(The Philadelphia Daily News posted the following article by Rose DeWolf on its website on April 24.)
PHILADELPHIA — For Marcella Ross and thousands of other SEPTA riders, yesterday was a you-can’t-get-there-from-here kind of day.
It took Ross more than six hours to get to work, and she got there only because a co-worker she phoned for help gave her a lift part of the way.
Several unrelated SEPTA incident delayed thousands of rail commuters. The snarl was so bad that many people gave up and went home.
North of the Fern Rock Transportation Center in Philadelphia, overhead wires fell, paralyzing SEPTA’s R2 Warminster line and the R5 Lansdale/Doylestown line.
And in Bucks County, a freight train derailed, blocking service on the R3 West Trenton line. Then the R7 – the alternative route to the R3 – was shut down after a pedestrian was struck and killed by an Amtrak train in Bridesburg. The accident caused a two-hour delay and closed the Trenton corridor, authorities said.
The Amtrak Northest Corridor and the R7 lines were reopened at about 6:30 p.m. CSX spokesman Bob Sullivan said freight trains should be running this morning.
SEPTA did not expect service to be fully restored today, but spokesman Jim Whitaker says the Bucks County line will run between Trevose and Center City.
If you counted on any one of those trains yesterday, you had a problem. Ross, who commutes from her home in New Castle, Del., to her job at Applied Skills Industries in Huntingdon Valley, Montgomery County, had to count on two of the three.
“I normally take a bus to the rail station in Claymont, Delaware, then take the R2 to Market Street East. I switch there to the R3, which takes me to Philmont [the rail station near Hungtingdon Valley],” Ross explained.
The R2 line from Delaware did get her to Market East, but that, she says, “is where the chaos began.” She discovered that the R3 line was not running, and SEPTA wasn’t offering shuttle buses to R3 riders in either direction.
“I found the closest I could get to work was Jenkintown,” said Ross. SEPTA was running shuttle buses between Jenkintown and Fern Rock for R2 Warminster and R5 Lansdale/Doyles-town commuters.
So Ross went to Fern Rock, boarded a bus, and got to Jenkintown. But it wasn’t until 11:30 a.m. that a co-worker with a car could get away to fetch her. Ross had started for work at 6 a.m.
“They should have had shuttle service for R3 passengers, too,” said Ross of SEPTA. “And SEPTA just announced that fares are going up. Ha! Ain’t that a laugh!”
Ross met a lot of fellow sufferers at Jenkintown, where suburbanites heading for Philadelphia had long waits for seats on the shuttle buses heading south. The problem, explained a SEPTA staffer who was directing commuters to the buses, “is that it takes two buses to accommodate all the passengers in one car of a train. And we don’t have that many buses.”
SEPTA spokesman Gary Fairfax said yesterday’s derailment and downed wires were bad-luck occurrences that weren’t related.
SEPTA has not determined why the wires fell near Wayne Junction, where the R2, the R3, the R5 and the Airport line trains pass before heading in different directions, said Fairfax.