As a child, Alainia Tucker would ride Metro-North trains with her grandfather, watching as he collected tickets from passengers, shared a joke or sang whatever tune was in his head.
When Robert Tucker walked the aisles of a train, you heard him before you saw him.
“He’d dance up and down the aisles,” Alainia Tucker recalls. “Tap dance. Well, his version of a tap dance, or try to do the Temptations dance, whatever it is that comes to his mind.”
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Robert Tucker was Metro-North’s first Black conductor – “the Jackie Robinson of the Railroad” as he told anyone within earshot – with an outsized personality to go along with the title.
His granddaughter wasn’t that.
“More reserved,” Alainia Tucker says.
But something about the job, maybe her grandfather’s undying love for the work, or the pride he took in wearing the uniform, made her reconsider an initial resistance to applying for a job on the railroad.
At 28, after years of selling sneakers at on Fifth Avenue, she decided to give it a try. Her father, a longtime Metro-North worker, had just died. Maybe it would bring her closer to him?
She signed up without letting her grandfather know.
And then, while spending time with him near his Bronx home, she revealed the move.
“I will never forget, we were in the supermarket and I said, ‘Grandpa, I’m going to take the physical for Metro-North to be a conductor.’ And his face just lit up like, ‘What are you doing? Why didn’t you tell me?' I just wanted to do it on my own. He was just so excited.”
That was more than 10 years ago.
Today, Alainia Tucker trains other conductors how to do the job her grandfather once did.
It’s a different job than it was back then.
For one, her grandfather’s sometime habit of locking fare evaders in the bathroom until the last stop would likely be frowned upon by management today. There are more and more rules in the rulebook, and so many tests that sometimes conductors feel like they've signed up for college.
“Growing up seeing my grandfather collecting tickets, I thought that was the only thing that conductors did, collect tickets, open doors, make announcements,” Tucker said. “Getting into the position you find there is so much more that you have to know about the job.”
And lately, it’s gotten a lot more dangerous.
During 2019 and 2020, Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees were spit on 200 times. There have been so many incidents that last week, the leadership of the MTA’s major unions, including the one representing Metro-North conductors, lent their support for a bill that will increase penalties for spitting on MTA workers.
A few weeks ago, one of Tucker’s trainees called her to tell her she was spit on.
“I can’t imagine my grandfather having to deal with that,” she said.
Tucker, 37, spent three years as a conductor after getting her conductor’s license in 2012. She’s been training other conductors since 2015. Her cousin, Khesean Tucker, is also a conductor, joining the agency same year as Alainia.
Her grandfather, now 81, has been in failing health for a few years. But when she visited him a few weeks ago, he admired her work identification card and told her he needed one of those. She had to remind him he wasn’t on the job anymore.
Not a 'Doggone' Day on the Danbury Branch
On the evening of February 18 at around 5 PM, a Metro-North train was operating
south on the Danbury Branch through Redding, CT, when the locomotive engineer spotted something awry.
“We were coming around a curve and went into a straightaway when I saw some movement,” he said. “I put a little brake on — and blew the horn repeatedly.”
Apparently, it was a dog running at full speed right in the middle of the tracks ahead of them.
“As we were approaching, the dog was still running away from us,” said the conductor, who continued to blow the horn and apply the brakes.
Under normal circumstances,
it takes about a mile for a train to stop, and there just wasn’t enough time. Before the train could come to a complete stop, the dog disappeared underneath the head car. The train crew prepared for bad news.
“We got off the train and looked under the head car to see,” said the conductor. After a few minutes, relief flooded in. “It was safe, on its belly crawling underneath the train, just sitting there. It must’ve been able to duck as we went over it.”
As the incident unfolded, the train’s Conductor radioed Metro-North’s Rail Traffic Controllers to relay the situation
at hand. The Assistant Conductor was also on board to provide immediate support.
Upon closer inspection,
the crew saw that the dog, a black and white Husky named Lolli, wore a collar with
I.D. tags. With a little coaxing — no thanks to some trail mix, the only food they had
on board — the Assistant Conductor was able to reach the dog and place it inside
one of the coaches.
Lolli’s owners, who lived nearby, were notified and pickup was arranged as the train continued its northbound travel.
“We set up an area in the car for the dog and we gave it water,” said the
Engineer. “It calmed down after we got moving and it settled into its spot
. She was really comfortable and calm.”
Apart from Lolli’s appreciative owners, the customers aboard the train were
notified about why they were experiencing a delay. And they were equally
impressed with the crew’s efforts in rescuing the Husky.
“To see the dog unharmed and to get her back to her owners, it was a
good day,” added the Engineer. “We were all able to work together. It
was definitely a great outcome.
STAMFORD, Conn. (WCBS 880) — Connecticut lawmakers on Monday announced a new plan to make rail service throughout the state faster.
Connecticut Transportation Commissioner Joe Giletti says officials scrutinized every inch of railroad track in the state and found that trains could be moving much faster with some improvements.
“We learned that we could achieve time savings on the rail line of up to 25 minutes,” he said. “Happening now are infrastructure improvements such as straightening track curves, improving movable bridges, creating [passing] sidings for trains – so that they don't have to wait for others.”
Positive train control has also improved safety on trains and allows for them to travel at higher speed, according to Giletti.
“The railroad has been saturated with slowdowns that were out there,” he said. “We've been able to clean up those slowdowns and, on top of that, what we're doing now is we've looked at all the drawbridges and all the fixed bridges and we've looked at whether or not we can ballast deck them, which to allow us to increase some of the speeds.”
Ultimately, the transportation commissioner expects that commuters will save 82 hours per year once the improvements are completely. He also hopes that by 2022, commuters can shave 10 minutes off the trip from New Haven to Grand Central Terminal.
The improvements are expected to cost $8 billion to $10 billion, but state officials are hoping for some help.
“The Federal government should pay for rails in the northeast corridor,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
He and other lawmakers are hopeful the federal government will step in as Congress looks to pass an infrastructure package.
Dave Klepper comment: Obvioiusly, would also help Amtrak's NEC sevices.
Here is link to report. Format is a little different to figure at first.
AECOM Blank (ct.gov)
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