I noticed in the morning TV news coverage that the MBTA General Manager Daniel A. Grabauskas, along with a MBTA spokesperson, were being interviewed about the now and the T's response. Could it be because WHDH/Channel 7 chooses to pre-empt the Today show and just blabbers on for hours about the snow. The same reporters give the same updates every 20-30 minutes or so, so I guess they need to interview people like Grabauskas in an attempt to make it interesting.
The Sun Chronicle out of Attelboro published an article in this morning's edition about the Amtrak strike. If Amtrak did strike, Boston, Providence and Worcester would all be impacted. One would think this would be a bigger story in papers such as The Boston Globe, The Boston Hearld, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, and The Providence Journal, but there hasn't really been a lot of coverage about the strike.
The headline of the Sun Chronicle's article said it all "Rail strike seen unlikely." I sure hope the headline proves to be true! Amtrak and union officials are trying to avoid a strike. Also, since Amtrak is a federal entity, Congress could also intervene to prevent a strike (especially since most of the cities on the Eastern Seaboard would be severely impacted by a strike). Everyone is "optimistic" that the strike will be avoided.
Beyond the strike, the article contained some great quotes from commuters about the current state of the commuter rail system in Massachusetts. Here are some really great bon mots:
"Barbara Tappan, another Attleboro resident on the 6:10 p.m. train out of Boston on Friday, said the commuter rail's performance was already "really bad," with late trains and long delays, and a strike would only make things worse."
"Emarie Pope said her husband had joked about MBTA service being so bad that even if there is a strike, "How would we know the difference?" Sitting in South Station, Pope said, "It really annoys me that we don't have a better transit system." Officials shouldn't let things get to the point where train service might stop, she said."I agree with Ms. Pope's husband. . . if an Amtrak strike happened, "how would we know the difference?" I also agree with Ms. Pope we need "a better transit system"!
Let's hope the strike is avoided!!
2 comments:
Just wanted to drop an update on this morning's commute. There were actually a good number of people on the P508 (709 AM) train, and it was amazingly only about 8 minutes behind. I had to give them some credit for that.
AJ,
I am so glad to hear that this morning's inbound commute on the Worcester-Framingham line went well. Or . . . at least the P508 train was relatively on time.
It seemed as though this storm was pretty much on-target in terms of timing. So I was hoping that the commute would be relatively smooth, considering both the MBTA/MBCR and the road crews had ample warning that a pretty large snow storm was heading towards Massachusetts.
I hope your outbound commute this evening is smooth too.
Thanks for the update!
Train Rider
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