As my evening train pulled into Goldens Bridge, I stood near the doors, quite puzzled as the train gradually slowed and stopped. I was thinking in my head, “What? The engineer hasn’t fully platformed yet!” (yes, I believe it is acceptable to use “platform” as a verb!) Anyways, not platforming isn’t unheard of. And overshooting the platform tends to happen in the fall, when the leaves make it harder for the train to brake. Normally the engineer goes forward or back to get the train in the right spot, and then the doors open. So then I was pretty damn surprised when the doors did open.

And then I realized the train was on the platform. But it was so completely dark, it was near impossible to see it! Who turned out the lights in Goldens Bridge?!

Looking down the platform as the train pulls away. Right there in the middle is the ticket machine. Good luck seeing that, though.

It was completely black in the stairwell, and in the vestibule. I held on for dear life to the banister going down the stairs. I thought briefly about falling down, breaking my leg, and suing the MTA, but then I was like, shit, the MTA doesn’t have any money. I’d be getting hate mail on the blog, because everybody’s fares would be going up to pay for my bum leg. “Thanks a lot, ****in’ Cat Girl!”

Good to know the lights outside are on, but not inside

In other news, I’ve been sporting my new hat this week. Like all my animal hats, they come from Boshi Basiik. I’ve been asked so many times on the train where I bought my hats, I asked for some business cards when I bought the hat. So next time anybody asks, I’ve got a card for you!

Me, the new hat, and the return of the masked bus rider! I look like a fool, but I’m trying my best not to burst out in laughter at his expression.

Oh, and as a final note, if you haven’t checked out the MTA’s new site you certainly should. The new service and delays status for the subways, bus, rail, and bridges is pretty awesome. As is the new Metro North Train Time.

Alright, let me just say it now, but I love it when people from the MTA read my blog. Alright, alright, I don’t really know if anyone from there or Metro-North read my blog. What I do know, is that a lot of people found my blog the past few days, specifically searching for a phrase. And what phrase is that, do you ask? Goldens Bridge vandalism, and Goldens Bridge graffiti.

The other thing that I know is that today somebody was busy over at Goldens Bridge. Replacing every broken pane of glass, and covering over all of the graffiti. Now that graffiti had been there a few days shy of a month. Though exactly a week after posting embarrasing (for the MTA) photos of the destruction, it is now fixed. What service! Of course it is possible that nobody important read this blog at all, but I prefer to believe my delusions of grandeur.

Unfortunately, I now have no further excuse for putting up crazy posters in the train station. I have nothing ugly to cover up! Maybe some day, the posters will come back. But until then, enjoy a little sound clip. Somebody did in fact call the telephone number on one of the Waldo posters, and left me a message. Perhaps that whole “Operation Cover Up Graffiti & Broken Glass” was not as much of a failure as I thought it to be.

[audio src="http://www.iridetheharlemline.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/waldo"]

I personally thought that last week’s Cat Found poster was pretty funny. They were slowly taken down one by one, but at least one of the posters survived the entire week. My goal was to again, cover up the graffiti, and now the broken glass, with something a bit more amusing. The poster I hung last night was somewhat more subtle.

The name Waldo should give it away. Don’t fix that glass Metro North, it looks sexy as-is.

Cover up that graffiti!

Well, let’s just say it was a miserable failure. The signs did not last 24 hours in the station. By morning time, six of the seven were gone, and one was moved in the corner and partially crumpled. If an MTA worker did this, I could understand. But then that means that they employ workers to go into stations and pull down posters. And do only that. Because they sure as hell didn’t clean the station. The same immature penis drawings in the dirt that have been there for months are still there. The graffiti is still there, the broken glass on the floor is still there. I will just assume that I pissed off the graffiti artist. And they certainly didn’t want their handiwork covered up.

This morning marked the arrival of our new shuttle bus. Within minutes of waiting, however, it seemed as though we were about to get hijacked by a masked man. Upon further scrutiny it seemed as though we were mistaken: it was just another passenger waiting out in the bitter cold for a bus that was going to be late. Typical.

Though the new bus is nice, I must admit. It turns out that the robot man is not our driver, it is some other guy. And we thought the robot drove slow, this as yet un-nicknamed fellow is even slower. Even poor bag lady missed her train (boo hoo). Just the part that the bus no longer picks us up in front of the train station isn’t the most fun. At least there you could wait in the vestibule, which is at times warmer even than the waiting room. Now we get picked up across the street by the Greyhound stop, and thus have no warm place to wait. (and now I deserve a good sarcastic boo hoo for myself).

Another side effect of the cold weather is that the pigeons begin to sneak inside the train station. I had been wondering where they were for a month or so now. Most people think pigeons are dumb, but they have to have some smarts to know they’d rather be inside than out in the cold, and practice amusing methods of getting in. I hadn’t seen any of them inside until today. A pigeon tore through the upstairs waiting room earlier this evening, flying over the people waiting for their (late) trains. Just in general freaking people out. Terrorizing the train riders, though today nobody ran off screaming. One of these times I need to capture that on video.

After writing all of this, it seems that everything is pretty normal over in White Plains. But on the home front, Goldens Bridge, it seems that everything is not. Here we don’t have pigeons, but people terrorizing the station. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is the obnoxious area skater kids, drunk on a weekend with nothing else better to do. They’re probably the ones to blame for the graffiti I mentioned before (and some new graffiti that appeared this afternoon), but maybe not for the weekend’s escapade of kicking in all the glass panels on all the doors of the south side vestibule. Maybe it was creepy, perpetually drunk Santa Claus. Who knows? Though, uhh, Metro-North? I can live with the fact that you never wash the windows. I suppose I will live, albeit a little frustrated, when you don’t clean up the graffiti. But umm… will you at least fix the glass? Is this train station even safe? Should I be carrying mace around on my keychain?

The cat girl was out and causing mischief this week in Goldens Bridge. I’ve been told by some people I see on my commute that seeing me with my cat hat every morning makes them smile. But what of every person at the station that I don’t see? I figured I’d make them smile a bit too, and maybe have a bit of a laugh. So if you hang out around Goldens Bridge, you may have seen this poster:

Monday night I hung six of these posters. By Tuesday morning two were missing, and by this morning there were only three remaining, on the south side platform and the south vestibule stairwell. I was hoping that someone would call the number on the poster and say something amusing, but thus far I’ve received no calls. Yes, the number is in fact a real voicemail number. If you call it, any message you leave will be emailed to me.

Part of the motivation for the poster was to cover up the graffiti that the MTA will never clean

Don’t mess with the ticket machines. One of the first signs to disappear.

As I was leaving Goldens Bridge station today, I noticed that someone had been busy in the station mid morning or early afternoon. In the south-side vestibule there was some new spray-painted graffiti that hadn’t been there in the morning. When I saw it, I made me think that it was about time for a part two to the original train graffiti post I made a few months ago. And so here you go, graffiti part two…

Goldens Bridge is such a small, quiet station. We don’t get much spray paint here. Mostly just penises drawn in the dust of the windows that nobody ever cleans… I’m sure the MTA will send some people to clean the windows. Someday. If the cleaning people’s jobs aren’t cut…

I can’t even begin to decipher that one…

No, I didn’t do this bit of graffiti. Considering my post on my dislike for this ad, I had been pondering something snarky to write on it. Someone else got to it first.

I imagine a bored track worker did this, knowing the third rail was off. That or someone dumb enough to go and write on a live third rail…

A warning for you to watch the gap. Yeah, that gap. The one right on the bottom of her face, under the nose.

A sticker someone left on an M7.

The NY Lottery does like to advertise heavily on public transportation… Trying to make it sound like it easy to win a million dollars in the lottery though, that is bullshit.

Now this certainly seems to me like a racist statement. A poster with a bunch of African kids, attempting to raise money for charity, and someone labels it as a future Obama rally… Classy, real classy.

Did someone let the nutter bus loose today? Was the local asylum giving out day passes? We had some delightful numbskulls today getting in fights on speakerphone in the waiting room, and an amusing man wearing a New York Times badge that was having difficulty hearing on his phone. Of course when you have difficulty hearing, the only solution is to stick your finger in your ear, find the nearest corner, and go stand facing the corner while resting your head against the wall for support. Can you hear me now?

I like to read and mumble. And then get on my speaker phone and get into arguments, which I am sure everyone loves to hear!

I can’t stand some people’s UGGly boots, but there are some that just make no sense to me at all. These boots are so hairy it looks like an old, brown poodle died on each of your feet.

Every time Santa Claus Man treks up the stairs at Goldens Bridge, he thinks in his mind, ‘I can reach the unreachable star!’ because just going up a flight of stairs when you are that drunk might as well be climbing Mount Everest.

Ah, good old Sleeper Kid. I have to give him credit, at least he isn’t trying to eat and sleep at the same time any more.

I have no pictures for this one, so instead, I will leave you with a story:
This week marks the return of this rather large and obnoxious woman. She rode the shuttle bus last year, and then all of a sudden disappeared. Honestly, I had hoped she got fired. I guess she didn’t, because now she is back. Maybe she just rides the bus in the winter for some odd reason. I don’t really know. Either way, she is dead set about being the first person to get on the bus. She can and will push aside any other person in her way to be the first person on the bus. As witnessed this evening, if she is sitting in a seat and there is another open seat right next to her, her fat ass is not moving an inch. Our building complex now has two shuttle buses, but for the longest time we had only one. Before we got the second bus, extra people would have to stand in the aisles if there were not enough seats. Now that we have two buses, people that don’t fit in the seats on the first bus are required to wait five minutes or so for the other bus to come around. Tonight there was an extra seat on our bus, but because fat ass didn’t want to move her butt, that person had to stand in the bitter cold until the other bus came around. And then she had the audacity to laugh about how cold it was outside, and that she couldn’t have waited another minute out there. When someone said to her that there was one more seat, she said, “Who gon’ fit dere?” If someone can’t fit there next to your fat butt, maybe that is your cue to go on a diet? For the record, as I am sure I will get a flame from someone about that, I do not have a problem with fat people, but I do have a problem with assholes.

What a craptacular day this has started out as… Quite snowy and wet. Goldens Bridge had a bit of snow in the morning, but by the time I was walking to the train station, it had turned to rain. White Plains didn’t seem to have much snow, but it was rainy and a lot more windy. I got bored and took a few pictures of the delightful weather.

The platform was slippery as hell, I’m surprised I didn’t see anyone fall on their ass!

Our train when it arrived was covered in snow

Despite the weather, the trains always seem to be reliable. I suppose that is why I am sitting here at work, and none of my coworkers who drive have arrived yet… Though I must admit, I was rather amused watching too many people running around White Plains with collapsing umbrellas.

Schadenfreude

Female train conductors… boy does Craigslist have a deal for you! Do you have “fantasies” of sex on the train? Apparently there is one man who does, and he wants the world to know!

I am sure that there is one woman conductor out there that would like to fool around on metro north train, and live out a fantasy,i will be taking the 6:46 tomorrow morning from ossing and the 5:56 this evening, would love to orally please a woman, hispanic male 5;4 stocky build, d& d free

This was my amusement of the morning, since I have google alerts set up to email me when new websites and news articles are posted about Metro-North and the Harlem Line. I doubt this desperate guy is going to get any, but I have no illusions, I’m certain people have done this on the train before.

In other news, the delightful Santa Claus man, the resident drunk of Goldens Bridge station, had a little bit of an “issue” the other night. His pants were, well, they were soaked. In a drunken stupor he pissed himself. So here’s a little expert tip for you: don’t sit on the benches at the station.

Other than that, this has been a pretty much uneventful week… enjoy the rest of it!

Obviously if you’ve ever been on the Harlem Line you know that the tracks run alongside various bodies of water. An astute observer can see the Kensico Dam in Valhalla… And around the stations of Purdy’s through Katonah if you look out you will notice the Muscoot Reservoir. Over the summer I purchased a small row boat in order to go out on the reservoir. The DEP is actually rather strict what varieties of boat can go out, and where the boats must be kept.

My boat was assigned a spot up in Purdy’s, and it is named the Brazilian Nut. Train conductor Guy actually came up with the name, because the best I could come up with was Horizon, and I didn’t really like that much. Anyways, one afternoon I decided to row down to where I live in Goldens Bridge, which is about two and a half miles. The water runs parallel to the train tracks, so I watched all the trains go by. I also saw a rather large machine go by on the tracks, I think to clean the tracks. While I was rowing, closer to Goldens Bridge I saw some man near a tunnel, and the next time I looked, he had disappeared. A few weeks ago I decided to take my boat and investigate.

I found a random little tunnel, accessible only by boat, where you can sort of hide out, right under the railroad tracks. Honest to god though, I’d be really freaked out if I was under there when the diesel train going up to Wassaic went by. Hell, I was freaked out when there weren’t any trains going by, there were lots of spiders hanging out under there too. Here are a few pictures I took while investigating the tunnel.

Sadly, the days are too short for me to take the boat out after work, and most weekends I am busy, so I have retired it for the season. Next summer if you pass by Goldens Bridge and you see a little green rowboat out on the water, it may be me, sitting out and watching the trains go by.