Back in the saddle after a ten-day break, a spell enhanced by our furloughed Fridays here at the salt mine.

The break featured our annual summer block party, during which I chatted with a man who recently moved into the neighborhood with his wife and two small children. The man and I discussed walking to the train–he’s really the only other one I know of that walks from beyond the immediate vicinity of the station each day. We discussed our mutual surprise that no one else walks, and we both seemed to be pleased to hear that another human in Hawthorne eschewed the auto for the trip to the train.

The break also featured six days in Cape Cod, half of which featured a driving, sideways rain. During the wet first half of the week, me and Little G found a brief window of rain respite for a trip to the beach, where we encountered a woman and two small boys–one who, coincidentally, was also named Little G.

We lamented the lack of foul weather activities on the Cape (the kid museum, the acquarium that no one seemed to realize was closed Mondays), and she mentioned the trolley that runs from Falmouth to Woods Hole and back. A trolley sounded fun, but the details took the fun away: It’s a bus decorated like a trolley, it sits in the same miserable summer traffic on Rte. 28 as everyone else, and, while the back opens up to the air, it’s zipped up in the foul weather. Nothing doing there.

During the break, I also missed what sounded like a truly horrific LIRR disaster. Midweek, an editor at the freebie Metro paper hit me with an email, wondering if the esteemed steward of this very blog could turn around a quick story on the horrors of being a train commuter into NYC. Alas, I was far from a computer and turned down a freelance assigment for the first time in, oh, forever.

The legs were seemingly still on vacation, creaking as I pedaled the bike over the humpback Chelsea bridge.

The train station looked resplendent (OK, less crappy) with new windows all around. Before I’d departed, I’d seen a man and a van; both were there to install the new windows. The man wore a t-shirt that said STREAKER and had a naked stick figure running. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed “streaker” was some window-guy humor. (Ya, know, streaks on the windows and all.)

Town Supervisor Maybury said it would be late August or early September when the town board decided what is going in to the old Hawthorne station spot. No word on it yet…

My mindset was glum as I stepped onto the 8:16, but I caught a break when I saw a beloved 1-3/4 seater, partially obscured by a swinging EMERGENCY EXIT conductor booth door, wide open and unlocked. Got it.

Almost an hour later, I learned that my breakfast deli is, presumably, now serving Guinness with breakfast. The Guinness brought me back to vacation, a pint and some pub grub at Liam McGuire’s on the Cape, sunburned, sandy, relaxed, smile for a nice family foto.

Alas, a hazelnut coffee would have to suffice.

Nearly a quarter of the L.I.R.R. employees make six figures, reports the NY Times, including one hale fellow who took in $239,000 last year, thanks to lots and lots of overtime.

The MTA is under tremendous financial duress, as we all know, so news of the seemingly out of whack salaries come at a tricky time. And to be sure, most railroad employees’ wages are much more in line with what one might expect.

But overtime remains a lucrative prospect for the career railroaders. The $239,000 conductor, named Thomas J. Redmond, retired in April. He had a base pay of just under $68,000, got the same amount in overtime, and racked up almost $100,000 in unused sick days and vacation time.

Redmond outearned the railroad’s executive v.p. last year. Helena E. Williams, the president of the L.I.R.R., made $286,872.

Reports the Times:

Two car repairmen at the L.I.R.R. and 12 police officers assigned to the authority’s bridges and tunnels, some of whom earned more than double their base salaries, were among the 50 employees at the authority who collected $200,000 or more, the data show.

The second-highest paid employee at the agency’s bridge and tunnel division, after its president, was Walter Stock, a lieutenant who earned $226,383, more than twice his base pay of $90,000, according to the data.

At No. 17 was Dominick J. Masiello, an L.I.R.R. locomotive engineer, who earned about $75,000 in base salary and overtime payments of $52,000.

He also received $94,600 in “penalty payments,” which railroad officials said stemmed from a contractual rule that requires engineers who work in a storage yard to be paid extra if they are assigned to move a locomotive to a nearby maintenance facility or if they are asked to operate a train outside of the yard.

Similar to the cops and firefighters, railroad workers try to rack up major overtime and unused days in their final year, as I believe their pension payments are set based on their last few years’ earnings.

As companies cut costs and wireless technology improves, we’ve seen a handful of co-workers get pushed into permanent work-from-home status. The company shaves off some overhead, and the worker avoids commuting costs–and hassles–as he or she sets up the home office.

So here’s the hypothetical question for ya, dear readers: If you were presented with the opportunity to permanently work from home, would you do it? Granted, the notion of working from home now and then is a favorable one, a mini-vacation from the rigors of commuting. But would you opt to do it full-time?

On the plus side, you’d save that $250 or whatever (and rising dramatically!) a month in commuting costs. You’d avoid the day-to-day humiliations of commuting–a seat on the end of the Stench Bench, the middle seat between the cellphone yakker and the buffalo wings eater. You’d take back that two or three hours a day. You would not have to wear a shirt with a collar for weeks on end. Or any shirt, for that matter.  

You’d get more family time.

Then there’s the not insignificant issue of, ya know, guys trying to bomb our city.

On the downside, you would not set foot in the Greatest City in the World each day, and get to witness all of its sites, including some of the most pulchritudinously blessed people on the planet. You’d inevitably lose touch with your City Friends. You’d sever that tenuous tether to the city, and be a full-time Suburban Person.

And you’d get more family time.

I want to hear from readers on this one. If you could skip the commuting altogether and go full-time from the home bureau, would you cut your ties to Gotham? Hit us in the Comments section.

UPDATE: The NY Times’ New Jersey blog picked up the story and has some interesting comments from readers.

Old-School Disability

There used to be a break room at Penn Station somewhere between track 15 and track 18, back before it was upgraded to a “modern” station. My grandfather worked as a conductor for the LIRR starting in the 1940’s right through to the 1970’s and retirement.

There’s an old family story that says he put my aunt through college by gambling in that break room with the other LIRR conductors. An ongoing pinochle game (or it might have been poker – the exact details are fuzzy) was his daughter’s ticket to a higher education. My grandfather, it seemed, worked a late shift on the train, went to work at a bank during the day, and gambled on his break. He did things the old fashioned way.

My aunt told me she didn’t believe it for a long time, but then one day my grandfather brought her to the break room and introduced her to the gang.

“So you’re the girl we’re putting through college,” one of the conductors said.

The others all nodded and shook their heads. There could have been a lot of cigar smoke and the stale smell of sweat, or it could just be my imagination.

My grandfather didn’t need a disability scam. He just needed a pinochle deck and some willing marks — I mean, players.

That, some luck, and a second full time job to supplement the first.

–Joe Lunievicz

A year and a half after a giant NY Times investigative report on extraordinarily high disability claims among retiring LIRR employees, the New York attorney general has closed its investigation, reports the Times. Andrew Cuomo issued 108 subpoenas related to the case, to doctors, insurance companies, LIRR execs and “every worker who retired in 2009,” but brought just one person up on felony charges.

The initial Times story, from September 2008, revealed that virtually all retiring LIRR workers who applied for lucrative disability pensions received them. The numbers were way, way out of whack with other railroads, such as the neighboring Metro-North, suggesting widespread institutional fraud and abuse.

The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation’s most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety.

“Short of the gulag, I can’t imagine any work force that would have a so-to-speak 90 percent disability attrition rate,” said Glenn Scammel, long one of Capitol Hill’s top experts on railroads. “That defies both logic and experience.”

Frederick S. Kreuder, a former manager of the railroad’s pension office, was brought up on charges that he charged workers $1,000 to coach them on how best to score disability benefits.

Kreuder may have committed ethical violations, ruled the judge, but not criminal ones.

Reports the Times:

A judge threw out most of the charges in December, saying his moonlighting may have been unethical but was not illegal. The attorney general’s office dropped the case last month in exchange for Mr. Kreuder’s resignation, payment of a $1,500 penalty and agreement not to work in the public sector.

So what’s the net result of the mammoth investigation? The LIRR will hire an independent examiner to review its safeguards, reports the Times, against abuse of the railroad’s disability pension system.

But the Times says that measure was agreed to not long after the paper’s front page expose:

In fact, the agreement, announced Monday, appears to echo reform measures the railroad undertook shortly after The Times’s report.

A big, costly investigation that didn’t get much done–that can’t help Cuomo’s potential campaign for the governor’s seat.

Slate.com has a a fun story penned by Julia Turner on yet another reason to dislike Penn Station–impossible-to-follow signs.

Penn Station’s signage got 2.5 stars on Yelp.com (”Without a doubt, one of the poorest and most confusing arrangements for signage and passenger movement that I can imagine”), Turner notes, compared to the 4.5 stars Grand Central got.

Of course, comparing Penn Station to Grand Central is comparing Tad’s Steakhouse to Gramercy Tavern Camryn Manheim to Cameron Diaz.

But Turner does some digging into signmaking and “wayfinding”–the school of thought about how best to get people from Point A to Points B, C and D–and discovers what sort of a conflicting mess the Penn Station signs representing Amtrak, LIRR and NJT make in aggregate.

She writes:

The problem at Penn Station is not that designers skipped these steps. It’s that three sets of designers did them three times. Penn Station is owned by Amtrak, which manages its concourse on the western side of the station. But Amtrak leases the rest of the station out to the two other tenants: New Jersey Transit has the southeast corner, and the LIRR the northeast. (The Metropolitan Transit Authority oversees both the LIRR and New York City Transit, which manages the two adjacent subway stations; their sign systems are similar to the LIRR’s.) The fundamental wayfinding problem at Penn Station lies in the fact that each of these entities manages its own signs, usually without consulting the others. As a result, the station essentially has three different systems of signage.

This is a crazy way to manage information at the biggest railway station in the country. The user experiences Penn Station as one place. But the current system assumes that the user experiences the station as three distinct spaces. In truth, though, as we saw in the slide show above, many journeys require travelers to cross from zone to zone.

It’s a fun read. It’s here.

Frederick Kreuder, charged with taking money from LIRR employees to help them get lucrative disability benefits, was cleared of most, not all, charges by a Long Island judge Friday.

Kreuder reportedly got $1,000 for his services, which the NY Times said included instructing workers “to pay a doctor $1,000 in cash, to save up his vacation time to get a larger pension, and to take physical therapy for documentation.”

In one case, Kreuder accepted a check for $100 toward the teen baseball team he coached, and did not explain where the remaining $900–to be paid once the Railroad Retirement Board green-lighted an applicant’s disability claim–went. Kreuder was a former pension manager with LIRR who then shifted to manager of budget analysis. He was suspended without pay following his arrest in November 2008.

At the time, state attorney general Andrew Cuomo’s office said in a statement:

“Today’s arrest is the first time that someone is being held accountable for the culture of entitlement and systemic abuse that plagued the LIRR and Railroad Retirement Board. Moving forward, this office will continue to pursue criminal charges against any individual who facilitated such unchecked abuse, and will continue working to correct the systemic abuse in the disability benefits program.”

The Nassau County judge saw it differently. Kreuder might’ve committed ethical violations, said the jurist, but for the most part did not commit criminal violations. The charges he was hit with pertained to not paying taxes on the money he made coaching LIRR employees about disability.

Newsday has the link, but it’s only for Cablevision/Newsday subscribers.

Fun little piece in yesterday’s NY Times about the Long Island Railroad lost and found at Penn Station.

Like a time capsule, what’s left on the train is often a good indicator of what the societal trends are at a given time, says lost and found manager Casey Arasa. 

Judging by the number of lost karate gis, interest in the martial arts and being properly uniformed for them is booming in the suburbs. Yoga, too — at least according to all the dropped mats — remains quite popular. But trend spotting gets more difficult when the items are bizarre ones, and there are certainly plenty of those.

One day last month, the lost and found contained: a surfboard, several boogie boards, a Louisville Slugger baseball bat, a set of dentures, a stroller (without the baby), a battered white commodore’s cap and — Mr. Arasa’s favorite — a pair of metal crutches, leading one to envision a poor sprain-kneed commuter hobbling toward the 6:15 to Hicksville.

The lost and found collects 10,000 items a year, with a 50% return rate. My own return rate too is 50%–lost the remote-control car, found the Blackberry.

The digital offerings designed to make commuting life easier continue to increase. There’s the Metro-North timetable app over at StationStops.com that the MTA is not all that excited about, and there’s the crowd-sourcing Clever Commute service, where riders share delays and other abnormalities (actually, on the New Haven Line, they’re known as “normalities”) via group emails.

Clever Commute is taking things a step further with a service that emails you the track you should be headed to in Grand Central–and Penn Station, for Jersey and Long Island types–each evening as you leave work.

Clever Commute CEO Josh Crandall says that product is coming out of beta. We’re excited to see how it works, and we will of course report on how well the service works.

Here’s how you sign up:

1. Go to www.clevercommute.com
2. Click on “Find your line”
3. Toward the top right, change “Select provider type” to “Trains (Track Number)”
4. Select “Metro North Track Number Announcements (Beta)” to select your line
5. Enter your sign-up info just as you did when you first joined Clever Commute.

Some transit-related eavesdroppings from Overheard in New York.

Loud black girl on cell phone: You know where the train station is, where all them homeless people live? Yeah, that’s where I go get my hair done. She doesn’t fuck my hair up, because I told her, “you best not fuck my hair up.” And now she never does. (chuckles)

–LIRR

Mom to son, after looking through his phone: Who is in your phone as b-i-t-c-h?

–M60 Bus

Guy with teardrop tattoo: Dude, moonshine is awesome. It’s 99% alcohol and 1% liquor.

–L Train
 

Conductor: Please stand clear of the closing doors. (pause) Please stand clear of the closing doors. (pause) Station police officer, please apprehend the man holding the doors in the 6th car. (pause, then doors close) Hahaha, that always works.

–B Train

MTA engineer: Please use all exits. For the love of god, people, use all the doors to get out of the train. What the fuck, people, use the doors. Thank you.

–G Train

Conductor: Please stop holding the doors. (people continue to hold doors). I’m already on the clock, I have nowhere to be.

–A Train

Disgruntled subway conductor: Listen up, y’all! This train needs to move! Do not try to hold open the doors! Do not run at closing doors! Do not stick anything in the doors! That includes arms, legs, obnoxiously expensive purses, children, animals, whatever! Let’s go!

–1 Train

Conductor: Please stand clear of the doors or it will bruise yo face.

–C Train

Thirty-something black man to Catholic high school girls: So what’s it take for a couple of black guys to get to play with y’all’s skirts?

–Metro-North