On Light Rail Travails

Some days, I think the universe is conspiring against me. It doesn’t want me to get to work. Or to get home. This was one of those days.

The light rail is powered by a distributed electrical grid. Sometimes, when it’s rainy, you can hear the sparking of the contact against the high-voltage wires. And when the train pulls away after you’ve disembarked, you can watch the sparks fly. It’s fun.

Enough about the destructive potential of electricity. 🙂

One problem with a distributed grid is this — lose your contact, lose your power.

And, for some reason, on the trip up this morning, the contact with the electrical line kept breaking. The train would chug along, and then the power would go out in the cabin, and the train would come to a halt. This went on for miles, while the conductor tried to restart the system, get the contact redeployed from his compartment, and get us on our way.

Suffice it to say, the trip to work this morning took forever. As it was, he did a complete restart of the system at one stop away from where I get off to go to work, and I decided that I could just as easily walk the extra two blocks. Which I did.

The trip home was not as frought with peril. The only problem there was that the doors didn’t quite shut all the way at various stops, which meant that they were repeatedly opened and closed until they did, in fact, snap shut. It wasn’t quite the lengthened journey as the trip to work was, but it wasn’t as snappy as it might’ve been.

On the plus side, all this extra time came in handy. Today’s Sudoku puzzle in b, the free daily paper, was an absolute bear. Oh, I got it, but I spent a good hour on it. 🙂

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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