It’s Been a Bad Month for MARC and its Riders

It’s been a bad month for MARC and its riders. First, age and decay has taken their toll on the conditions of the locomotives, the cars and the track infrastructure. Second, the high temperatures of June pushed the system over the edge. Third, the chronic lack of managerial planning for known deficiencies has lead to a repeat of the long ago breakdown that stranded many hundreds of passengers in sweltering heat inside unpowered cars on the Northeast Corridor between Washington, DC and Baltimore.

In that years ago incident, passengers waited in darkened cars without functioning HVAC and, water or any way to mitigate the situation. There was no way that is until they took it upon themselves to remove emergency exit window panels to get what little ventilation could be had in the dead air of mid-summer. The restroom cars were a relief for a short time until they filled to their capacity and stopped functioning.

The temperature continued to climb while the railroad personnel tried everything they could to restart the locomotive or hook up a replacement motor and pull the train back to Union Station. When the breakdown stretched into second hour, some people saw the open window frames as a means of egress. They climbed out onto the track bed where the conditions were not much better. The sun blazes down on the steel rails, gravel ballast making an efficient furnace on the ground. Some of the more energetic commuters just walked away, preferring to implement their own personal Plan B.

After that event, the MARC management said that they would have a better emergency response plan before the next time. The next time? In the months since that fateful day there have been dozens of times that faulty locomotives, ruptured brake line, wonky circuit-breakers have delayed departures or initiated mid-station breakdowns. All of these events have been the warning signs of the imminent collapse of this commuter rail system.

June 21, 2010. The much anticipated unexpected breakdown came. Train 538 departing Union Station at 5:34 came to a stop between stations and sat there with locked brakes. The automatic braking system did its job when the locomotive lost power. The problem was that the system would not disengage and the rescue locomotive dispatched to assist and bring the train back to DC was unable to do so. This is where a well conceived Plan B would have been quite helpful. Conductors would have made periodic accurate announcements and they would have opened the storage compartments and distributed the water to everyone who needed it. The trouble was there was no accurate information to announce and no water to distribute.

So much for Plan B.

The next day there was another breakdown on a train departing at 4:15 from DC. They were lucky. The delay was short and the events unremarkable.

Tuesday the following week the engineer of Train 538 forgot that he was supposed to stop at Odenton Station. In what is euphemistically referred to as a “blowby” the train kept going on to BWI where the passengers who wanted to get off at Odenton had to wait on an Acela to take them back. In a related event, the train I was on in the morning of July 1, over shot the Bowie State platform by two extra car lengths. Our conductor jokingly said “we’re off the platform but at least we still have a few cars on,” as he hurried by to get to the doors that he could open.

MARC and Amtrak managers had a “Meet the Managers” session set up for June 30, at 4:30 in the Gate C area of Union Station. In an ironic move, they were all 35 minutes late. One long time rider comments, “There were on MARC time.” After that meeting, the train crews must have had a meeting where they got a bug in their trowsers or something.

On the 5:20 train Lash Larue called an unscheduled stop north of Odenton and just out of BWI because several passengers had moved pre-maturely into the vestibule on at least one car. He was only able to see one vestibule before he authorized the stop. Lash came through our car to inspect another vestibule on the other end of our Car 5. His PA announcement clearly informed everyone that we were stopping because a few passengers were in the vestibule and the train was stopping because THAT was a safety hazard. Good move, Lash. We are all better off when people don’t crowd the vestibule even though they backlog the aisle and stairwells up and down. If we hadn’t already been running late, there would not be as much anxiety about getting off the train and out of the garages. That raises items Four and Five, but that will have to wait.

Lash Larue made an off the cuff remark as he breezed by to the other end of the car. “Bob, it’s your friends that did this.” The Gang who was there looked at me and I wagged my finger back at them. Larry said, “I didn’t know you had friends in other cars too.” I told him there more friends than there were seated in our end of the car.

It was a power move, and we were under way in a minute or two. It is ironic that an unscheduled stoppage of the train is far more hazardous than a few people standing in the vestibules. Instead of a half dozen people at risk of being crushed if the train suddenly struck an immovable barrier, 900 plus people were at risk of being stranded a couple of hundred yards from the safety of the BWI platform if the locomotive should fail or the brakes decided to not release. We wondered if the corridor dispatcher knew about the unscheduled stop before it was implemented.

Now Four and Five. Four, the northbound platform has been under reconstruction of over a year so there is a large gap between the two ends. Trains can only access the shorter north end portion. Amtrak is overhauling the northbound track and sleepers so our evening train are using the southbound side because the entire train can offload at once there. This means about 400 BWI commuters must trek the stairs up and across then down the other side. It’s a big irritating inconvenience for everyone and an impossibility when the elevators are out-of-service when one uses a wheelchair.

Five, half of Garage 1 is closed while they finish the repair to the structure and clean up. Everyone temporarily must exit through Garage 2 and half as many exit lanes. Somewhere back there in time, commuting became an adventure, or a mis-adventure if you prefer.