Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
Temperature is also an issue. Some recent summer, there was a fire at an MBTA Red Line station (probably Park Street). The fire department ordered the MBTA to shut off the power to that station, which had the side effect of stranding a train on the Longfellow Bridge. After an hour or two, the temperature inside that train was apparently over 100 degrees. (Depending on the vintage of Red Line car, some or all of the lights will run off the batteries in the car if there's no third rail power, but the HVAC system has no battery backup, as far as I can tell. There are windows that the crew can open in the cab so that they can look out to close the doors, but no windows intended to be opened by passengers.) At which point, some passengers decided to use the emergency brake / door release controls, climbed down onto the fence, and crossed two lanes of traffic to get to the sidewalk.
It probably would have gone better if the police had been there to block off the two lanes of traffic for several minutes, but they and the MBTA officials may have been too distracted by the fire.
The MBTA's position on this was that the pasengers leaving was unauthorized, but I have to think that at some point, someone staying in one of those cars would have suffered serious injury from the heat, and the risk of crossing traffic was probably worth taking. Also relevant here is that crossing traffic well before one is about to collapse is probably safer than waiting until one is ready to collapse.
All that said, in freezing temperatures, I'd much rather be on a heated train than at a closed station in the middle of nowhere with no clear plan of where I was going to find heat. I do think that if the train was really out of toilet paper, Amtrak needs to tweak their produres a bit, but I'd still rather be on a train with no toilet paper than out in the cold. (I also worry that Amtrak's practice of sometimes running long distance trains with a single locomotive is dangeous from the perspective that if the locomotive fails in certain ways, the HVAC systems in all the cars die with it, and if Amtrak didn't include a second locomotive in the consist, they have no way of getting one to the train in a timely fashion.)
