Hamptons Subway Newsletter: Week of May 1–7, 2015

Week of May 1–7, 2015
Riders this past week: 13,899
Rider miles this past week: 101,868

DOWN IN THE TUBE
Ken Lipper was seen on Thursday reading The Wall Street Journal while riding the subway from the East Hampton stop to the new, little-known, upscale Georgica Station, where friendly doormen assist in opening the sliding doors. Hedgerows have been installed along the edges of the platform this spring and they are very beautiful. They’ve been designed to completely protect anyone falling off the platform onto the tracks. This is a potential solution to an ongoing problem. The downside is that the trains have to be stopped exactly where there is an opening in the hedgerows.

FUNERALS
Many funerals were held at the end of this week as a result of the sad doings involving the subway system earlier.

FOURTH RAIL
One funeral was held yesterday in Chippewa, Kansas for Williston Grange, a young man with an entrepreneurial spirit who approached Hamptons Subway on Monday about buying 60 miles, our whole length, of the special Fourth Rail product he had invented and was now marketing. Its main feature was that it could not electrocute anybody. Electrified, it just let off a friendly hum. He demonstrated how it worked, dropping 200 yards of his Fourth Rail down onto the tracks at the Quogue station next to our Third Rail, and then, oh, it’s just too awful to tell more about this.

FOUR ENVIRONMENTALISTS
When subway motorman Ira Baker got to the Montauk Yards yesterday morning, he found that by mistake his motorman car had been hooked up not as the lead car of a train, but as the second car. Because he had to keep to his schedule, he went out that way, looking ahead mostly at the back end of the car in front of him, except for when he went around turns. Between Amagansett and East Hampton, unbeknownst to him, a deer had run out on the tracks and had been caught by environmentalists who, pinning it to the tracks and darting it woozy, fed it high protein drinks, brushed tick-go-away onto its ears, injected a nutrient supplement into its side and performed a hysterectomy to help control the future deer population on the East End. And they just didn’t see Ira Baker’s train coming. Funerals are tomorrow at the Nature Conservancy in Wainscott.

BREAKTHROUGH AT THE LIGHTHOUSE
The last stop out east for Hamptons Subway is at the Montauk Lighthouse. Around 4 p.m. Wednesday, Harry O’Neil pulled his train in, attempted to brake to a stop where the tracks end before the wooden barrier, but nothing happened. The train shattered through the barrier. Beyond it is just a thin dirt wall separating the subway system and the world outside—high up on the cliff above the lighthouse there. The train ripped through the dirt wall and, as fishermen below watched in horror, leaped out into sunshine and then fell down to the surf and rocks below where everything exploded. Just awful. Somehow, just two people lost their lives, and they were both convicted criminals who were midway through long terms at the Riverhead jail before escaping and taking the subway east. So no real harm was done.

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE
Our hearts go out to those who died in the incident. I have ordered our American flag on the Hampton Bays platform lowered from six feet to three for the next 24 hours.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Felicia Boone of Sag Harbor, our traffic controller, turned 28 on Thursday and her birthday party was a big hit in the subway building cafeteria at noon that day. The cake was cut, the candles blown out, Felicia’s parents were Moonies, she told everyone, but now they are done with that.

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