Hamptons Subway Newsletter: Week of June 2–8, 2017
Week of June 2–8, 2017
Riders this past week: 37,735
Rider miles this past week: 206,812
DOWN IN THE TUBE
Harvey Weinstein, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ivanka Trump and Sarah Jessica Parker were seen in the same subway car heading from Southampton to North Sea last Friday afternoon. All were reading Dan’s Papers. Jon Bon Jovi was seen on Thursday morning heading by subway from Amagansett to Montauk.
GUARDS DOUBLED
Due to the hacking of the subway computers at 11 p.m. Saturday night, there was no subway service on Sunday until 4 p.m. when we finally got it fixed. This was a terrible thing not to have subway service for this period of time over Memorial Day Weekend. We had to put chains across the entry stairways of all the stops to keep people from coming down to the platforms where they might have caused a riot. It is believed the hacking job originated in Bulgaria, although nobody can explain what Bulgaria was upset with us about. In any case, we have barred the windows of the subway room on the second floor of the Hampton Subway building in Hampton Bays and have doubled the number of security guards at the door from two to four, so that ought to put a stop to it.
TOKENS ARE BACK
To prevent further hacking of our subway system, Hamptons Subway is changing the way you pay from the current swipe card computer system to the old fashioned token system. As this is written, the swipe card readers on all the turnstiles are being replaced, one at a time, with token slots. Every day another turnstile will be taking tokens instead of swipe cards and so riders are being nudged to seek out the old tokens and begin to use them by next Monday. Fortunately, all the old tokens have, for twenty years, been piled high in all the basement rooms in the subway building and in storage rooms off every platform, so the token booth ladies are going to be very busy the rest of this week exchanging tokens for swipe cards. Bring tote bags. Sorry for the inconvenience. By the way, the tokens are slightly smaller than dimes, the smallest coin of the realm, so don’t even think you can put a penny or dime in the slot for a ride.
EXTRA SUBWAY CARS USED
Just after dawn on the Wednesday before Memorial Day weekend, many visitors were astonished to look up in the sky and see a parade of 24 helicopters with twelve New York City subway cars hanging on cables underneath flying from the Brooklyn Subway Yards to Gabreski Airport in Westhampton for the weekend rush. At the airport, the cars were pushed down the ramp to the subway station tracks to become two trains. For those of you who called to say they were seeing NYC subway cars on our system, well, you were. It was not a mirage. They were a great boon to us getting through the weekend, at least until 11 p.m. Saturday when everything went flooie. The cars were choppered back Monday night.
COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE
Few people know this, but President Donald Trump, who is a great friend of mine, flew into Westhampton Airport when he returned to the United States from his grand European tour rather than Edwards Air Force Base. Security was the reason. We had on hand a representative of each of the six countries he visited—from Finland, Portugal, Paraguay, Tunisia, Taiwan and Uruguay—to shake his hand before he took the limo back to the White House. He gave my wife a gift of Swiss Chocolates before he left.
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