I am sitting on the train right now… not my usual train, but an earlier train. I left work a little bit early, I have such a terrible headache I am just dying to get home so I can take a nap. It is raining outside, and somewhere this train must have a leak, because I feel water dripping on my head. I don’t know where it is coming from, but I can feel it. We just passed Mount Kisco station, is it sad that I can look out the train now and know by the landmarks where exactly we are? Guess I ride the train just too much.

I think I shall now give White Plains the title of shittiest train station bathroom. For the longest time it had definitely been Huntington’s bathroom, a station on the Port Jefferson branch of the Long Island Railroad.

Anyways, you’d think with all this money we pay for fares (ahem, 30% increase??) we could at least get decent bathrooms. Because today we had some delightful feces smeared over the floor and toilets. I heard an old lady walk in and she kept mumbling, “Feces! Feces everywhere! Women are so disgusting!” So congratulations White Plains, you are now my official top pick for worst train bathroom.

When I first began commuting, I always thought it would be incredibly amusing (or rather, incredibly annoying) to record the noise that the M7A trains make before announcing stops, and use it as a text message alert on my phone. I never actually did it until recently, since the trains I usually ride are of the older variety. Friday I happened to leave work early and ended up on an M7A, so I made a little recording. It is now my text message alert. It could be yours too… I decided to put the noise up for download. Enjoy!

M7 / M7A Ding Dong

On the train home this evening, I sat next to a woman who after one stop, turned to me and asked, “Is this train going to New York?” Unfortunately it wasn’t. She had gotten on the wrong train.

It made me think back to a few times when I got on the wrong train. When I first started commuting to work, I got on a train in Brewster that apparently went express after a few stops and didn’t stop at White Plains. For the record, that was the first and only time I had ever been on a Harlem Line train that did not make a stop there. I was lucky enough to have a really nice conductor… he stopped the express train at White Plains just so I could get off. People at work joked around, if I looked more like my age or older (as opposed to looking like a 15-year-old or something) would he have still done the same thing?

Another time I got on the wrong train was when I was riding the Long Island Railroad from Northport station. Northport has only one track, so unless you are observant and notice the direction the train pulls into the station, you don’t necessarily know in which direction it will be heading. I arrived at the station exactly at the time my train was supposed to leave. There was a train on the tracks waiting, and my friend who dropped me off was like, “Run! You can catch it!” I ran my little ass off and did in fact catch it… Only to find out as the doors closed that the train was heading to Port Jefferson, as opposed to Penn Station. My train was late, and was waiting on an other track outside the station for this train to leave so it could pull up. I managed to get off at King’s Park, the next station…

I didn’t, nor do I even now know where the hell King’s Park is, but I knew I certainly didn’t want to be there. I think this was back before I had a cell phone, so I was looking for a telephone booth to call my friend for help. A scruffy looking old man stood in front of the phone booth. By the time I awkwardly got him to move away from it, I saw that the phone receiver had been cut off by a vandal, and there was just a wire hanging where it should have been. Yeah, that was a spectacular afternoon.

Another remembered story… last summer while riding LIRR, I was hanging out in the outdoor waiting area outside Northport station, waiting for my friend to pick me up. I was sitting in an end seat, and the seat to my left had some trash that some slob left behind. A Hispanic man walks up to me, moves the trash, and sits down next to me. Mind you, there were plenty of other open seats, he just chose to sit next to me, despite the fact that he even had to clean off the seat.

In his hand, the man carried an Abercrombie and Fitch bag, the kind with the shirtless guys and a girl that I probably wouldn’t want to know in real life. He holds it up, points to the picture and says “Haha! Look at these guys!” He proceeds to pull out the contents of the bag, a statue of an eagle, which he had made, or at least painted. I was sort of not paying much attention, thinking “okay dude, whatever” and looking desperately for my friend to save me from this nutjob.

Of course, knowing my luck, the situation got worse before it got better. The man began to make comments about my clothing, noticing that I had a hole in the knee of my jeans. He then reached over and began to touch my knee. In retrospect, I probably should have punched the guy. Better yet, I should have gotten the hell away from him long before. But being the nicer person that I was I got my ass up as fast as possible away from that damn nutjob.