The Night the Long Island Railroad Erased Farmingdale

May 18, 2002

by Andrew E. Carlan

--The following adventure appeared in the author’s diary under the date May 8, 2002.

In the past, its trains had disappeared. This is my first experience of the Long Island Railroad causing a whole village to disappear.

The dark clouds built up long before this ordeal. I stayed in Manhattan Wednesday evening with friends. I drank a little and decided to dance until the cows came home. But they never did. By the time my thoughts turned distastefully to the Long Island Railroad and getting home, it was past midnight.

I read the miniature timetable under a bright light. Trains left a few minutes after the hour. Only that was in the afternoon I realized later when I took a second look at 1 AM. The next train? The next train left Penn Station at 3:16 AM. No more drinking or dancing. I felt droopy. When asked "come on, let’s dance," all I said was "I’m waiting for a train."

The track was announced. About 15 phantoms stood on the platform while the crew figured out how to open the doors. Finally the doors up front did. That was my first premonition of trouble ahead. My second was the two conductors. Two females who looked like Laurel and Hardy. When I asked Laurel if the back doors were going to be opened, she seemed unsure, unsure whether she worked for the railroad.

Farmingdale is on the Ronkonoma Line. There are no wealthy communities on this branch where lawyers and others accustomed to demand "run of the mill" service congregate. So it gets the dirtiest trains and worst on-time performance. On weekends I have waited for trains that disappear completely. They are so late, they are scratched. Otherwise, they might step on the heels of the train in front of them.

It occurred to me that the 3:16 AM is the perfect train for the MTA [the Metropolitan Twilight Authority] to satisfy affirmative action guidelines. It had more crewmembers than passengers. Since these two conductors obviously were better at opening the front of the train I decided to be cautious and sit up front.

My worst fear at this hour is falling asleep. I have never seen Ronkonoma. But rumors suggested if I dozed off going east I’d rather wake up in London. The entire trip is only an hour. For a distance of 30 miles, that doesn’t quite qualify for TGV (Tres Grande Vitesse) status on France’s SNCF. Jamaica station in Queens, still in New York City, gives the dozing rider a second chance. Tickets are rechecked. Other trains connect there.

At Jamaica Laurel, who was wider than she was tall, got into a brawl with a drunk. The train didn’t move. He withheld from her where he got on or where he was going. She must have spent ten minutes repeating the same question. All she got in reply was a fog horn. Remember there were only about 15 passenger on the entire train. What was Laurel doing during the half hour to Jamaica? She was supposed to be clipping tickets, surely not sleeping. The drunk also refused to disclose whether he had a ticket at all. Perhaps we were waiting for his lawyer to be roused out of bed and come down to the railroad station to protect his client from being grilled without assistance of counsel. Laurel obviously found this task for which she had no flair so challenging she forgot to recheck the tickets. Anyone could have walked on the train in their pajamas.

In a world where disability employment didn’t include responsibility for the health and safety of 15 passengers with an IQ of 50, she would have called the railroad or New York City police. They would have ended the impasse by throwing him off the train. After this ride into the landing beaches of hell is over, it occurred to me that she had more to hide than her unresponsive passenger.

After Jamaica, my suspicions were washed away in the oblivion of sleep. I remember Mineola. That sounds like a movie with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, but it’s the next stop I remember until Hicksville on this sour milk train. I woke up reassured, two stations to Farmingdale.

At Bethpage the doors opened, but neither Laurel or Hardy bothered to announce the station. In the wink of an eye, we were moving again, I gathered myself and my belongings together and headed for the door. The next 2 or 3 miles are the slowest in railroad records. All trains reduce speed to a funeral march. In time this one fell over into the Farmingdale station as if grasping its final breath. The platform was there, lit up cheerfully as was the parking lot. Taxis were at the ready to compete for the shadowy couple of figures getting off.

The train stopped. It stood there as if the mechanism and its human tenders lost the ability to communicate. We were hostages of the Long Island Railroad thanks to Laurel and Hardy. "Open the door!" I called out. Nothing. "Open the damn door!" The train began to pull out. After all, it had satisfied its statuary obligation by stopping for the required time.

The train pulled away from Farmingdale so slowly as if it, too, regretted the last stop in a warm, protective, civilized world. The platform is so long that it had not fully pulled out of the station when Laurel woke up to what was happening. She reached halfway around her globe and pulled her keys from her pocket. She rushed to the cab. Her decisive action, the first of the entire trip, got the engineer to apply the brakes near the edge of the platform. She and the now awake engineer were yelling at to each other over the intercom. The quick-witted engineer made up his mind in a moment. "What is once written cannot be unwritten."

I had visions of leaving Nassau County and crossing the international border into Suffolk, into a dark, unfamiliar gothic territory that lay beyond. Fear now welled up as I thought of films circa World War II of a night train crossing the border from the safety of Switzerland, my home country, into Nazi Germany, where I would be devoured by the receding mist,

The train picked up it first real speed down the stretch into Suffolk and beyond just for fun. Sure, I thought the only reason the train stopped a second time at the end of the platform was for our Swiss engineer to turn the train over to some sadistic Nazi in a hurry to get us to a concentration camp. Whatever fate had in store was now ready to materialize. We continued on through a night that soon would turn to day in a strange and unhallowed place.

Laural and Hardy were now joined to negotiate the return of us six passenger made refugees from our home country. "You can take a cab back from Wyandanch. How much will it cost?" I was the first to speak being a member of the Nassau bar. Like Boss Tweed who made millions on the overruns in building New York’s city hall a century ago, my fear had turned to greed and my theory of the case against the railroad from negligence to intentional emotional and physical distress. I was going for punitive damages.

Laurel took a wad of bills out of her pocket. I presume from its size that it wasn’t hers but the railroad’s. She began to pass out five dollar bills. "Are you kidding," I snarled. You know taxis out here in the boondocks, once they are beyond the village they charge whatever the traffic will bear. I’ll bet it will cost us thirty dollars at least. And what about my lost time tomorrow because I will have to sleep until midafternoon just to make up for yours and your gang’s incompetence."

The others said nothing, being mainly qualified minorities like Laurel but not Hardy. Hardy hardly spoke, which led me to believe she had the job because she represented the dumb. I don’t think she was deaf. She was just too stupefied to speak. I passed out my business card to the other refugees and said "I think we have a case against the Long Island Railroad. I know it is an everyday laughingstock. But this is unique. Someone could write a TV situation comedy series based on this blunder. I don’t think E. Virgil Conway, Chairman of the the Metropolitan Twilight Authority wouldn’t like seeing this story in the one of New York papers."

Just then two fellows who were waiting to go in the city for a new workday figured out why we running back and forth between a taxi and the stopped train. "The westbound train will be coming in seven minutes," one of them said. "Sure," I answered. That’s why this branch has such an impressive on-time record." "I can’t talk about the entire record, he answered with down-to-earth honesty, "but this train is always on time."

Just as he said that, the headlight of the train headed back across the border to freedom appeared in the lifting mist. It felt good when the doors closed without any border guards getting on to interrogate us. In ten minutes we crossed back into Nassau (Switzerland) and then the border town of Farmingdale. All the doors opened. Farmingdale stood before us in all its glory just as I had left it twenty four hours earlier.

The author believes this to be a true and faithful rendering of events. He claims the protection of First Amendment against the corporation and its agents. The author presumes any reasonable person able to distinguish between comedic exaggeration and facts. No malice is intended beyond the actual dereliction of duty and foreseeable consequences of that dereliction of those mentioned.