Hamptons Subway Hires George Santos, Adds New Paintjob

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Martha Stewart was in Amagansett on the platform there eating a power bar on Monday morning. She looks terrific. Singer Debbie Harry was seen up in Eastport getting on a train there. Builder Joe Farrell was seen on the Southampton platform with architect Peter Cook measuring a wall down there with a tape measure.

DIGGING ON NEW SUBWAY EXTENSION TO FOXWOODS BEGINS

Our esteemed commissioner, Bill Aspinall, was on hand in Sag Harbor with a silver-handled shovel to make the first ceremonial dig into the earth so the construction on the new subway tunnel to Connecticut can get underway. The tunnel, and after that the subway tracks and the subway cars, will go on this half-hour nonstop journey under Shelter Island and the North Fork and Long Island Sound to bring people directly to the main hotel and casino building itself. Passengers will arrive beneath the giant slot machine casino, and the escalators will take them directly from the subway platform into this hall. There will be no gambling on the train, but there will be slot machines on the platform at the Foxwoods stop. The spur should be completed in two years.

LETTERS

Dear Sirs:

I want to know how the subway can be allowed to go under Shelter Island without the permission of the town government.

Edna, Resident of Shelter Island

Answer: If you go under the island deep enough, the land there is the property of the United States government. We had hoped to go not so deep under the island, but the island government said they would oppose the project if we tried to do that. They also said they would not allow a stop to be on Shelter Island and we said if that’s the way they wanted it, that’s what they would get. It would be a seven-story escalator ride back to the surface from down where we will be if they ever want a stop. So at no time in the future, even if a less party-pooping Shelter Island government were installed, could a stop there be created.

NEW HIRE

Commissioner Bill Aspinall is pleased to announce that George Santos, who was recently a congressman in the House of Representatives in Washington, has been hired to be the new director of operations for Hamptons Subway.

“Santos has all the necessary qualifications to run a subway system such as ours. Born and raised in Brazil in a well-to-do family, he was given the job of commissioner of railroads for all of Brazil by his father, who owned them all. He was only 15 at the time,” Aspinall says. “Subsequently, he was accepted to Harvard University and completed his undergraduate work there, graduating with the dual major of English Literature and Railroad Operations. He can recite the entire volume of Homer’s Odyssey, although, as he says, he is too shy to do it in public. And he soon became chief comptroller and part owner of the Atchison, Topeka and Sante Fe Railway here. Among his most recent jobs before becoming a congressman was advising Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk about his proposed high-speed transit system connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco and also about Musk’s space rockets.”

Aspinall continues, “Santos has a doctorate in Spaceships from Yale University and is good friends with a number of the astronauts who have landed on the moon. Santos’ recent decision to focus on underground subway systems is a good thing for us indeed; 114 congressmen are his friends, voting side by side to keep him in Congress when they had the opportunity in recent weeks, and this is another feather in his cap. Surely his buddy-buddy up-close-and-personal relationships in Congress will bring heaps of money our way as we embark on our new plan to extend the Hamptons Subway to New England and beyond.”

COLOR GREEN TO BE ABANDONED

Our efforts to show solidarity with the environment last year by painting all the subway cars green worked out pretty well. However, it turns out that this paint, which is now peeling, is chock-full of asbestos, mercury and other bad materials we should have known about beforehand. So now it is being removed. We are pleased, however, that the green paint stood the test of time for a good 10 months before going bad like this. To accommodate the repainting of all the trains with a new red, white and blue coating to signify our solidarity with America, three cars at a time will be out of service so the subway system does not have to suffer a major slowdown until the repainting is completed in March. And until then, trains will be arriving at 12-minute intervals rather than the regular seven. A minor inconvenience.

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

I apologize to the people of the Hamptons about the Foxwoods spur approvals coming so quickly, resulting in my being unable to hold a referendum or an opinion poll about the project. But we had the money — we’re using $500 million of the $1.2 billion that the Kingdom of Basinoba paid us when they bought our entire warehouse stock of subway tokens as you know, and we wanted to invest in a new expansion that would be an exciting project. The vote by the subway’s board of directors, by the way, was 3 in favor and 2 opposed. We feel that this is an exciting investment, even if it is a gamble in hard times.

On another matter, the lighting in the tunnels in the western half of our subway system is now completely automated to turn on and off only when a train comes through. We had thought this had been done a few weeks ago, but apparently, it did not work properly in Hampton Bays. So this is a fix. So now, it’s all working and those on board will not notice the difference.

Indeed, the only real way that passengers will even be aware of this is that on the platforms themselves, the subway tunnel lights in the close-by-100 yards will turn on about 40 seconds before a train arrives. (The platform lights are on all the time, of course). So passengers can get ready to board a train a half-minute before it arrives. Of course, this is a major energy-saving matter.