Flagmen Slowdown, Steve Guttenberg & More from the Hamptons Subway Newsletter

SEEN ON THE SUBWAY

Actor Steve Guttenberg was seen reading a Bible while straphanging on a subway train Thursday morning going westbound from Montauk. Beautiful Julie Andrews was spotted going down the escalator to the platform at Southampton heading eastbound.

COUNT THE CARS CONTEST WINNER

Congratulations to little Amy Renick, age 6, of Southampton, who guessed the number of cars in the annual Hamptons Subway “Count the Cars” competition. We had more than 400 entries placed in our yellow metal bin at the top of Fort Hill in Montauk, from which you could look down at the Montauk Subway Yard and count the cars. Of the 400 entries, 38 got the number right, which was 26 cars. Amy’s name was pulled out of a hat last Saturday, and the next day she and her parents enjoyed a ride at the front of the 5 p.m. train leaving Montauk with the motorman showing her how to use the buttons and levers.

“Thank you so much!” Amy wrote us in a thank-you note. “She loved it,” added her mother Martha Renick.

ESCALATOR HURRY-UP

Subway-goers need to be aware that we are experimenting with a new system on the down escalator to the Southampton platform that will, under certain circumstances, speed up the escalator from 1 mile an hour to 2 miles an hour. Know how you can be coming down the escalator, see a subway train in the station moments away from leaving and wish you could hurry up the escalator? The new system, developed by Microsoft and called “Hurry-Up,” will, by tapping the Hurry-Up app on your phone, double the speed of the escalator so you get to the bottom faster. As this could upset other riders on the down escalator, the Hurry-Up app includes a Bluetooth connection that weighs the total of anybody using the escalator at that moment and will not operate if anyone else is on the escalator other than the person activating the app.

So far, the reception to this has been mixed, and though nobody has fallen, it looks like this just might not work as we had hoped. Nevertheless, the experiment continues.

FLAGMEN TO HOLD TWO-DAY SLOWDOWN

Members of the oldest union on the Hamptons Subway line, the Flagmen’s Union, which was founded in 1933, have ordered a slowdown next week between Monday at 11 a.m. and Wednesday at 5 p.m. During this time, riders are asked to take appropriate measures. The issue is better pay and better working conditions. The vote by the membership was 42 ayes and 6 nays.

The flagmen, as I am sure you know, operate in 22 locations, 24 hours a day, just a hundred yards along the track as you enter any of our 11 stations from either direction. It’s a job they’ve had since the founding of Hamptons Subway nearly a century ago.

Charlie O’Leary, the longtime president of the union, held a press conference on the steps of the subway’s administrative offices in Hampton Bays yesterday at 4 p.m. to make the case.

“This is a bleedin’ hard job it is, standin’ down there in the dark tunnel waitin’ for the next train. Then we have to find the proper flag, red or green, and we have to wave it. The flags are filthy. Some of them haven’t been cleaned in years. We stand in these little glass booths with the filthy windows, and it’s hard enough to even see the train, then we have to step out and wave the flag through the dust and cinders and all. We have no place to sit in there. Our feets is sore. We need a place to sit.

“And the cost of living here in the Hamptons today, let me tell you, ain’t it somethin’? Some of our men have to work two and a half shifts a day just to make ends meet and put food on the table. At six hours a shift that’s, well, somethin’. And for what? Taxes is terrible. To buy a proper house is at least a million six. The overtime adds up and does it for us, but it take a toll. We gets really bad stuff, mouse bites, coughs, you all know. We need the booths cleaned. And we need more money, we does.”

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

The slowdown announced this morning by the Flagmen’s Union is a despicable act. These people are paid perfectly well compared to other subway systems. They get raises at the start of every new decade. It’s in the contract. And we provide them not one but two picnics a year, one above ground and one below. We also give them, when they emerge from their shifts, the requested and traditional thwopping with the tennis racket to shake the dust off, and we’ve never missed a single one ever since the first thwopping on the first day of the subway in 1932.

As I have said from time to time, and I know this is crying wolf because I have said this from time to time and other commissioners have said this from time to time to no effect, but there will come a time when we replace all the flagmen with the red and green traffic lighting systems that all other subway systems I have ever visited use.

Frankly, when I was asked to come here from my post as assistant commissioner of the BART system in San Francisco, I was shocked and appalled to discover that Hamptons Subway still uses this ancient system of flagging the trains. It is a disgrace. Other subway systems have long since even changed over from tripwires for the traffic lighting to modern computer and laser beam control switches. And though I know this is in the union contract that this continue for as many years as the subway system exists, and though I know this has become a hallowed tradition that has in the past even been in the movies — did you know that the flagmen for the silent Buster Keaton film Romance on the Tracks were our very own flagmen here in the Hamptons? — I only recently found out about that — nevertheless this union has got to learn to behave.

This business about mouse bites, it’s ridiculous. We send a shotgun crew down the tracks twice a month to take care of it. The riders don’t complain. Why should the flagmen?