She’s a Metro-North conductor. She checked my ticket this morning and, in fact, checks it a few times a week.

She’s a Latina, about 30, pretty, and pleasant.

And she looks exactly like freakin’ A-Rod.

As such, it’s hard to return her pleasantness. She’s politely thanking me for showing my monthly pass, and I’m gritting my teeth so I don’t snap at her about sullying the Fall Classic with her announcement that she was spurning the Yankees to test the market, her crawling back to the Yankees after a heart-to-heart with Warren Buffett, and her overall state of arrogance, artifice and manufactured earnestness every time a video camera is near.

Has anyone else out there encountered A-Rod’s Sister on the train? Any of those conductors out there know who I’m talking about?

(I know, I know, time to get a damn cellphone camera.)

Is it me, or is it sort of sad when the fact that the trains are operating on time is considered newsworthy?

Check out the big scoop in today’s Journal News:

Metro North: Trains on time

(Original publication: November 8, 2007)

Metro North Commuter Railroad reports as of 7 a.m. that trains on the Hudson, Harlem and New Haven divisions are running on or close to schedule this morning.

The results are in for the October Metro-North train challenge, which saw us keep track of every ride into and out of the city we took for the whole month, and chart how often the train was on time. Of course, our definition of on time is within 59 seconds of when it was supposed to arrive, not the 5 minutes, 59 seconds Metro-North uses to come up with to come up with its 99%-plus on time figures, which are about as credible as MLB home run totals in the late ’90s.

We’re happy to report the Harlem Line had a very, very good month. Metro-North was, in fact, on time more than it wasn’t–18 early or on time arrivals, compared to 17 late arrivals (1 minute or more). That’s a 51% rate, folks–a big leap from the 41% it scored in July. Bravo.

With November upon us, we’ll see how well Metro-North’s Waterworld project, geared towards combating the evil slippery rail phenomenon, fares.

He entered the train car, and an iron curtain of stink fell upon the entire car.

No, it wasn’t a homeless guy on the 6 train.

It was a cologne-doused conductor on the Metro-North.

He was a small man, with a trim moustache, Latin coloring and a giant wristwatch. The smell was completely overpowering, as in, you knew he was in the car when he was 20 feet away, you couldn’t breathe through your noise as he approached, and it took a good five minutes for the air to clear after he’d left.

He’d walked into our car while we were still in the Grand Central tunnel. As he checked tickets and walked through the back door, I actually turned my face toward the open door to take in a large gulp of carbon-monoxide-laced tunnel air for relief. Had there been a bathroom in the car, opening that door might’ve provided relief as well.

I’m generally a live and let live kind of guy. But someone–his wife, his friends, his co-workers–has to tell this guy that he’s laying the perfume on a wee bit thick.

Two lasting commuter-related images from Halloween 2007:

1. The kid leaving Hawthorne Elementary in a spot-on Metro-North train car costume. It was perfect–a box around his torso painted with precise detail to look like a Metro-North car. Fittingly, it was the blue Harlem line.

I know, I know, time to get a damn camera phone. I was tempted to ask the kid’s parents to email me a picture of him, but those are the sort of requests that start with angry looks and end with you being questioned by detectives in dank, foul-smelling interrogation rooms.

2. The heavy-set…no, she was fat…woman with receding gums accompanying her young trick-or-treating daughter on our doorstep last night.

“I see you every morning…riding your bike or walking to the train…,” the woman said.

I shrugged sheepishly. “Yeah, that’s me,” I think I said.

“Every time I see you,” she continued, “I think, good for you!”

Uh, thanks.

If you hang out at the Fordham, Tarrytown, Port Chester or Mamaroneck stations, life will only get sweeter–Metro-North has earmarked nearly a million dollars to refurbish them as part of an “ongoing effort to bring its facilities to a state of good repair and to improve the customers’ experience.”

Metro-North isn’t providing much detail as to what they’ll do, but it appears Port Chester is getting new windows and doors and Mamaroneck a new waiting room.

I knew it would happen eventually.

After one year and two weeks of regular train riding, a perfect storm of factors fell into place on the 8:43 this morning and I fell asleep for the first time on my commute, drifting off somewhere around 125th and waking up just before we docked in Grand Central.

I’m not against sleeping on the train; in fact, I think it’s a great way to pass the time and catch up on sleep on those days when Little G thinks 5:55 a.m. is the perfect time to get up and re-enact the tractor-tipping scene from Cars with Matchbox cars. But for whatever reason, mostly centering around my general state of low-level anxiety in crowded spaces, I’d been unable to do so thus far.

But everything came together today. It being the 8:43, it wasn’t very quiet. No one on my car yapped into their phone. The train was way overheated, those Sox games have been ending around midnight, and those Bose ‘phones did their noise-cancelling trick. Next thing I knew, I was out.

Let’s hope it’s not another 54 weeks before I sleep on Metro-North again.

After the great fun we had in charting Metro-North’s on-time percentage–and allowing for 59 seconds of tardiness, as opposed to the 5:59 Metro-North gives itself–we’re going to do it again.

Yes, starting on Monday, Trainjotting will bust out the stopwatch (mind you, the Brit term “trainspotting” means just that–charting trains’ times, not shooting dope while collecting checks on the dole with friends Spud and Sick Boy), and keep tabs on Metro-North for the month of October.

October seems like a fair month: the trains’ progress should not be affected by vacations, such as with the summer, and the dreaded slippery rail season, which sees cars slip, slide and skid out of commission and riders squeezed together tighter than Dewey’s Flatiron at Friday happy hour, won’t be upon us until November.

We put Metro-North to the test in July, and the railroad came through with a 41% on-time rate for the 32-odd rides we took that month. It’s a far cry from the 98-99% scores Metro-North gives itself, based on its generous 6-minute-late cushion. We were pressing MTA headquarters for a comment/excuse at the time, then backed off when that steam pipe burst.

Game on!

The “Metro-North Customer Satisfaction Survey 9/07″ has been sent to WebTicket customers, with 77 questions about stations, schedules and service.

A few revelations:

* Metro-North is planning some sort of special thingy for its 25th anniversary next year. The questionnaire asks riders if they’ve been riding since 1983, when the Sony Walkman changed the face of commuting forever, and mobile telephones were so large they needed their own ticket and seat. “If you…would be willing to talk with us about your experiences on the trains over the past 25 years,” the survey reads, “please check here and write your name, address, e-mail…”

Perhaps the 25-year riders will be presented with some sort of medal for courage over rubber chicken at the Grand Hyatt.

* Like the good folks at Mount Pleasant Town Hall, the concept of riding one’s bike in the suburbs for reasons other than, say, mountain biking, are fairly foreign to the Metro-North folks. Prompting respondents with “How do you usually get to your home station?” the questionnaire offers the following answers:

Drive and park

Dropped off

Carpool/Vanpool

Public Bus

Walk

Taxi

Private Shuttle

Yes, “Bike” is right up there with “Magic Carpet,” “Teleporting” and “Heelys“.

My co-worker, who’s new to the commuting game and learning some hard lessons on the New Haven line, expressed his extreme frustration with a co-worker who read and tossed no less than three newspapers at his feet, then left the mess there when he exited. He’ll be sure to tick off a ‘1′, located under ‘Not Satisfied’, in the “Cleanliness of the train car interior” category.  

Metro-North is hard at work to avoid the annual late-fall fiasco known as slippery-rail season, which means falling leaves leave oil on the tracks, cars skid and have to be taken out of commission, and cars are so packed they resemble the mosh pit at the old Coney Island High for much of November and December.

According to Caren Halbfinger of Indian Point Today…I mean the Journal News…Metro-North will institute speed restrictions in problem areas, going around 50 m.p.h. instead of 75-80. As Metro-North deputy chief of operations Dave Schanoes tells the paper, that means a 6-7 minute delay, as opposed to a 12 minute delay. (Metro-North would actually prefer a 5:59 minute delay, so it’s technically “on time.”)

The railroad is also testing a sand-shooting mechanism that propels a “microjet of sand between the wheel and the rail” to foster adhesion and prevent skidding.