SEPTA: The tragedy and the prevarication

As you may have heard, a woman was killed by an oncoming SEPTA train at the Bryn Mawr regional station on June 11 while trying to retrieve her dog, which had jumped onto the tracks. I know nothing about the details of this tragedy except for what I read in the Inquirer's story the next day. However, I was an indirect participant in it, since I was a passenger aboard the 5:39 R5 train from Thorndale that was halted at Paoli because of the accident.

When our train stopped, a conductor announced to us that there was an unspecified problem up the line that would delay us briefly. A few minutes later, it was reported that a fatality had occurred that might shut down service for one to two hours (in the event, it was closer to three).

The conductor suggested that our best alternative was to take the 105 bus down Lancaster Avenue toward the city. No one seemed to know exactly where the bus stop was. There was no plan of evacuation, merely individual decision-making by the passengers. Some got off, and some remained.

The train moved up a short distance for reasons that weren't entirely clear, and then back to the station, where we were informed that all passengers wishing to leave should do so immediately through the rear exit, since this would be our "last chance" to detrain. It was clear that the train crew wanted us off its hands.

We found (on our own) the 105 bus stop, and after ten or 15 minutes a bus arrived, although there was no indication that it had been specially dispatched. It did not shuttle passengers "to their destinations," as a SEPTA spokesman told the Inquirer, but merely took its normal route.

On our own

The driver did his best to assist those of us who'd been stranded, but it was clear he had no special instructions or knowledge of the situation. No one asked where we were going; no one took any responsibility for getting us there. The riders from the train were simply on their own.

My wife and I got out at Ardmore and took the 44 bus to our destination in Bala Cynwyd. The driver of that bus knew nothing of the situation either.

In short, SEPTA appears to have had no plan for dealing with this emergency, and took no steps to deal with it or to assist passengers stranded, as we were, many miles from home. The SEPTA spokesman lied to the Inquirer reporter, Sam Wood, both about the authority's response and, by inference, its policy in such situations.

Aging stock

False and misleading statements about breakdowns and interruptions in train service, particularly one such as this that involved a fatality, add insult to the injury daily faced by SEPTA's riders. The R5 line seems constitutionally incapable of running on schedule. Some of the rolling stock dates back to 1952, a year when Harry Truman was president and Casey Stengel was managing the Yankees.

The only excuse for delay I hadn't experienced previously, and repeatedly—slippery rail (or dust from too much drought); electrical and signal failure; equipment breakdown and vandalism; snafus with AMTRAK, whose comings and goings are, if anything, even more random than SEPTA's— was an actual fatality.

We all know that SEPTA is perennially underfunded, and routinely stiffed by Harrisburg. We know that the commonwealth, like the country, treats rail travel as a poor sister, and that infrastructure is crumbling everywhere. But there is finally no excuse for train service in and around one of the nation's largest cities that would put Albania to shame. And there should be absolutely no tolerance for bald-faced misrepresentations.