As Trainjotting visitors know, we’re big fans of the monthly Metro-North mouthpiece Mileposts (second best alliteration you’ll see all day). We were a bit surprised to step onto the 8:16 headed for GCT today and see a copy of it, as we’d already seen the March issue, and April wasn’t due for several weeks.

Then I looked closer, and saw that it was actually Outposts–”a publication for MTA Metro-North Reverse-Peak Customers.”

Turns out it’s a quarterly publication that’s been around for like a decade, an MTA spokesperson told me. What was a publication geared towards reverse commuters doing on the Manhattan bound train, one wonders.

What was particularly interesting was that half the issue was en Espanol. To wit:

Los cambios de horario de abril le traen mas servicios expresos cuando usted mas los necesita 9y seguoro que eso es aun mejor que las flores que le traeran las lluvias.

(Sorry, our Spanish is limited to asking for two beers at American-friendly all-inclusive resorts in Mexico and the Dominican Republic.)

I assume the Spanish is for all those investment bankers making the reverse schlep to Stamford.

The Hudson Line, the darling of the Metro-North trinity, gets a whopping 41 more trains each week when the spring timetable goes into action April 6.

All told, Metro-North is adding an extra 67 trains each week to keep up with growing–and changing–rider demand.

Besides those sweet river views, the Hudson Line gets 21 additional weekend trains, including a pair of Upper Hudson “Saturday Only” expresses leaving from Poughkeepsie and Grand Central.

As defits its middle-child status, Harlem Line gets 16 new trains, including an early morning express out of North White Plains at 5:55. (North White at 6 in the morning…is there a more depressing thought?)

The 7:52 p.m. out of Grand Central now goes express from White Plains to Chappaqua, and the poor suckers in between (North White, Valhalla, dinky little Hawthorne and Pleasantville) will have to wait for the new 7:57.

The black sheep New Haven Line gets mostly lip service with an early morning ride out of Waterbury, Connecticut at 5:57, arriving in Grand Central at 8:18. (Dude, get a job closer to home.)

Finally, the young UBS bucks sentenced to Stamford can be at Jeremy’s Ale House on Fridays by 5 p.m., thanks to a new Stamford express leaving “The City That Works” (yes, Stamford’s actual slogan) at 3:47 and pulling into GCT at 4:41.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the commute from city to suburbs, and finds that it’s exhausting, it’s expensive, it can ruin your social life, and it just might help your career. In short, when all of your friends are hitting happy hour and some funky bar around 6, you’re sipping a Bud tallboy on a train next to some angry guy who runs some stupid commuter blog.

Matt DePascale, 24, says he used to socialize with co-workers three to four times a week when he worked in Legg Mason Inc.’s downtown Manhattan office. In recent months, he accepted an offer at the money-management firm’s Stamford, Conn., office and says that by the time he gets home to his Manhattan apartment, he’s often too tired to go out. “Now I have to take the train to Manhattan, go home to drop off my bag, and then go out to meet up with friends. It’s more of a production,” he said.

The one positive, reporter Dana Mattioli notes, is those suburban jobs often mean more face time with the boss and quicker advancement. Matt DePascale, who never thought to actually bring his bag to the bar, is at least making a little more coin these days.

Mr. DePascale was able to go from a back/middle office position to a front-office spot when he moved to his company’s Connecticut office. Now, he is also eligible for financial incentives and bonuses.

Q: Engine Bob, a couple of years ago I got into an argument with a New Haven Line conductor over something stupid. I had missed my morning southbound Harlem Line train at Fordham Road. A New Haven train pulled in a few minutes later. It stopped, and I got on. As we were pulling away, the conductor recognized a new passenger (me) and started yelling that his train was for discharging passengers only. He didn’t care that I had a monthly commutation pass for Fordham, either. I don’t get this. If I’ve paid Metro North to travel a certain distance, what the hell difference does it make if I get on a red train or a blue one?

Since the New Haven could never have afforded to build a terminal in Manhattan—much less obtain a right-of-way onto the island—it brokered a deal that allowed New Haven trains to use the Central’s 16 miles of track into Grand Central Terminal. Operating costs would be split between the two railroads based on a percentage calculated from the number of train cars that the New Haven brought into Manhattan.

With this arrangement in place, the New Haven laid an 11-mile spur from its mainline to hook up to the Central’s. Today, the junction point is easy to spot—it’s just north of the Woodlawn Station where there’s a “flyover” that loops the New Haven tracks down into the Harlem Division’s iron over some square-arched tunnels. (It’ll make sense when you see it, trust me.)

Okay, so, the Central was happy because the New Haven would now be subsidizing its operating costs by paying rent for track usage. Emphasis on usage. The Central might let New Haven trains roll on its tracks, but it would be damned if it was going to let the New Haven generate actual revenue from New York Central customers who’d be boarding trains at the handful of stations between Woodlawn and Grand Central.

And so the New Haven, while free to discharge its own passengers at stations such as Williams Bridge and Fordham, was prohibited from boarding passengers there. If you were a passenger traveling between two points in New York Central territory, your money was going to stay with the New York Central. (Listen, the robber barons did not get rich by accident.)

To this day, that rule—or a surviving incarnation of it—is still observed, only now the players are the New Haven Division and the Harlem Division, both of Metro North. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? The rule made sense back when you had two competing private railroads—but the New Haven and the New York Central railroads have been gone for about 36 years now and Metro North runs everything.

So why is this dumb rule still in place?

I won’t pretend to know the deepest bureaucratic vagaries that must apply, here, but the essence of it is that, even though the red (New Haven) and blue (Harlem and Hudson) trains are all operated by Metro North, one train is not necessarily interchangeable with another. New Haven trains are partially funded by tax revenues from the State of Connecticut, just like Harlem and Hudson trains operate with help from New York State money. And so the accounting books must still be kept separately to some degree. Just like in the old days, Connecticut trains ain’t allowed to make money with New York State passengers.

If you’re bound for Stamford and boarding at Fordham, well, that’s fine—because your destination is in Connecticut. But if you’re going from, say, Botanical Garden to 125^th Street, you have to board a Harlem Line train.

I’m confident that I’m ignorant of a good 80% of the hairsplitting technicalities that purport to make this rule sensible in the eyes of MTA management—and the gods be praised for that—but what I’ve told you is the way it was long ago explained to me by an old-timer. This guy, incidentally, used to love to argue with New Haven conductors about the boarding prohibition, and would grandly denounce the 1848 law (which the gape-mouthed ticket-takers had probably never heard of once in their entire stinking lives) Perry Mason style.

I’m quite sure his ass still got kicked off the New Haven train, all the same. 

Fox had a pretty soft report on its 10 p.m. news about the vulnerability of commuter trains to terrorism. If Fox reporters could stow suitcases in the overhead racks and then depart the train, the reasoning went, why couldn’t Al Qaeda?

Fox tried this experiment in Stamford, then went to an Everyman Commuter–”Tom,” 40, hair parted to the side, middle manager somewhere–for a comment. His mastery of the English language made commuters everywhere proud:

“While I don’t feel totally unsecure, there is always that naggling doubt in my mind.”

Q: Engine Bob, Why does my morning train take 48 minutes, while my evening train—with the exact same stops—takes 42 minutes? Does it take longer for people to get on than get off? 

A: First, pat yourself on the back for picking up on a detail that 99.98% of commuters have never noticed. We’re going to have a little fun with your question because, first, I’m going to give you my speculation and then, second, we’re going to see what the MTA has to say about it. Last night I stopped into the Stationmaster’s Office to retrieve a customer-comment/question form, and on it I wrote down a more detailed version of your question, using two specific New Haven trains for comparison—ones that showed a seven-minute discrepancy between north and southbound runs. The Stationmaster promised me I’d receive a personal reply from the Public Affairs Office. We shall see. 

Meanwhile, here’s my take. Assuming that the trains you’re comparing share all the relevant parameters in common—both peak, same station stops, no transfers with one and no the other, etc.—what you’ve struck upon here is evidence of a practice that’s as old as train schedules themselves. 

It’s known as “schedule padding.” 

While it may take a wee bit longer to board a train than disembark from one, I doubt that such a thing would result in a schedule adjustment. And if it did, logic would hold that you’d see a greater amount of time allotted for station stops where the most people get on—and when I tore through some Metro North schedules last night, that’s not where I found the discrepancies. More on that in a minute. 

Here’s another interesting observation. While your trip home (northbound, I presume) is taking six minutes longer, I found that the opposite appears to be more often the case. For example—and these are all peak trains I’m referring to, with all station stops common to both directions—catch a morning express train at South Norwalk and you’ll get to Grand Central in 55 minutes. Homeward on the same run? 1 hour, 4 minutes. Hop an early local out of Stamford and you’ll be at GCT in 1 hour, 2 minutes. Grab the same run back and it’ll take 1 hour, 9 minutes. 

Is that just the New Haven’s quirk? Nope. Let’s get a morning-rush local out of Croton-Harmon on the Hudson Line. Train No. 704 will take precisely 1 hour to reach Grand Central. But at evening peak, the same run (Train No. 757) will take 1 hour, 4 minutes. 

I found a few other examples in which run times were exact, and a few, like yours, in which the return runs took less time. But overall, it seems far more common for the northbound runs to take longer. And this brings me back to the practice of schedule padding. 

What is “schedule padding”? Schedule padding is the practice of adding a few extra minutes to a run—time that a train does not really need to cover the allotted distance—merely to “help” a late train make up time on paper, and hence arrive “on time” even if, in fact, it’s not. In short, schedule padding helps boost a railroad’s on-time performance statistics. Before you shake a fist at Metro North for stooping this low, consider: New Jersey Transit does it, too. So does Amtrak. So does VIA Rail in Canada. Most every railroad uses schedule padding. 

But let’s take a closer look at how it works. We’ll go back to our local train between
Stamford and Grand Central, because the discrepancy is pretty dramatic—a full seven minutes more on the return (northbound) run. 

I made a chart and marked down all the station stops with the corresponding route-mile distance for each (Grand Central is Mile Zero; Pelham is at Mile 15; Harrison is Mile 22, etc.) With some simple subtraction and comparison, we see that both southbound and northbound trains take the same time to cover the same distances for the vast majority of the run. For instance, The southbound train travels the 14 miles between Mt. Vernon East and GCT in 26 minutes—and the northbound train takes just as long over that same stretch. It’s an even time match for the bulk of the route. 

But watch closely! Let’s take a look at the last two stops at the top of the run—Stamford and Old Greenwich. Those two stations are 2 miles apart. If you’re taking the train southbound out of Stamford, you’ll get to the next stop in only 2 minutes. Returning home, however—why, this is amazing!—to cover that same distance of 2 miles between Old Greenwich and Stamford, Metro North allots SIX MINUTES. 

Where did those four extra minutes come from? Does the northbound train pause to pick up a crate of caviar and champagne? Hardly. The schedule has been padded. So if northbound Train No. 1360 out of Grand Central is running a few minutes late, not to worry! That two minutes the train should take to traverse the final leg of the trip has been conveniently tripled. Think of it as loosening your belt by two holes. There now, don’t you feel thinner? This numeric hocus pocus means that a really late train will be less late, and a slightly late train will suddenly, magically, be “on time.” 

(Incidentally, the one other extra minute on the northbound run that adds up to the total extra northbound travel time of seven minutes comes from the stretch between Harrison and
Greenwich. That’s six miles of track; the southbound train does it in 10 minutes while the northbound takes 11.) 

As I said, schedule padding is not a secret that only Metro North knows. A number of years ago when Shirley Delibero headed up New Jersey Transit, an absurd amount of padding was added to the schedules—always between the second-to-last and the last stop, as in my example above—to keep on-time statistics high. But too many people noticed the trick, and the railroad’s loose schedules quickly became known as “Shirley Time.” 

In theory, if a railroad uses padding to improve on-time statistics, it should be able to use them in both directions, right? But in the case of Metro North—I’m making an educated guess, here—the four-mile stretch between 125th Street and Grand Central is so complex a choke point shared by so many trains at any given time, it’s just not a wise place to toy with the schedule. Uniformity rules on this stretch; I’ve seen no examples of trains taking longer in either direction. Plus, I just have this feeling that discrepancies would be easier to notice down on the GCT end of the timetable; it’s not a good place to hide stuff. 

But let us not close the book on this matter yet, and wait to see how the good people at Metro North explain these discrepancies—if, that is, they reply to my comment form.

Got a question for Engine Bob? Email it to trainjotting@gmail.com.