Station Improvements

Lucius Kwok wrote:It's sort of an interesting technical exercise to ask yourself, if you ran the railroad, what would you do?

Well, you start by taking the padding out of the schedules. According to SEPTA's own analysis, there's 2-1/2 to 3 minutes wasted time in the current schedules through the tunnel. And given the way trains loaf along between Fern Rock and Temple, there's more padding elsewhere too.

Second, reintroduce the concept of hustle to railroad crews. Some of the [stuff] I see is [blasphemy] astounding--now I am not making this up: one day while boarding at Jenkintown, I saw an employee leave the train, go over to the row of newspaper boxes on the other side of the stairway to the underpass, and buy a paper. And to top it off, the guy paid for one paper and took three or four! And the less outrageous stuff is frustratingly frequent, like unauthorized employee stops and crew members standing around talking about the Eagles or an upcoming picking while they're supposed to be making relief and the train is late. Where the [bowa] is any discipline???

And if I might be allowed into the realm of wishful thinking, go to 2-2 seating systemwide. In a lot of cases, particularly where there's a relatively large number of people boarding, getting the passengers into their seats (think middle-seat shuffle) is more of a bottleneck than the big step from the platform onto the train. John Pawson collected data on this some years ago, and found that the loading time difference between high platforms and low platforms wasn't as great as one would think.

Matt, you have an excellent point there - there is an institutional lack of urgency at SEPTA. Isn't it telling that one of the hardest things to find at a SEPTA station is a clock? In a related topic, I was posting some old Reading timetable information from 1950 and 1963, specifically Crusader schedules. I thought it was pretty impressive how there were instructions on how "Trains having direct connections will wait if connection is in sight or known to be close." Train 600 was due in Jenkintown at 6:14am and was to wait 5 minutes for inbound 224 Hatboro local, due in Jenkintown at 6:11. With SEPTA, you would add 10 minutes of padding to those figures, OR you would watch from the arriving Hatboro train as your connection notched out the throttle and pulled out of the station.

I also find it fascinating that in an age where it is possible to identify the nanosecond and the attosecond and control clocks from an atomic master unit in Colorado, SEPTA's timekeeping is not even up to the mechanical watch standards of the 1930's when railroads ran like - and ran by - clockwork. (I sound old, and I'm not, just amazed that this is the accepted status quo. Just remember the words of Homer Simpson: "If you don't like your job, you don't strike... you just go in every day, and do it realllly half-a$$ed - that's the American way!")