New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Unusable stairs add to rail woes
Buses replaced canceled Shoreline trains
NEW HAVEN — The concrete stairway leading to the State Street railroad station has been replaced, but has been taped off for weeks, unusable by commuters coming and going on MetroNorth and Shore Line East.
Lu Leahy, who rides in from Essex to her job at the Susman, Duffy & Segaloff law firm, is tired of getting her feet wet every time it rains, because a major puddle forms at the bottom of the stairway to the side of the entryway.
“When it rains, at the bottom of those stairs there’s a ton of water,” Leahy said. “We have asked two or three times, what’s the deal? I don’t like going to work with my feet wet.”
Leahy is a member of the Shore Line East Riders Advocacy Group, which has complained to the state Department of Transportation since last year about canceled and late trains and other issues. Many of the complaints have resulted from Amtrak restoring the track bed and taking a track out of service. Amtrak runs Shore Line East under contract with the DOT.
Last year, buses were used for four out of seven daily trains because of the track work on the Shoreline. This spring, the tracks between Branford and New Haven have been worked on.
The stairs are just another inconvenience the commuters must deal with.
“It’s been done for a couple months,” Leahy said. “It was torn up all winter for a long time and now it appears completed to us for at least two months, and there’s barriers and tape up so you can’t use it.”
She said that in the morning, if it’s been raining, “you can leap 21⁄2 to 3 feet” over the puddle, but it’s not safe to jump onto the steps. She said using the ramp on the other side of the entry takes extra time and that she has eight minutes to get to her train from the office. Also, the Yale University shuttle waits at the bottom of the stairs on the north side.
Kevin Nursick, a DOT spokesman, said in an email that the main stairway will open by June 26 “pending receipt of new hand-railing system and installation. Construction crews have repaired the stairs and they will be ‘sealed’ at a later time.”
Meanwhile, the riders are increasingly frustrated by having to take CT Transit buses because of mechanical breakdowns on the Amtrak trains. The riders had been promised Dattco coaches to replace out-of-service trains.
On May 31, DOT Rail Administrator Carl Jackson wrote to Susan Feaster of Essex, spokeswoman for the riders, “It is a standard procedure for Amtrak to replace SLE trains that are unexpectedly canceled with CT Transit buses. This process offers the fastest and most economical response to recover the train’s operating times. Unfortunately, [Dattco] cannot give us this same emergency response, and the CT transit (buses) are our best alternatives for customers to get to work on or close to schedule as possible under these conditions.”
But Feaster, who said recently her train was delayed 25 minutes on a Monday so that Amtrak trains could pass, said more has to be done for Shore Line East riders. As for Dattco buses, Feaster said, “I heard Amtrak didn’t want to use them because they were too expensive.”
She said CT Transit buses are not adequate for traveling Interstate 95. “There was another woman that literally was … seconds away from you know what, losing it,” she said, because of motion sickness.
“The Shore Line East is still not good and it’s not going to get any better until they put some money into it,” Feaster said.
Jackson emailed Feaster and others last week about using Dattco buses, saying “we will discuss internally and with Amtrak, options for using coach buses instead of transit buses during emergencies. I can’t make any commitments to this today; proximity, timing and availability of coach-style buses will help us determine whether this is an option. In the spirit of customer service we will investigate if a change can be made and we get back to you. Thank you for your patience and cooperation.”