Dan's Papers - July 18, 2008 - The Hampton Subway Newsletter

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and Rabbi Marc Schneier were seen boarding a Westhampton Beach train just two hours before the Jewish Sabbath was to begin at sundown on Friday. The rabbi said they were getting Starbucks coffee in Hampton Bays and would be returning in plenty of time, if the lines were not too long. Martha Stewart was in Amagansett on the platform there, eating a PowerBar on Monday morning. She looked terrific. Writer E. L. Doctorow was with singer Dolly Parton over in Eastport, getting on a train there. Donald Trump was on the Southampton platform with architect Peter Cook, measuring a wall down there with a tape measure.

Our esteemed commissioner, Bob Aspinall, was on hand in Sag Harbor with a silver-handled shovel to make the first ceremonial dig into the earth so the construction on the new subway tunnel to Connecticut can get underway. The tunnel, and after that, the subway tracks and the subway cars, will go on a half-hour non-stop journey under Shelter Island and the North Fork and Long Island Sound, to bring people directly to the main hotel and casino building. Passengers will arrive right beneath the giant slot-machine casino, and the escalators will take them directly from the subway platform right into the hall. There will be no gambling on the train, but there will be slot machines on a platform at the Foxwoods stop. The spur should be completed in two years.

I want to know how the subway can be allowed to go under Shelter Island without the permission of the town government.

Answer: If you go under the island deep enough, the land there is the property of the United States government. We had hoped to go under the island not so deep, but the island government said they would oppose the project if we tried to do that. They also said they would not allow a stop to be on Shelter Island, and we said if that's the way they wanted it, that's what they would get. It would be a seven-story escalator ride back to the surface from down where we will be if they ever want a stop. So at no time in the future, even if a less party-pooping Shelter Island government were installed, could a stop there be created.

I apologize to the people of the Hamptons that the approvals for the Foxwoods spur came so quickly, resulting in my being unable to hold a referendum or an opinion poll about the project. But we had the money - we're using $500 million of the $1.2 billion that the Kingdom of Basinoba paid us when they bought our entire warehouse stock of subway tokens, and we wanted to invest in a new expansion that would be an exciting project. The vote by the Subway's board of directors, by the way, was three in favor and two opposed.

We feel this is an exciting investment, even if it is a gamble in hard times.

On another matter, the lighting in the tunnels in the western half of our subway system are now completely automated to turn on and off only when a train comes through. As you know, since the trains move along and the lighting turns on and off with the train, those on board will not notice the difference. Indeed, the only real way that passengers will even be aware of this is that on the platforms themselves, the subway tunnel lights will turn on about 40 seconds before a train arrives. (The platform lights are on all the time, of course). So passengers can get ready to board a train a half-minute before it arrives. Of course, this is a major energy-saving matter. Hampton Subway goes green!