Hamptons Subway Back to Full Strength After Repairs

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

The 12 members of the International Monetary Fund who met in Manhattan last week accepted an invitation to tour our subway on Saturday after their meetings ended. They included the IMF’s Geoffrey Okamoto and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and a whole lot of other people.

Actors Bob Balaban and Alec Baldwin were seen reading scripts while straphanging on trains between Southampton and Bridgehampton and Amagansett and Montauk respectively on Thursday afternoon.

DELAYS

The delay on the Southampton to Shinnecock line originally scheduled for Sunday, January 14 from just 2–5 p.m. lasted right through to the end of the evening, and we regret that. The plan was for animal rights veterinarians to coax an 85-pound raccoon out of an air duct near Shinnecock Lane. He had taken up residence there. Unfortunately, one of the veterinarians got kidnapped by the raccoon, who, for five hours in the depths of the air duct, tried unsuccessfully to mate with the vet. The doctor, who was extracted a little after midnight and whose name is being withheld while we notify family, is now in fair condition at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital.

SUBWAY BACK TO FULL STRENGTH

The two subway cars that sideswiped each other during the Hamptons Subway Firecracker 200 subway train race are now back in service. The time between trains is now back down to 15 minutes.

ESCALATOR PROBLEM CONTINUES

As reported last week, the down escalators at both the Southampton and Bridgehampton stations have slowed to just 1 mile an hour from the regulation 2.5 miles an hour. The result is that people coming on the down escalators at these two stations sometimes cannot move fast enough to make it in time to board an incoming train. Servicepeople, including electricians, plumbers, heating experts, auto repair mechanics and transmission and muffler experts, have been unsuccessful so far in being able to fix this. And now the East Hampton down escalator has begun experiencing the same problem.

Several workmen have suggested that gears made abroad are to blame and so should be replaced, but after finding their source of manufacture and looking into it further, we found that the gear-making company is located in Pyongyang, North Korea, and its gears are no longer available in America, as the U.S. has put an embargo on all gears made there. Furthermore, we’ve learned that the North Korea escalator gears are to be found in nearly three-quarters of the escalators operating in America.

As a result, a new gear-making factory is being built in emergency hurry-up mode in Knoxville, Tennessee, and until that is completed sometime in the spring, Hamptons Subway is trying to find escalators out of service for having broken down because of other reasons and so might still have the particular down North Korean escalator gears in their innards, used but available. We hope to have something in place soon.

In the meantime, straphangers are urged to just hurry up a little on the down escalators even if they do not hear a train screeching in the station below.

AI

Please note that AI (artificial intelligence) is not being used anywhere on the subway system, and we have no plans to bring it in anytime soon.

MOVIE TO BE SHOWN ON PRESIDENTS DAY WEEKEND

Commissioner Bill Aspinall has announced that in conjunction with the Hamptons International Film Festival, a showing of Throw Momma from the Train starring Danny DeVito, Billy Crystal and Anne Ramsey will take place on the Southampton subway platform at 10 p.m. on Saturday night of Presidents Day weekend, February 17. The Hamptons International Film Festival often shows films in months when it is not in session.

It’s just a reminder that they will host their 10-day annual film festival in October. They have yet to announce 2024 festival dates, but make a note on your calendar for October. For Throw Momma from the Train, the admission is just one Hamptons Subway card swipe through the turnstiles. All are welcome, and when the trains rumble through, the projectionist will turn the volume up loud.

SUBWAY TUNNEL TO FOXWOODS SHUT DOWN

The planned 22-mile-long subway tunnel to Foxwoods Resort Casino from Sag Harbor, now headed for Connecticut and completed to a point eight miles off the North Fork underneath Long Island Sound, has been officially shut down by the Environmental Protection Agency. A black fluid identified as oil has been leaking in ever-increasing gushers into the tunnel resulting in not only the evacuation of all workmen but the sealing up of the tunnel at the start of the work in Sag Harbor so that no oil can back up into the main system.

At the present time, all workmen have been evacuated and no oil is being allowed to be pumped out into the ocean. The tunnel is now half full of what is estimated could be as much as a 300-billion-barrel oil strike, which if true, would be the largest in the world.

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

The movie being shown on our Southampton platform next month is one of my favorite films of all time. We hope that you think so too and get to the Southampton platform to see it. I really enjoy one part of it, where Momma is actually thrown from the train, which happens, I think, about in the middle of the show. Or maybe it’s toward the end.

Regarding this monstrous oil find that has closed the subway tunnel under construction between Sag Harbor and Foxwoods, I have to say that certainly this is a major blow to the pocketbooks of both the subway and the gambling casino. We are working on the problem and hope to have the construction begun again soon. If not, we intend to dig a more circuitous route to Foxwoods to get around this disastrous and totally unexpected pool of oil. Interestingly, as the surge of oil has begun to fill up our huge dig, levels of underground oil pools in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Venezuela and Iran are reportedly lowering. No one knows quite why that is.