The Hamptons Subway: Week of December 21–27, 2012
Riders this past week: 13,412
Rider miles this past week: 97,414
DOWN IN THE TUBE
Barbara Walters and James Lipton were seen chatting together on the subway going from Southampton to Water Mill at 2:32 p.m. last Wednesday.
SANTA CLAUSES COFFEE KLATCH
If anyone had been atop Fort Hill looking down at the Montauk Subway Yards at 6 a.m. last Saturday morning, they would have seen a yellow school bus, courtesy of the Tuckahoe School District, pull in loaded with 11 Santa Clauses picked up at various places around the Hamptons who were now in Montauk to begin their work day.
These Santa Clauses, motormen all, then disembarked from the busses and entered the Subway Yard dispatch building, where they sat in the lounge drinking coffee until it was their turn to take the “reins” of a train out and be off on their appointed rounds along the system. Yes, Santa Clauses steered all the trains on the system beginning on Saturday and will continue to do so until closing time on Christmas Eve, when we let them go home to their families.
MAILBAG
Dear Hampton Subway:
I don’t want to be a spoilsport or anything, but continuously playing Christmas music at high volume over the subway system PA can get really annoying. Frankly, I’m Bing Crosbied up to HERE. And when the motormen keep time with the songs by going faster and slower and faster and slower to, for example, “Jingle Bells,” it is a back-wrenching experience for us Golden Years people.
SUBWAY TRANSFER SYSTEM ENDED
The free subway transfer machines on all subway platforms in the system are to be removed this week. They will be thrown in the dumpster alongside our Hampton Bays Headquarters building on Thursday for anyone who might want one. Most no longer dispense tickets, and most have either broken or been vandalized. The subway transfer machines were originally built for the Toronto Subway in 1954 and we picked them up for $500 each at auction up there last month. However, nobody uses them. Although pulling the lever gets you a free transfer ticket, there is no purpose to doing so since all you have to do to transfer from one subway to another is get off one and get on a different one. We’ve never charged for these second rides. So this was just one more mistake by Austin Applebottom, the marketing director who thought free transfers would be a good marketing idea. He was fired yesterday.
DELAY
A woman trying to bring 15 large gift-wrapped Christmas boxes on the subway at the Bridgehampton stop caused a 30-minute delay on the system when the boxes became jammed in the sliding door. One of the woman’s arms was briefly pinned in there too, but good Samaritans on the train carefully got her free.
REMINDER ABOUT FOOD
Although food kiosks operated by the Subway restaurant chain are on every platform, we would like to remind straphangers that eating hoagies or drinking Cokes on the subway cars is against the law. We will be suspending the enforcement of the law by our subway police during this final week leading up to Christmas, so please self-police yourself. Eating and drinking on a bouncing subway train can really create quite a mess.