Dan's Papers - January 16, 2009 -

Week of January 16 to 22, 2009
Riders this week: 5,842
Rider miles this week: 58,112

Bernie Madoff may be confined to his home, but the ruling didn't say which home. He was at his oceanfront home in Montauk last Wednesday and was seen straphanging underground on our subway train going eastbound between Napeague and Montauk about 11 a.m. From the looks of the bags he carried, it appeared he had been shopping. But when we asked him what was in them, he first said that underground he expected no one would notice him out of the house and after that, he denied being Bernie Madoff.

There will be a one hour delay getting down to or up from the platform at Water Mill this Thursday afternoon, as workmen are bringing a new down escalator from a truck on the street down the concrete stairs to the subway platform. The new escalator will replace the broken escalator at that station, which broken over Christmas when a six-year-old boy got his hat and both mittens, which were knitted by his grandmother, caught in the old escalator stairs, causing it to grind to a halt. The event frightened the little boy, but did not injure him. Parents are urged not to use mittens or hats that link together, particularly when the link is made of metal clips. It will gum up an escalator, if given the chance. And, worst case, you could lose a kid. The workmen will carry the bulky new escalator stairs down the concrete stairs on Thursday from 1 to 2 p.m. After that, the concrete stairs will reopen. If you have to go up or down, do it before or after. Be warned.

The 13 double-decker Hampton Subway cars that got damaged on their inaugural run last June because they were too tall to fit safely through our underground tunnels are finally on their way back to Sweden where they were made. Numerous lawsuits had been filed, involving damage to the underside of the ceilings and its lighting fixtures and to the roofs of the cars, but it's all been settled, and if you want to see 13 damaged Swedish subway cars that were used only once on their way back to Europe, drive down to the beach anywhere in the Hamptons and watch them pass just offshore on Wednesday. They will be strapped atop a Japanese freighter and, calculating their speed out of the Manhattan's Pier 17, they should be going by the Hamptons around 8 a.m. that day.

We have been informed that the $1.3 trillion public works expenditure that Barack Obama expects to have after the Congress votes it into law next month will include a project to paint the Hampton Subway cars. Well, we have just finished a big painting of all the cars, pink and green, the colors of the Hampton Subway. So we don't need them painted again.

We want the President to know that we are entirely opposed to this. According to our sources, the job will be accomplished by 146 former Wall Street investment bankers working for three weeks underground, at night, at our subway yards in Montauk, where the trains get serviced between uses.

This is a lot of people milling around, and we have lots of workmen's tools and ladders and cleaning equipment and other things of value and we sure don't want no light fingered strangers down there. Who will be monitoring them? How do we know they can paint? Will we have assurances that if this painting crew spills some paint they will take responsibility for cleaning it up?

We also think these people will be just in the way. The cars come and go, even at night. It's a big operation, running a subway company. We can't have people around bollixing up the works all the time. It will result in poor service and we cannot have that. Also, as I said, we just painted all the cars. They could have warned us.