21 Nov 2012 5:17 pm
The other night Rachel Maddow did a report on the A train to Far Rockaway (Queens, NY) being washed out from hurricane Sandy, and what the MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) is doing about it.This story really hit home with me, since I lived most of my life on the other side of Jamaica Bay from the Rockaways, and rode that train out there many times.WATCH THE VIDEOTranscript:MADDOW: Best new thing in the world. OK, let`s cue up the train tape right where it crosses the water. OK, what you are looking at here is one of the strangest parts of the subway system in America`s largest city. This is the A Train, the longest subway line crossing the water of Jamaica Bay. New York City is truly huge both in terms of the number of people who live here and how much land the city covers. The A Train, this section of it, goes from Queens across Jamaica Bay. As you see here, the trip over the water is long enough that -- I kid you not -- pigeons have learned to get on the train at one end and ride it to the other side. The pigeons commute. And where they are going is the Rockaways, a 11-mile long Atlantic Beach Peninsula, which is still part of New York City, but it`s more than an hour`s ride from Manhattan and it has sand and waves and lifeguards all at the southern edge of New York City. The Rockaways are a funny place. It`s got a dozen distinct neighborhoods with a lot of housing for the elderly, also a lot of housing projects when the city put thousands of low income families way, way, way, out there -- an hour`s ride by subway from the Manhattan skyline that everybody thinks of when they think of New York. Half a century ago when these projects went up, the urban planners of New York City thought that the elderly and poor people didn`t need to be near town or near jobs, so they put them way, way, way out there in the Rockaways. Now, working poor families making long commutes from the beach to their jobs in the city. And conversely in the summer, especially, you can find surfers toting their surf boards on the subway out to the part of New York City where the word swells doesn`t rich people, it means waves. So, it`s thanks to that miraculous and very long A Train subway route that you can move between the Rockaways and town. It just takes awhile. That was the deal before hurricane Sandy. And I`m sorry to tell you these trusty A Train tracks with the families and the surfers and the commuting pigeons, those tracks got washed out last month by hurricane Sandy. The storm surge swamped the tracks and twisted them and dropped all the (INAUDIBLE) on them, they are not expected to get fixed for many, many long months -- which means tens of thousands of people, our fellow Americans, are logistically stuck out there in the Rockaways. Lots of them still without power and heat in their homes. The Rockaways are not an island, but for people out there, that is how life is being lived right now. After the storm, the Rockaways got so hard to reach that some bicyclists pedaled in supplies, I think partly to prove that they could it, but partly because with gas supplies short and ration, biking still worked. Believe it or not, the U.S. Navy made an amphibious landing a couple weeks ago because that was the best way to bring in equipment. Just pull up to the beach and go. Today, we got some news. The folks that run the subway system just posted this video. Look at that. The city -- look at that -- the city has trucked in 20 subway cars for the Rockaway side of the busted tracks. They did this in the dark four nights running, bringing in the subway cars and putting them back together. The replacement train is going to run along the eastern part, the far part of the Rockaways where an old line remains intact. And then when you get to the busted part, a bus is going to take people across a bridge, across the broken down part of the tracks, and then the bus will drop folks off where they can catch another train and continue their commute. They are calling this rejiggered line the H Train. And it starts tomorrow morning. This H Train is not a perfect fix, but it won`t work for anybody. But it gives something back to the people who were left up a creek without a paddle after Sandy. The H Train and the will and ingenuity and the long nights working of everybody involved to make it happen and the city`s manifest determination to not forget that far flung part of the world again, and life looking ever so slightly up again because of all that hard work, that I humbly submit as the best new thing in the world today. While the subways to Manhattan (except for the L train) are pretty much back to normal, the A train to Far Rockaway will be out of commission for awhile. The line runs through Broad Channel, with the tracks sitting not far above the water, and the system was pounded during the hurricane. Debris, boats, and entire docks found themselves sitting atop the tracks, and long sections had the supporting ballast completely washed out. A section where the track support was totally washed out.To provide temporary transportation in the Rockaways, the MTA trucked subway cars to the peninsula to create shuttle trains until full service can be restored. The MTA has given no timeline for full restoration of the A line.LOL....I could see my High School in that video.