Reason 43: Tardy Trains

100 Reasons I'm Retiring

This is not so much about a slightly late train—which happens pretty often—but about a train that sat on the track for a couple of hours. On Thursday, February 22, I was headed into Philadelphia on the 6:23 when Amtrak shifted our train to a dead track. We knew we were in trouble when we heard on the engineer’s radio, “Hey, I think they’ve switched us to a dead track.”

And so they had.

We sat on the “dead track” for almost two hours without lights or heat as the engineer tried to find a way to get us going again, but eventually, we were told that we would need to exit onto another train. A “rescue” train came about half an hour later and we needed to step down from the “dead train” and step up onto the “rescue train”—which was already full of passengers we were making late for work—and were told to do so without touching the train on the live track.

Most of us on the 6:23 are friendly with each other so we maintained our good spirits. The next morning we joked about how brave we were to try this again. It’s not an event I want to repeat.

And, honestly, where was the Red Cross with our coffee and donuts? We all felt cheated!

What’s a slightly scary situation you’ve been in before you retired?