(The following article by Jeff Gammage was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on October 12.)
PHILADELPHIA — Two days after the World Trade Center collapsed, Phyllis Berman was standing on the Amtrak platform in North Philadelphia, preparing to go back to her job in New York.
A young woman came running up from the parking lot, wrapped her arms around Berman and said, “We didn’t see you yesterday. We were so frightened.”
Then she ran back to her car.
Berman called out a surprised thanks. Because this woman, she was, well, not actually a friend, not really an acquaintance, she was – what was she?
She was someone Berman saw practically everyday of her working life, but only from across the lot or through a windshield. To Berman, who runs a language school in Manhattan, she was the woman who dropped off a roommate at the station each morning. She was part of what Berman calls “the strange life that we lead” – the daily commute from Philadelphia to New York and back.
Nearly 700 Philadelphia-area residents take on the commute, according to Amtrak, and these days they’re a pretty angry bunch.
Amtrak intends to boost the cost of monthly Philadelphia-to-New York passes from $633 to $1,008 – beyond the break-even point for many commuters, who say the increase threatens not just their income but their jobs. As riders consider switching to cheaper-but-longer commutes aboard buses or NJ Transit trains, the rate increase jeopardizes something else too, something subtle and intangible: The culture of the train.
The people who ride to New York in the morning and back to Philadelphia at night make up a kind of community within a community, spending three to four hours a day encased within the same speeding steel tube. Some spend more time with each other than they do with their kids.
To them, the train is more than 150-mph transportation. It’s a point of social connectivity, a place where they find the comfort of familiar faces and make friends of people they otherwise would never have met.
The guy who writes advertising copy chats with the librarian, the fashion designer with the financier, the physician with the toy-maker. They know things about one another – who is having a birthday, who is hoping for promotion, who has decided to go back to college.
“It’s a very interesting little social laboratory,” says Gaspar Taroncher, who knows of such matters, not only because he commutes but because he’s a science editor at the journal Nature in New York. “It’s a way of life that’s going to be severed just like that.”
There are rules on the rails. And small competitions. And strategies for obtaining things that matter – like seats, when the train pulls in to 30th Street Station.
“Mondays are standing room only,” says Jason Arnold, who lives in East Falls and designs toys for Fisher-Price, on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.
The trick to getting a seat, he says, is to be standing in front of a passenger-car door when the train stops. The problem is, nobody knows precisely where the train is going to stop.
“Some people play like a free safety. They stand back, just waiting,” he says.
Not Arnold. He heads for a spot known as “the cubby.”
“The cubby is high-risk, but high-reward,” he explains.
The cubby is, of course, not a cubby at all. It’s a narrow strip of platform, hard against a stairway, that allows room for only a few people to stand. If the train stops so a door faces the cubby, “that’s perfect, you’re right on,” Arnold says. But if it stops even a few feet beyond, “you’re screwed, trapped behind walls of people.”
Arnold has been commuting for two years, and he’s met some cool people along the way. One works for Google. Another for Viacom. “It’s invaluable in terms of a networking standpoint, but also in terms of, you have your little train clique.”
That’s how he met Stan Mallis, who lives in Manayunk. Mallis, who works for a New York advertising firm, taught Arnold some of the unwritten rules of the train.
One is: No talking after 10 minutes into the ride.
As the train pulls out of Philadelphia, it’s considered polite to make conversation. But after 10 minutes, you need to zip it so people can work. And if somebody else wants to talk, you’re under no obligation. Go ahead and pull out your laptop computer, read a book, listen to music or go to sleep.
Some rules Arnold figured out for himself. For instance: Do not mess with the people who ride in the Quiet Car.
The Quiet Car is just what it sounds like – a car that maintains library-strict silence, its stillness never to be broken by the ring of a cell phone or the beep of a pager.
Arnold watched as one poor man, not realizing he was in the Quiet Car, took out his cellphone and began chattering away. Another passenger stood up and started shouting at the guy. Others joined in.
“We call them the Quiet-Car Nazis,” Arnold says. “They’re not conductors or anything. They’re just average, crazy people.”
At her husband’s 50th birthday party, says Karen Schmitt, half the people there were train people. That’s how they introduce themselves. Train people.
“All of my friends in Philadelphia are people that I know from the train,” she says. “It’s social, it’s supportive. It’s kind of like a crisis thing – the crisis of having an incredibly long commute, and during the week not having much of a family life.”
Schmitt has been commuting for 15 years, from her home in Queen Village to her job as director of the Columbia University Breast Cancer Screening Partnership. By conservative estimate, she’s spent 16 months of her life on the train.
Like other commuters, she’s furious about the fare increase. Some people worry they’ll have to quit their jobs. Who can afford $12,000 a year to get to work?
“The effect of this whole thing,” says Berman, who runs the Riverside Language Program, “is there’s not going to be monthly riders.”
And with them, says Berman, who has been commuting for 18 years, will go a small, rolling society.
“I know these people more than I know my neighbors,” she says. “It’s a very important piece of the strange life that we lead.”