No Way to Run a Railroad

It is indisputable fact that the Acela spends nearly as much time standing still as it does moving forward. Today, on my fifth consecutive delayed trip, the train crawled around bridge repairs in Connecticut, sped through Rhode Island, then got stuck behind a disabled Amtrak train at Forest Hills station in Jamaica Plain.

Here the train has sat for half an hour. Two functioning commuter trains have been dispatched past our High Speed equipment, and nearly a half dozen Orange Line subway trains have passed us on the adjacent tracks.

We are scheduled to move forward again in five minutes, at which point we will be 45 minutes late.