After icy struggle just to get to the T, Red Line users faced long ride home
Dinners were delayed. Parents worried when their teenagers were late coming home. Men and women were packed together, stalled in tunnels, commiserating, feeling helpless and stuffy. One man reportedly suffered a panic attack.
The cause: one terrible rush hour on the MBTA's Red Line, a cascading series of delays Monday evening that followed a tough 72 hours for the T as it contended with back-to-back snowstorms.
But it was less a tragedy than a series of inconveniences for thousands of uncomfortable commuters.
"They just kept telling us technical difficulties," said Nick Todinho, a bartender from the North End. "Everyone was just crammed in together." He said he was stuck for 30 minutes somewhere north of South Station.
Passengers said that announcements describing the delays varied, sometimes talking of a disabled train, sometimes operational problems, other times just plain old delays.
For about 45 minutes, the problems were something of a mystery even to T employees, said Joe Pesaturo, spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
"We understand that some people would be frustrated when these situations occur," Pesaturo said. "But we promise them MBTA crews are working very hard in situations like this. We had one storm after another."
The problem could not have begun at a worse time, 4:45 p.m., when cars on the MBTA's busiest line were filling with tired workers who had slid across Boston's icy downtown streets. A northbound train had come to a sudden stop just after it left Charles/MGH station.
"It's not clear at that point what triggered it," Pesaturo said. "The assumption is, you have a disabled train with a mechanical problem."
Ice and snow on the tracks was not considered a primary culprit, Pesaturo said, because trains had been moving all afternoon without interference.
It took about 30 minutes to get power back on the train and move it to the next station, so passengers could get off and the train could be removed from service. In the meantime, trains behind it were delayed. Platforms and cars were beginning to fill with people.
Until troubleshooters could figure out the problems, crews had to manually operate nearby signals, slowing the line even more as train operators called dispatchers for permission to leave stations.
"You could just feel the temperature rising, and the windows were fogging up," said Laura Swofford. "It was just getting incredibly stuffy."
Swofford, a Cambridge resident, said she spent about an hour getting from Park Street to Charles Street, where her boyfriend picked her up.
At 5:31, another train came to a dead stop in the exact same place, just past Charles/MGH, where the first train shut down. By then, crews were beginning to suspect that ice and snow on the tracks were in fact to blame, Pesaturo said. The trains had been stopped by a trip, a footlong arm in front that automatically disables the power if it detects an object on the track. A crew removed the debris within 40 minutes, but the delays lasted until about 8 p.m., Pesaturo said.
Trains all along the line were stopped between stations for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, adding more than an hour to many commutes, passengers said.
Swofford and another passenger, Al Lee, said one man on their train appeared to be hyperventilating, trying to push his arm out the window for air, while the car was stalled just before Charles Street Station.
Lee said the train operator was unresponsive when passengers asked for help. The passengers finally pulled the emergency lever, and the operator started yelling at them for extending the delay, Lee and Swofford said.
Pesaturo said the T is investigating the incident.
Lee decided to bail out a couple of stops early, paying $10 for a cab home to Cambridge.
"It really wasn't worth it, being in the sardine can," he said.
Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com 