Hamptons Subway Hosts Massive Yard Sale

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Ace Mets slugger Pete Alonso, apparently lost, was looking at the subway map by the token clerk’s booth at the back of the Three Mile Harbor platform. Also on the subway were Alec Baldwin in East Hampton and Bill Gates in Montauk, who said he was looking for a retirement home in town. Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat who will be facing off against Republican Congressman George Santos (or whomever he says he is) in the upcoming election, was seen on the platform talking strategy with state Assemblyman Fred Thiele Jr. on the Sag Harbor platform.

HALF OF SUBWAY SYSTEM STILL SHUT DOWN

The delay on the western half of the subway line, caused by the new double-decker cars on their maiden voyage tearing out all the lighting in the ceiling of the tunnels because they were made 2 inches too tall, is still in effect. More than 4,000 light bulbs were ordered, but found not to fit into the old antique fixtures. New fixtures are on order and should be in shortly. Strangely, we found that the old, oddly sized bulbs are no longer being made. It turns out they never go out, and so there has never been a need to replace them since they were installed back in 1927.

YARD SALE NOVEMBER 18

The Hamptons Subway will have a giant yard sale at the Montauk Subway Yards down by the railroad station in that town all day on Saturday, November 18. It will consist of nearly 4,000 light fixtures — many damaged, some fine, all antique. Light bulbs remain in some, and they work. Others have shattered light bulbs and should be considered antique items only. Also being sold are the remains of 10 double-decker railway cars, made in Sweden, all of which have severe damage to their roofs, but are otherwise new.

THE TURKEY HAUL-OFF

Henry Happening, our new social director hired away from X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is to be in charge of subway after-hours activity, offering up another event to excite our customers. As you know, he ran the very successful after-hours spooky costume contest over Halloween when kids could get down on the tracks during the period from 2–6 a.m. — the third rail is shut off and our maintenance crews work through the night during that time — to walk through the tunnel from Westhampton to Montauk for a best costume prize.

His new offering is turkeys! One hundred frozen Butterball turkeys will be placed along the tracks by our arriving maintenance crewmen (and crewwomen) using wheelbarrows at 2 a.m. on the night of November 22. Beginning at 3 a.m. everyone is welcome to run down the escalators, onto the tracks and into the tunnels to search for the Butterballs and haul them off. It’s first come, first served, and it’s only one per customer.

Of course, the Butterballs each weigh about 40 pounds, so that’s easy to enforce. Also, the Turkey Haul-Off ends at 4 a.m. because we want them gone while they are still frozen and usable. The remaining ones will be removed by maintenance beginning at that hour.

TOKENS EXTRACTED

Crowds gathered on Tuesday morning at the Hamptons Subway Headquarters in Hampton Bays as the nozzle of a huge vacuum cleaner, usually used for cleaning up sand, snaked down into the basement of the headquarters and into the vault underneath, where 1.2 billion stored New York City subway tokens are being extracted. Onlookers noted that during the extraction process, the sound of the tokens coming up made a noise not unlike that of change jingling in your pocket.

The tokens are being poured out of vacuum cleaner bags and into potato trucks that take them to fishing draggers at the docks in Shinnecock; the boats then take them to large tankers offshore. The tankers cannot tie up at the docks in Shinnecock because Southampton Town refused permission. The tokens will cross the Atlantic — the tankers are only half full because of the weight — and be unloaded in the new African country of Basinoba, to be used as the country’s currency and replacing the dollar the country uses now.

The extraction process, ongoing 24/7, should take about 10 days, and though the jingling noise is keeping neighbors up, it needs to proceed for the Hamptons Subway to stay in business.

ACCIDENT VICTIM’S BEQUEST

A wealthy anonymous donor who was killed in an auto accident last Thursday in East Hampton has willed $1 million to the Hamptons Subway, provided the money is used to speed up service. We intend to use the money to purchase special equipment being built by a new company headed up by Commissioner Bill Aspinall’s brother, Biff Aspinall, that can magnetize the tracks and train wheels so speed can be increased from a maximum of 35 miles an hour to 75 miles an hour, around the turns, between stops.

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY

Due to a mix-up on the staff birthday calendar caused by a British intern who will go unnamed, we want to extend a very belated “Happy Birthday” to Jeanette Backulby of Hampton Bays. She turned 68 years old on the 11th of July and has worked all her life on the Hamptons Subway as a platform maintenance person. “They used to call us the ‘cleanup ladies’ back in the day,” she said, as she cut the birthday/apology cake at the subway headquarters. “But that was then, before #MeToo.”

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

We regret the further delay of the western end of the Hamptons Subway between Bridgehampton and Eastport. The new lighting should be in shortly. We are installing a special new lighting system in the tunnels that will save energy. The lights on the tracks will go on only when a train is within 100 feet of a particular lighting stanchion, and then it will go off 5 seconds after the last car passes.

We do not need lighting in the tunnels when the trains are not going through. And those on the trains won’t notice the difference. We expect this will halve our electric bill. The lights will be on all the time on the platforms, of course.

I have, by the way, already bought two of the damaged antique lighting fixtures, and after having a workman bend them back into shape, have installed them on either side of the front door of our oceanfront home in Southampton. They work perfectly. And they make a perfect partner to our front doorbell, which, when you press it, makes the sound of an oncoming locomotive.