"This" blogger has a fasciating take on the frequet delays on the T. He has bought a short wave scanner and can listen to the dispatchers when there are delays. Excerpt below:


What's interesting to me, and the part of this episode that relates it to the theme I mentioned earlier, is that the train drivers keep announcing that the delay is the result of "police action," which is only partly true. Its true that there's police action, but the real delay is because a bunch of testy people sitting in a room someplace are trying to run a railroad by remote control while sharing a radio and having only a vague picture of where anybody is or where they are headed. The real delay is because these trains may as well have wheels made out of stone to match the kind of technology that is being employed to dispatch them.

By the time I made it to Park Street, the dispatchers hatched a fairly vague plan that promised delivery via shuttle bus to passengers in exchange for their getting the hell off their trains so said trains could be turned around and run in the other direction. I have been involved in several of these "shuttle bus" situations before, so I can tell you how they work, which is that you go up and stand in an unruly crush of people along Tremont Street waiting for buses that are never going to come because they're stuck in rush hour traffic 10 blocks away, unable to move because the emergency vehicles trying to make it to South Station have made matters even worse. By the time you actually manage to get near the door of these supposed shuttle buses, the Red Line will usually be running again.