Here we are in the waning days of November, and I can’t say that I’ve seen much evidence of that dastardly commuter scourge known as Slippery Rail/Slip-Slip/The Worst F***ing Thing About Commuting in the Northeast.

Granted, I’ve only lived through one fall season of riding the rails, and didn’t even have this little ol’ cyber soapbox last year, so I don’t have much frame of reference. But I seem to remember cars being out of commission this time last year, our fleet of 8 knocked down to 6, to 5, to freakin’ 4 for the tightest ride since those 18 kooky college kids piled into the VW Beetle.  

Maybe the worst is yet ahead. Then again, just about every last leaf is down from the tree, so if ever the failed foliage were to plot their havoc on the train tracks, I’d think now would be the time.

Could it be that Metro-North’s multipronged plan to thwart the tyranny of oily leaf residue–shooting sand and alkaline onto the tracks, scrubbing them from moving trains with steel brushes, and a fearsome contraption dubbed Waterworld–is actually working?

I put a call in to Metro-North to find out.

In the meantime, I’m just enjoying the ride.

(Boy, is it hard to type while simultaneously keeping fingers crossed and knocking on wood.)

I was sitting on the platform bench in the boonies this morning, thinking about how Metro-North’s various strategies geared towards combating the autumnal tyranny of Slippery Rail seemed to be working. Here it was less than a week before Thanksgiving, and not once had I been on a train running at less than full capacity, or been on a train that skidded past a stop.

Chalk one up for Waterworld, I thought.

OK, this is a bit disingenuous. I was sitting on the bench because the train was a few minutes late, which of course got me thinking that Slippery Rail had officially kicked off. Indeed, the train pulled in five minutes late, and indeed, it proceeded to skid right past Valhalla a few minutes later. “Nothing I can do about that,” the sheepish engineer told his congregation mid-skid. “We’re gonna have to back up.”

But lo, the true misery of my ride had not even begun.

Truthfully, I’ve been having less heinous rides of late; either I’ve finally gotten used to being jammed into a tight train car with several hundred people I don’t know, or those blessed Bose headphones are finally earning their not inconsiderable fee. Either way, I hadn’t felt my blood boil on the train in some time.

He was about 20, in a stiff black baseball hat on backwards. His iPod offered a bumpin’ Fremix for the entire car to hear; in the unlikely event you couldn’t hear it, the young man rapped along at a fairly loud level, and punctuated the music with manic gesticulations–the left hand threw up emphatic points, the right hand conducted a little air-turntable.

Worse yet, when he boarded in Hawthorne, he set his sights on an empty four-seater. He dropped a full Hefty bag on the seat next to him, and his blue duffel bag on the two seats across from him. This slim young man had four seats, all told. By my calculations, that’d be $832 for the monthly pass.

The train filled up in White Plains, and the young man made nary a move to make his compound available. While some seasoned commuters arrange their baggage (that’s literal baggage, not figurative) to dissuade fellow riders from sitting near them, I honestly think the kid was just completely in his own world.

So just as I’m tuning out 25 Cent, a voice fills the vestibule just behind me.

“I don’t know if this is going on public record,” the woman shrieked into her cell, “but I don’t want this document just floating out there.”

(Uh, but it’s OK to have it floating around the train?)

The woman was engaged in a lenghty discussion about an artist’s contract and aspects of the contract aimed to fight piracy. Generally you cut a little slack for a cellphone user in the vestibule; at least they’re self-aware enough to take their convo to a less-peopled place. But this woman was truly shouting. I turned around and saw the bulk of the problem–she was shouting not into her phone, but into the hands-free wire that dangled down by her neck. Her hands were thus free to rest in her pockets.

“The reason it doesn’t work is it’s not the real answer,” she bellowed. “The whole law of exegisis (I had to look that one up) is what sounds defensive to me. Yes, I’m here…CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

Yes, Ma’am. Yes. YES! 

I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps the lady could do up a contract for the young rapper not ten feet from her.

Young MC mercifully got off in Harlem, and the woman’s exegisis convo thankfully wrapped. The train ended up only being 2 minutes late.

Ah, but further horrors awaited in Grand Central. A few weeks back, we were faced with a substantial logjam at the stairs heading down to the subways while an escalator was being fixed. Alas, the escalator next to it was out of commission this morning, and an MTA employee in that red LL Bean vinyl jacket you wore in junior high was at the top of the stairs to corral us into a single-file line. Of course, I got stuck next to the lady with the small child who was just big enough to do the stairs on her own.

It’s times like this we wish we stashed a little Jameson’s under our desk.

After Metro-North’s demonstration of its new Waterworld campaign to fight slippery rail, the railroad offered a little more detail on the plan. Metro-North will dispatch “rail wash trains” to “blast” the offending leaves off the tracks with “high-powered jets of water and rail scrubber trucks that use steel brushes to clean the rails.”

Metro-North also shares that the leaf residue is “iron pectate,” which is produced when the pectin from the dead leaves mixes with rail steel.

The railroad will also look to combat the problem by tweaking its computer system so the trains don’t brake as soon as they start to slide. It will also reduce speeds on rainy days.

A Yonkers Youth Was Stabbed Daily…I mean the Journal News…has some more detail, such as Waterworld’s twin 10,000 gallon tanks of water mixed with alkaline soap, shooting a stream that’s strong enough to cut off your hand. Reporter Caren Halbfinger also mentions how the problem was so bad last year that the Metro-North had to lease an extra “trueing machine”, which gets wheels back to their preferred round shape.

Where would one ever find a trueing machine?

I like that Metro-North is taking these steps to make life less awful for riders. I just question the wisdom of naming the campaign after one of the greatest flops in Hollywood history.

With the dreaded Slippery Rail season just about upon us, Metro-North is announcing a major campaign designed to fight those nasty leaves that wreak such tremendous havoc for the railroad and its riders.

In short, falling leaves leave an oily residue on the tracks. Cars slide on the residue, wheels lock up, skid and flatten, trains are taken off the rails, and riders are jammed tighter than the mosh pit at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel from mid-October on into December.

Tomorrow, Metro-North will conduct a demonstration of “Waterworld”, its “aviation jet engine” that blows leaves away, along with a “rail scrubber,” a series of brushes that wash the tops of the rail.

The demonstration takes place at the North White Plains railyard t0morrow at 10:30.

Spokesperson Marjorie Anders seems genuinely optimistic about this season’s Slippery Rail battle. “There are a number of innovations we’ve made, in terms of computer technology and mechanical improvements,” she told Trainjotting. “No railroad can get rid of all the leaves and rain, but we can make progress. We hope to do better than past years.”