with an
average age of 27 years.
“I’ve been riding the El pretty much all my life, and I’ve never seen
performance anywhere near this bad,” Alexander Facklis, 37, a rider on the Blue
Line, said during a recent morning commute when a stalled train slowed most
service. “There are delays every single day.”
For years, the story of the El has been one of too little money and costly
patchwork maintenance, transit experts say.
Along with two other transit systems, Metra and Pace, which link Chicago to the
suburbs by bus and by rail, the C.T.A. depends on a financing formula of fares
and sales taxes that has not changed since 1983. The state auditor general has
called the system’s financial condition “precarious.”
The Regional Transportation Authority, which oversees the three transit
agencies, is trying to persuade state lawmakers to approve a $10 billion
infusion of state and local money over the next five years. The C.T.A. needs
$5.8 billion to bring its system, including buses, into a state of good repair,
officials say.
“We call this ‘the year of decision,’ ” said Stephen E. Schlickman, the
executive director of the regional authority. The choice, Mr. Schlickman said,
is between a “world-class transit system” and an economic downturn that, he
predicted, a hobbled transit system would most likely bring about.
The combination of slow zones, construction projects and packed rail cars has
unleashed complaints from riders at community meetings and on blogs like C.T.A.
Tattler, which refers to one of the most troubled routes, the Blue Line, as the
“Blues Line.”
Jeff Gonzales, 40, sitting across the aisle from Mr. Facklis, said it used to
take him 35 minutes to travel from his home in the Logan Square neighborhood to
his job in the Loop. “Now, it takes an hour and 10 minutes,” he said.
Not far from where Mr. Facklis’s and Mr. Gonzales’s train had ground to a halt,
a derailment in a tunnel last July caused a smoky fire and forced passengers on
a packed rush-hour train to evacuate below ground and crawl to safety. The
derailment sent 152 people to the hospital and snarled commutes on trains and
buses around the city for hours.
Commute times have since doubled along that line, riders say, as deteriorating
ties on many stretches of track have forced trains to travel as slowly as 15
miles per hour in some spots. The El’s slower trains prevent it from carrying as
many passengers per hour as transit systems in Atlanta, Boston, New York,
Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area, according to a state performance
audit released this month.
Next month, work is set to begin on a $529.9 million expansion of the system’s
third-busiest rail line, the Brown Line, which winds through some of the city’s
most congested neighborhoods. Ridership on that line is up 83 percent since
1979, according to recent figures, and officials at the Chicago Transit
Authority predict the overhaul will increase capacity by 33 percent.
In the meantime, though, riders are bracing for more than two and a half years
of track closings that could reduce the capacity of already packed trains by as
much as 40 percent at peak travel times.
But transit officials say the work is a necessary evil. Without it, the system
would almost certainly fall into a chronic state of disrepair.
Helen Harrison, an administrative assistant who says the El is her only mode of
transportation, faults Mayor Richard M. Daley for not paying enough attention to
the problems. Ms. Harrison, 50, said she wondered how the transit system would
handle an influx of tourists should Chicago win a bid for the 2016 Summer
Olympics, a dream of Mr. Daley’s. (The city is currently competing with Los
Angeles to become the United States’ bidder for the Games.)
“Mayor Daley should concentrate his efforts on this rather than on the
Olympics,” Ms. Harrison said.
Mr. Daley, who by law appoints several members of the C.T.A.’s oversight board,
has said that luring the Olympics to Chicago could draw more federal money to
assist with long-term upgrades to the system.
But for some, coping with the immediate future is more pressing.
“The notion that we’re supposed to prepare for a doubling of our commute time
for the next two and a half years is so laughable to me I haven’t been able to
get my arms around it,” said Peter Skosey, a transit expert with the
Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit advocacy group. “I’m going to make
sure my bike tires are inflated.”
DETROIT, May 12 — General Motors is preparing
to give a final salute to the hulking Hummer H1, the ultimate in sport utility
might and, to its many critics, the ultimate in environmental incorrectness.
G.M. said Friday that it expected to stop building the H1, flagship of its
Hummer line, next month. The move comes 14 years after it first went on sale to
the public.
The H1, originally called simply the Hummer, and lately known as the H1 Alpha,
is derived from the military vehicle called the Humvee.
The wide, rugged Jeep-like vehicle captivated many television viewers, who
watched it trek across the Iraqi desert during the Gulf War. Hoping to
capitalize on Humvee-mania, its maker, A.M. General, quickly brought out a
street-legal version.
Despite its $140,000-plus price tag, rough ride and a fuel economy rating of
about 10 miles a gallon, well-heeled buyers and celebrities like Arnold
Schwarzenegger snapped up the H1 when it first reached the market in 1992.
"It started out as a huge image boost for G.M. — everyone knows what a Hummer
is," said Ron Pinelli, the president of Autodata, an industry statistics firm in
Woodcliff Lake, N.J.
About 12,000 H1's have been sold to the public, including 4,000 by G.M., which
bought the marketing rights to Hummer from A.M. General in 2000.
Since then, G.M. has added two slightly smaller Hummers, the stately H2,
introduced in 2002 and the relatively petite H3, which went on sale last year.
Perhaps because there are more choices of Hummers, or because H1's moment of
military chic simply has passed because of the conflict overseas, sales of the
H1 have plummeted.
G.M., which sold 875 H1's in 2000, sold just 374 in 2005, and 98 in the first
four months of 2006, according to Autodata.
With diesel fuel prices around $3 a gallon, it costs more than $150 to fill up
the H1's two gas tanks, which together hold 51.5 gallons.
And with G.M. on a push to recast its image as a green company, "it's time for
it to go away," Mr. Pinelli said of the biggest Hummer.
Environmentalists, who have used the H1 as an automotive punching bag since it
first heaved onto American streets, could hardly contain themselves.
"It's one thing if it's carrying soldiers to and from a fight," said Daniel
Becker of the Sierra Club, which maintains an anti-Hummer Web page called
"Hummerdinger.org." "It's another if it's hauling lattes home from Starbucks."
For its part, G.M. said high fuel prices were not the reason it pulled the plug
on the H1. Instead, G.M. said Hummer's maker, A.M. General, "will dedicate its
engineering, manufacturing, marketing and dealer resources to bringing more new
or significantly revised models to market."
Despite the decline in H1 sales, Hummer dealers expressed disappointment that
the gargantuan vehicle's days were numbered.
"The H1 is where it all started," said Ben Olin, sales manager at Ed Schmidt
Hummer, a Maumee, Ohio, dealership that was one of the first in the country to
sell the H1. "There's a lot of heritage that goes along with it."
Mr. Olin sold just two H1's last year. Many buyers, he said, are now turning to
the less overbearing H2, which is based on the Chevrolet Tahoe S.U.V.
Indeed, G.M. has sold more than 100,000 H2's and more than 50,000 H3's, based on
the Chevy Colorado pickup, since each went on sale. Leo Karl III, president of
Hummer by Karl in New Canaan, Conn., said he was surprised at G.M.'s decision to
discontinue the vehicle after investing money to make it street-legal. The H1
has a "beautiful interior and unbelievable" 6.6-liter, turbo diesel V-8 engine,
Mr. Karl said.
Mr. Karl said he would miss the H1. "If there's one vehicle on the road that's
like nothing else, that's it," he said.
The Great Central Railway was opened to-day to passenger traffic,
though the goods traffic — apart from coals — will not commence until after
Easter.
Judging by the experiment of this, the opening day, the auguries for passenger
traffic are of the most promising kind. For the present only eight trains are to
be despatched daily from Marylebone — five of them through to Manchester — and
the first of these started this morning at 5 15, being due at its destination at
10 25.
Among those who gathered on the platform at this early hour — which was rendered
anything but pleasant by a continuance of the thick November-like fog which has
been enshrouding London for the last few days — was Mr. Harry Pollitt,
locomotive engineer and son of the general manager, and a cheer was raised as
the five-vehicled corridor train, drawn by a very powerful bogie-wheeled engine,
decorated with the Royal arms as well as with those of the Company, steamed out
of the station with its four solitary passengers.
Yes, these were all the travellers by the first train, with its five cars,
reminding one of Macpherson's "four-and-thirty men and five-and-thirty pipers."
A craving for immortality or a wish to accomplish a feat may have been the main
motive which induced this early rising, and in any case somebody must have been
the first travellers from London to Manchester by Great Central Railway. All the
other seven outward trains, on the other hand, were pretty full, especially the
1 15 special express, which was timed to reach Manchester at 6 15, or in five
hours.
By and by, when the road becomes hard and settled, the new Company promises to
reduce the time of transit to the same limit as the competing lines. Among those
who watched the departure of some of the other trains were Lord Cross and
Colonel Hutton, directors, and Mr. Haig-Brown, super intendent of the line,
while throughout the day the station was thronged with a crowd of sightseers.
There were also two [through trains] to Leicester and one to York, while from
Nottingham there were no fewer than four special trains, carrying the employees
of the Corporation of that city on a trip to London, which, starting at
intervals of a quarter of an hour, commencing with noon, steamed into Marylebone
only about a quarter of an hour behind their time. This was a most gratifying
commencement.
Travellers and spectators were loud in their admiration of the corridor trains,
with their three first-class and two third-class. The Nottingham trippers were
whisked to London in four hours all but nine minutes.
In a huge gain for commerce and
administration, the London-Manchester route was chosen to inaugurate an express
mail service cutting 13 hours off the stage-coach time, as the Guardian
excitedly announced in quoting the official plan from the postmaster general.
The outline of the project is that a light
machine, drawn by two horses, shall start from the general post-office, London,
every afternoon at six o'clock, carrying nothing but the extra mail and the
guard, and proceed at the rate of eleven miles per hour, including all
stoppages, and arrive in Manchester at 20 minutes past ten the following
morning. The extra post shall arrive in London, from the principal towns, at ten
o'clock every morning. A quadruple postage shall be charged.
The commercial advantages are manifest The opportunity it would also give of
transmitting the earliest account of civil commotion, or [any] intelligence to
the government, must not be disregarded. [This] is a consideration of great
weight, the manufacturing part of the population being collected into large
masses at that distance from government.
That the plan recommended may be carried into execution admits of but little
doubt. Horses may be found in plenty that will be able to go, with a weight so
trifling, at the rate of twelve miles per hour, for a space of time in no
instance exceeding forty five minutes in every twenty-four hours.
The rate of twelve miles somewhat exceeds the pace proposed in the extra post,
after deducting the time lost in changing &c. Those who know the writer will not
be ready to accuse him of wanting humanity.
He states strongly that the plan he proposes may be executed without deviation
from humane principles. From his earliest years, everything appertaining to
horses has been of peculiar interest to him.
He does not hesitate to affirm that the extra post work may be performed at
eleven miles, or eleven miles and a half in the hour, with much less oppression
to the horses than now frequently exists in the regular mails.
An example precisely similar to this exists between Manchester and Liverpool;
and these instances are not cited as being of occasional occurrence, but what
usually takes place when the drivers have a full load of what they call their
regular by prime passengers.
Contrasting the weight of a stage coach, with luggage and fifteen passengers,
with an extra post machine, it is perfectly safe to say that it would be more
easy to perform eleven miles in the extra post, than nine in the best appointed
stage coach.