(The following story by Genevieve Reilly appeared on the Connecticut Post website on October 10.)
FAIRFIELD, Conn. — Ray Battaglia commutes to New York City every day. Thursday was no different as he boarded the 8:16 a.m. Metro-North train out of Fairfield to New York’s Grand Central Terminal. No different, that is, until the train pulled into Westport.
A woman and her young son got on the train, he said, only to realize it wasn’t the one they wanted. “The mother walked back to the platform and the boy hesitated for a second when he heard the door-closing bell,” Battaglia said, “and he did not make it to the platform before the doors closed, separating him from his mother.”
Passengers began sounding the door buzzer located on the rail car’s ceiling — used by conductors to alert the train’s engineer — while others tried to comfort the 6-year-old boy, Battaglia said.
“Picture yourself on that platform,” Battaglia said of the mother, whose identity he did not know. “I couldn’t imagine what was going through her head.”
Battaglia said no one responded to the buzzer, so a passenger took off to find a conductor. But an announcement soon came over the train’s public address system that whoever had triggered the buzzer would be removed from the train, and the conductor was heard telling the engineer to keep going because someone was fooling with the buzzer.
The conductor, Battaglia said, finally came back to the car where the boy had been left behind, and was rude to everyone — even the youngster.
He said the conductor’s reaction to the problem was that he was not responsible.
Luckily, Battaglia said, the train had started and stopped twice, only going a short distance, so the last car was still at the platform, and the boy was finally able to walk to the rear of the train, get off and reunite with his mother.
But for Battaglia, the way the incident was handled by the Metro-North conductor just didn’t sit right.
“The conductor was just so completely indifferent to the whole situation,” he said, and refused to give Battaglia his name.
So when Battaglia got to work, he filed a complaint with Metro-North using a link from the Connecticut Commuter Rail Council Web site.
“I was pleased with how quickly they responded,” he said of a Metro-North representative. “I’m actually pretty impressed with his response.”
Battaglia said he also spoke by phone with the customer service representative. “Several passengers had actually filed a complaint as well,” Battaglia said. “He took it very seriously.
A director of production services for Euro RSCG Life BlueStar, a medical advertising and marketing firm, Battaglia said he doesn’t want to the conductor to be fired. “But he should be retrained or reprimanded,” he said. “If he’s doing this, others are too.”
Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman for Metro-North, said she would look into the incident, but could not provide additional details.