Amid upheaval, still much work remains at the T

The transit agency has no permanent general manager. Its board of directors is about to dissolve as part of a historic transportation shake-up. And a fare increase, proposed several months ago before being put on hold, remains in limbo while a financial expert performs a “top-to-bottom’’ review of the debt-ridden agency.

So it’s little wonder that a half-billion-dollar decision on the future of the commuter rail system has not gotten much attention. But it matters, quite a bit. In addition to costing taxpayers $235 million last year, the contract with a private vendor to run commuter rail affects the daily lives of more than 70,000 commuters across 13 lines.

By December, the MBTA has to decide whether to exercise a final two-year option on its contract with the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Co., a private consortium that has operated the rail since July 2003.

The initial five-year contract included an option for a five-year extension. At the end of 2007, the MBTA’s board of directors voted to extend it by three years, through June 30, 2011, leaving years nine and 10 in doubt. At the time, rail service was suffering and commuters were complaining. Trains were late more often than those run by other large commuter rail systems in the United States. Commuters had also just suffered through a summer of chronically broken air conditioning systems.

But recently things have been better. Almost all air conditioners worked this summer. And more than 90 percent of all trains have been on time every month this year.

“We’ve really worked hard this year to convince them that giving us the final two-year extension is the best thing,’’ said Richard Davey, general manager of Mass. Bay Commuter.

Davey said the company has also worked with the T to make wireless internet available on all cars and plans to roll out a system that will better inform passengers waiting at stations when the next train is arriving.

Are these actions enough to win riders’ confidence back?

Paul Regan, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, would like to see open bidding on the contract, given the amount of money involved and the importance of commuter rail service to the region.

“It’s been a good long time and I’d like to see what the market has to say,’’ he said, noting that he would have no problem if Mass. Bay Commuter won in an open competition.

Some passengers, like Robert Ryan of Shrewsbury, remain frustrated. “My opinion is NO!!!’’ he wrote in an e-mail Friday after an 83-minute delay on the Worcester-Framingham line, which, he said, featured inexplicable emergency braking.

The MBTA is leaning toward signing on for the final two years, though it is not a done deal.

“While there is certainly room for improvement, the contractor has been able to achieve desired results in on-time performance and customer service,’’ MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said in an e-mail.

In July, MBTA managers told Davey they would like to exercise the final two years of the contract, which started a series of negotiations. If those negotiations are successful, the new state transportation board would vote on the contract in December, Pesaturo said. If not, the T will put the contract back on the open market.

In either case, the T has to make a decision soon. It takes at least 18 months to select a new contractor and transfer the complicated operations.

Ex-freight train engineer takes to clowning around

“Now I’m a clown. I’m at the highest peak of my career,’’ he said not long ago by telephone, between shifts that involved blowing up animal-shaped balloons, sleight-of-hand tricks, and squeaky toys.

More specifically, Prevost is a railroad clown named Choo-Choo, on the Hobo Railroad, a 15-mile round-trip train in Lincoln, N.H., that runs a seasonal schedule.

The Hobo train has two other entertainers, a guy named Hobo Phil and another named “Accordion-something’’ or other, Prevost said. But neither of the other two dress as a clown. Hobo Phil is more of a magician. “He doesn’t have the red nose, doesn’t have the red hat. He’s dressed up more like a comedian,’’ said Prevost, 77.

Prevost said most of the people he knew from railroads did their time and then stayed from the stresses of train life.

“They’ve just had it,’’ he said.

But Prevost hadn’t had it when he retired in 1993. His friend owned a small scenic railroad and needed a certified engineer.

“He parked his freight train and he took his pickup truck right down to Lincoln and hopped on the dinner train with us that evening,’’ said Benjamin E. Clark, one of the family owners of the railroad.

Prevost liked helping, but did not find the point-to-point existence as fulfilling as mixing it up with people. So he became a conductor.

The adventure in clowning started five years ago in Leesburg, Fla., where Prevost has a winter home. He saw an ad for a clown college on the bulletin board at his development and knew what he had to do: enroll.

Central Florida is apparently amazingly fertile territory for retirees-turned-clowns. He counts himself one of 28 members of the clown club in his development of about 2,000 people.

Within a few years, “I started clowning around on the train, and this year, he built me a theater and it’s going very well,’’ Prevost said.

So well, that Prevost announced, rather apologetically, that he had another shift coming. “I’ve got to be off,’’ he said. “I’m the conductor today, and Hobo Phil is on, right now.’’

Civil rights activist plans march from State House

Craig Dias, a longtime civil rights activist who works at the T, wants to make sure no one forgets.

Dias is working with several minority rights organizations at the T to march with employees from the State House to the meeting. They have asked Governor Deval Patrick and a few legislators to come along.

“It’s the end of the T as we know it but we still have issues that we need to address,’’ Dias said.

He and several other minority groups have been asking Patrick for a meeting for months; in March, they delivered to him the signatures of more than 500 employees asking for a meeting. The T has a long history of outside oversight of its minority hiring, promotion, and firing practices. But in his letter to Patrick, Dias points to a recent MBTA report showing nearly 63 percent of all dismissals were minority employees in 2008, up from 34 percent in 2002.

A spokeswoman for Patrick, Kimberly A. Haberlin, said the governor would not be attending the T meeting, but that his staff is in daily contact with the groups and he “has put a high priority on improving labor practices at the T.’’

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