This morning's ride into DC was nice and relaxing. I got onto the "quiet" car so I could read some of my book. The quiet car is the car at the furthest from the forward motion of the train and is a car in which people can zonk out or read and must stay off of their cell phones and if talking must have quiet conversation. I describe the quiet car as being "furthest from forward motion" because the engine isn't allways on the front of the train. Sometimes the cars are pushed and sometimes they are pulled.
This morning heading southbound I was on the East side of the train. I know this because I was able to enjoy the sun coming up. It was slightly above the horizon all the way in. As we passed Greenbelt a metro subway train had pulled out and was beside us (within one hundred feet anyway) and we were riding side-by-side for awhile. It looked to me like the train engineer sped up the locamotive a bit before the tracks diverged onto their separate routes. We pulled ahead as the I lost sight of the metro. I thought "we win".
Pulling into union station the train slows down gradually before it stops. The platform we were pulling up to was a low platform and one of the amtrak workers was out on the end with one of their glorified golf carts. He sped up onto our platform from the far side and gassed it to get ahead of us to the station before we stopped and unloaded our crowd of riders into his way. I thought to myself as he zipped by us: "we lose".
Welcome to "Commute Madness" - my name is Dave and I take the MARC commuter train into and out of Washington DC every day. I see so much madness out there that I need to start recording it. Some days I will report what I see, on other days I look back in the past at some of the observations I've made. Please Enjoy. :-)
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