Those double-decker trains you see on the LIRR and NJT (the “Bitanic,” in conductor-speak) may be coming to the Metro-North, reports the NY Times. The railroad’s next purchase of new cars is in 2015, and the split-level trains are being considered for the order.

Riders generally like the trains: lots of seats, and cool views from the Promenade deck. (MNR riders would be able to see Central Park from the second floor, writes Timesman Michael M. Grynbaum.) On the downside, it’s been my experience that there are like two restrooms for the entire double-decker, which is ginormous. If you’re taking that thing out to the Hamptons in the summer–granted, hardly a typical commuter trip–the line is 10-deep with Snookified Hamptons weekend warrior scruff.

Reports the Times:

But a fleet of rolling duplexes would bring the railroad in line with its nearby cousins. Double-decker trains, then called “up and downs,” were commonplace on the Long Island Rail Road from the late 1930s to the late 1960s; a more modern version began operation in 1998. New Jersey Transit has run double-deckers since 2005.

Officials at both commuter railroads say the bilevel trains receive rave reviews from customers, particularly because their interior layouts eliminate the hated middle seat.

“Customers love them for a number of reasons,” said Dan Stessel, a spokesman for New Jersey Transit. “They are quieter, and you have more leg room. It’s been overwhelmingly positive.”

Howard Permut, the president of Metro-North, said he was attracted to the double-decker option because it could help solve a broader challenge facing Metro-North: its ballooning ridership, which has risen 10 percent in the last five years.

The railroad is nearing capacity at Grand Central Terminal, its Midtown hub, and at rush hour it currently runs trains in and out of the Park Avenue tunnel at the fastest rate it can.

We here at Trainjotting have been harping on this for years: the railroad’s “on-time performance” is a very misleading figure.

Metro-North touts an “on-time” percentage in its monthly Mileposts mouthpiece that’s about as high as the temps this past weekend–the Harlem line is “on-time” 98.7% of the time so far this year, and the Hudson is 98.3%.

Of course, “on-time” means any train arriving within six minutes of when it’s supposed to.

The New York Times pushed the MTA to release its full on-time records, and found the trains were much later than the railroads reported in 2009. Rush-hour trains may be late as much as 25% of the time.

The good news is, and you probably already know this, Metro-North is best of the local bunch. New Jersey Transit is the worst, and the LIRR is somewhere in the middle.

At the peak of the rush, from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., about 25 percent of New Jersey Transit trains entering Manhattan arrived late; about 2 in 5 of the late trains were tardy by at least 15 minutes.

Things are better for Metro-North riders–at least those who don’t live along the Sound shore.

Metro-North’s lines to Connecticut and Westchester, which have the best performance in the region, benefit from having spacious Grand Central Terminal to themselves. Still, trains on the New Haven line perform worse than the others, primarily because the cars are holdovers from the 1970s and some of the track uses overhead electrical wires that are nearly a century old and prone to damage.

The various railroads’ on-time percentages look sweet because the non-rush hour trains are mostly on time, boosting the overall percentages. The rush-hour trains–the ones that affect most of us–are a much different story, as crowded tracks, tunnels and platforms make for significant delays.

Give it up for the Times, they did their homework on this one.

These are among the findings of an examination by The New York Times of the more than 685,000 trips in 2009 involving the region’s three major commuter railroads, using records requested by The Times that had not previously been made available to the public.

The review found that the official figures for on-time performance, often used as a promotional tool, contrasted sharply with the experience of tens of thousands of passengers who regularly ride the trains at peak hours. In fact, the most important trips for daily commuters, those that can make or break breakfast with a client or dinner with a spouse, experience far more delays than the statistics may let on.

Trips to and from Penn Station during rush hours, for instance, were two and a half times as likely to be late as trips taken at any other time. The disappointment among riders can be further appreciated by considering the record of specific commuter lines. For example, morning commuters on New Jersey Transit who passed through the Summit station were late on 1 of every 6 trips, nearly a third by more than 20 minutes. And Long Island Rail Road commuters who traveled from Huntington to Manhattan at rush hour arrived late on 1 of every 10 trips, twice the average for the railroad.

The guilty guy’s feet appear at the top of the frame

I witnessed my second major iced-coffee spill of the past week on the 8:16 this morning. Earlier in the week, it was the train home, and the spiller gamely mopped up as best he could with free New York tabloids, though they don’t offer the best absorbency.

This morning, the guy–60, bald, blue golf shirt and tan khakis–dumped about 16 ounces of a 20 oz. drink. He pulled a tiny packed of Kleenex out of his bag and set to it, sort of like trying to fell a grizzly bear with a wiffle bat. He placed the soaked Kleenex and spilled ice cubes back in the cup.

The spill took the form of three streams, and merged into two to enter the adjacent car. As it breached the levee and made it into the next car–that car’s riders scrambling to get their bags and feet away from the Starmucks–the man let out a frustrated sigh.

Ninety seconds later, the fool was back to his NY Times, folded into quarters, reading about Obama and Medvedev enjoying burgers in Virginia. But he was off his game, looking nervous and assessing the damage he’d wrought every minute or so.

No one really knows what to do when they spill large amounts of beverage on the train. They don’t tell you in the Mileposts Courtesy Corner, and they don’t tell you over the PA system. As a result, people react badly and inadequately.

So here’s the guidebook.

* First off, when you spill, make some effort to clean it up. You simply have to. Yes, you’re ill-equipped for the job. You don’t have quicker-picker-upper towels, and you certainly don’t have the hardware required for either a top kill or a junk shot. But you have some sort of paper products on you, and there’s always a bathroom nearby. Clean some of the crap up.

* Next, apologize to everyone within 10 feet of you. If your spill creeps into another car and people look up to see its source, raise your hand. Unlike the BP chief, Tony Hayward, own the damn thing.

* Offer a minimum of three disgusted shakes of your head throughout the duration of the trip, showing everyone around just how disappointed you are in your actions.

* If and when the conductor comes by, acknowledge what you did. It’s his or her house, after all.

* This is optional, but maybe lighten the mood with a joke. Everyone’s annoyed by what you did, but anyone with a heart feels a tiny bit bad for you. Get them on your side with a quip, such as “I’m probably better off without the extra caffeine,” or some such.

Above all else, just hold onto your damn coffee. Is it really that difficult?

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.

Metro-North doesn’t seem to envision bar cars in its future, reports the NY Times, which says it looks unlikely those bygone-era relics will fit into the long-awaited rollout of the M8 cars on the New Haven Line last this year.

Much as I enjoy and respect the Times, I have to say–reporter Michael Grynbaum includes every last cliche about commuting to the suburbs in his story. Reference to Don Draper and Mad Men? Check. Reference to John Cheever’s short fiction? Check, mate. Weepy homages to bar car bonhomie?

He squeezes them all into one sentence, in fact:

The bar car is a mainstay of the commuting life, a lurching lounge on wheels inseparable from the suburbia of Cheever and “Mad Men.” “The commute is so bad as it is,” explained Paul Hornung, a financial worker, as he sipped a Stella Artois. “This is the one thing you can look forward to.”

Here’s my issue. Is the bar car really, truly a “mainstay of the commuting life”? Grynbaum notes in his story that bar cars have long since been phased out on Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit. They’ve also been phased out on the Hudson and Harlem Lines….assuming those lines ever had those stankin’ basement-bars-on-wheels.

[By the way, what the heck is Paul “Golden Boy” Hornung doing drinking on the train? to Stamford]

I don’t know that I’ve ever consumed a potent potable on Metro-North, and I, ya know, follow the intersection of commuter trains and booze pretty carefully. While bar cars are surely meeting spots for friends old and new to enjoy a tipple, I’m guessing most New Haven Line riders would prefer to quaff their Bud tallboy in a normal seat in a normal car, instead of on these anachronistic oddities.

Metro-North officials say the decision to possibly eliminate the bar cars is all about–surprise surprise–money.

A new fleet of cars will soon replace the 1970s-era models now used by commuters on the Metro-North Railroad line heading to Connecticut. But with money tight, railroad officials said they could not yet commit themselves to a fresh set of bar cars, citing higher costs for the cars’ custom design.

“They’re being contemplated,” said Joseph F. Marie, Connecticut’s commissioner of transportation. “But we have not made any final decisions.”

Defenders of the boozy commute say it helps raise revenue: After expenses, bar cars and platform vendors made $1.5 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2008. (Officials would not say if a bar car makes more money than a car with the normal number of seats.) So far, 300 new train cars have been purchased, featuring airline-style headrests and graceful luggage racks. But officials say the bar cars remain a low priority, and may not be ordered.

“A decision was made early on that more seats on the trains was our top priority and that bar cars — as popular as they are — could wait,” said Judd Everhart, a spokesman for Connecticut’s department of transportation, which operates New Haven Line trains in conjunction with Metro-North. “It was about that simple.”

Our blogging brethren “My Effing Commute” has quite a funny story on a woman who refused to sit in the dreaded middle seat (”sitting bitch,” in biker parlance), so instead opted to stand and face backwards.

We’ve been collecting Metro-North related behavioral oddities for over three years, and this is one of the stranger ones.

Effing writes:

So standing or sitting on the floor are the two most common approaches to avoiding the uncomfortable feeling of touching another person. Turns out there is a third one which I didnt know about. Seems you can stand up at your seat, turn backwards facing the other riders, and scowl for 30 minutes, which is what this woman did. I kept wondering if she as looking for a friend, or an enemy, or a conductor, or happiness, or fulfillment, or a reason to keep going on. But she was standing for too long, so it didnt make sense. Maybe she had that shaky leg thing that you get when you cant sleep, or bad circulation like on planes when if you dont walk around every hour you can get a blood clot and die. But she wasn’t stretching or moving around at all. Just standing like a statue. A really pissed off statue. So what else could it be? It had to be that she just didnt want to touch the person in the seat next to her. Now in all fairnes, I couldnt see the person in the seat next to her, so its possible that this person was so repugnant that even the idea of sitting next to them was too horrible to imagine, but then why not go stand next to some other person, or even sit next to them? I still don’t know why this happened, and I havent seen her since, so I dont know if this was a one time occurrence or whether this was just how she enjoys riding the train. Either way, she’s just one more person on one more train ride of a lifetime of train rides that doesn’t make any effing sense.

I got an email from Metro-North Tuesday informing me I’d been picked to fill out an e-questionnaire regarding the railroad’s email and text message alerts.

“To help us continue to improve this system, we are asking selected subscribers to complete a brief online survey.  This will take about five minutes to complete and your responses will remain completely confidential,” it wrote. “Please help the MTA make its email and text message alerts more useful by providing the kind of information you need to make travel decisions easier and faster.”

I did the thing and, frankly, gave it low marks because I can’t remember the last time I got an email alert from Metro-North.

I searched my email box for Metro-North, MNR and MTA, and got my weekly CleverCommute news, my monthly Mail N Ride statements, and of course the questionnaire from earlier in the week. My box goes back to October and I didn’t see a single service alert. I haven’t seen one in my spam folder either. Not one!

And today, we’ve got a snowicane/blizzicane/Norbeaster, and nothing from Metro-North either.

So, yes, I suppose the alert service could be a little more useful.

For a much better way to get updates from Metro-North, email their PR people and tell them you’ve got some sort of wacky commuter blog or something. Metro-North’s updates to reporters are timely and informative; it’s odd that the railroad sees its relationship with reporters–most of whom do not ride Metro-North each day, and probably don’t report on it very often–as being much more important than its relationship with riders.

I got this a few minutes ago:

Because we expect ridership will be lighter than usual tomorrow morning, (Friday February 26) Metro-North plans to operate a slightly reduced schedule during the AM peak. About two dozen trains will be affected, either by elimination or combination.  The details will be posted shortly on the website (mta.info)

The trains selected were chosen to impact the fewest people.  As a result of these changes, the maximum additional wait for the next train will be less than 15 minutes.

In addition, customers can expect minor delays due to slow boarding on snowy platforms.

Crews are working and will be working all night to clear platforms, stairs and walkways.  Additionally track workers and signal maintainers are deployed to keep tracks and switches clear.

We will update you if and when conditions change. 

Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I got an alert from CleverCommute either, which relies on riders to submit their own train delay updates to members’ emails. I do get the CleverCommute track report each day, which tells me what track my train is on. Frankly I don’t use this anymore; I pass a departures monitor in Grand Central, which is easier for finding my track then pulling up my Blackberry and opening an email. I don’t know that you could enter Grand Central anywhere and not come in contact with a departures screen.

CC tells you to check the board anyway–PLEASE CONFIRM TRACK BEFORE BOARDING, it reads–which makes the service somewhat useless, at least in my opinion.

Plus, my train has been on the same track for months and months. An alert would be useful should it ever be on another track.

This is awful.

A little over a year ago, a Metro-North signal maintainer by the name of Kenneth McGrath was killed in the line of duty.

The ensuing media reports–Journal News, NY Daily News, USA Today–got McGrath’s name wrong in their stories, calling him Kevin.

We did the same, grabbing the story from the local Journal News.

We heard from McGrath’s daughter, still every bit in grieving over a year later. Lana asked us to please get her father’s name correct.

So that’s what we’re doing. Kenneth McGrath was hit by a Metro-North train and died Jan. 9 near Rye.

From the comments we got from people who knew Kenneth, he was a motorcycle enthusiast, a karate black-belt, a father of three, grandfather of three, and a fun guy who answered to “Shrek” or “Heavy Metal.” He owned three rescue dogs. He lived in New Rochelle. He would’ve been 51 Feb. 20.

“He was a father who layed a strong foundation down for his children. He was a very good brother, son , husband and family man. He was a superior person and he is with me when I wake and when I go to sleep,” wrote Alberta.

Rest in peace, Kenneth, and we’re sorry Trainjotting–and the media as a whole–got your name wrong.

Metro-North officials will conduct a live demonstration of their “Train Time” smartphone app at Hastings station from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 9. The next two Tuesdays will see similar app demonstrations at Brewster and Portchester stations.

Metro-North says the app covers 67 stations so far, and there have been 71,000 “hits” on the website. Riders with an enabled smartphone–Blackberry, iPhone, etc.–can get real-time train info.

“This new service allows customers to check the status of train service in real time at their home stations or wherever they are traveling,” said Metro-North President Howard Permut.  “It gives people the freedom to plan a trip and get up-to-the-minute information to make necessary adjustments while they are out and about.  We think it’s a technology whose time has come.” 

Says the press release:

Smart phones and computers will show whether a train is On Time, Late, Canceled or Delayed, including the number of minutes it is late, also what track it will arrive on and what stops it makes. 

The February edition of Westchester Magazine has a funny little “Field Guide to Metro-North Commuters” in it from John Korpics. The writer commutes from Waccabuc (uh, top 5 funny Metro-North station names…maybe top 3), and has come up with nine different species of Metro-North rider.

Here’s a taste:

Cellphonica obnoxium

A person whose need to make small talk on the phone supersedes your need for sanity. I was looking through some old drawings of medieval torture techniques the other day (like you’ve never done that), and I came across one that was particularly disturbing. It showed a man whose arms and legs had been pulled off by horses, his eyes had been gouged out, and someone was laughing while pouring hot liquid into his disemboweled stomach. Now imagine that the guy laughing and pouring the liquid is me, and that one of the severed arms is holding a cellphone…
Distinguishing Characteristics: Look carefully for the numbers 666 somewhere just beneath the hairline.
Warning: This rider can be dangerous if antagonized with a sarcastic comment (trust me). Overheard phrases can include: “Nothing, what are you doing?” and “I am so bored.”

Foster’s twofisticus

A commuter who boards the evening train with two 22-ounce, motor oil-sized cans of Foster’s beer. Yes, that’s 44 ounces of beer for a 45-minute train ride. If he drinks an ounce a minute, he still has an extra minute to pee! Subject also has been observed spilling various snack foods on his lap and not caring. Have you ever seen that scene in North by Northwest in which Cary Grant orders a Gibson in the dining car of the train and then charms the pants off of Eva Marie Saint? This is the complete opposite of that.
Distinguishing Characteristics: Untied tie, un-tucked shirt, sits near the bathroom.

You can even see Trainjotting’s shameless plug in the Comments section at the end!  

As it turns out, Korpics, who’s creative director at Fortune Magazine, has a Metro-North commuting blog called My Effing Commute. And we thought we had the only one out there!

Like Trainjotting, My Effing Commute revels in poking fun at fellow riders. Unlike Trainjotting, MEC has the nerve to shoot photos of the commuters its making fun of.