I don't ride the NH line, but I gather from the MN website and from this morning's paper that they did indeed restore normal service yesterday.
I'd expected to see the news spread all over the papers, the blogs, and railroad.net, but there's hardly a peep. No inside stories, no blow-by-blows of the first day back. And nothing, nada, zilch, bubkiss on railroad.net.
In a way, it's a testimony to the quality of service that M-N supplies every day that everyone (people here included) think of it as simply a return to normal. But it must be frustrating to the people who sweated and labored and took all kinds of @#$% over the past 12 days getting service back ASAP, when their beyond-the-call-of-duty efforts and accomplishments get so little public recognition.
To me, this episode is a reminder of how many moving parts (and points of failure) a system like M-N has and of how many people (and systems) have to work right, with no errors or mistakes, to keep the whole thing running smoothly. What should surprise and impress us is not that these incidents happen, but that they happen so seldom. And that they get resolved so quickly. (Certain governments -- who shall remain nameless, as there's more than one I'm thinking of -- could learn a lesson.)
I'd expected to see the news spread all over the papers, the blogs, and railroad.net, but there's hardly a peep. No inside stories, no blow-by-blows of the first day back. And nothing, nada, zilch, bubkiss on railroad.net.
In a way, it's a testimony to the quality of service that M-N supplies every day that everyone (people here included) think of it as simply a return to normal. But it must be frustrating to the people who sweated and labored and took all kinds of @#$% over the past 12 days getting service back ASAP, when their beyond-the-call-of-duty efforts and accomplishments get so little public recognition.
To me, this episode is a reminder of how many moving parts (and points of failure) a system like M-N has and of how many people (and systems) have to work right, with no errors or mistakes, to keep the whole thing running smoothly. What should surprise and impress us is not that these incidents happen, but that they happen so seldom. And that they get resolved so quickly. (Certain governments -- who shall remain nameless, as there's more than one I'm thinking of -- could learn a lesson.)
