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Next stop: The Twilight Zone

Joye Brown

June 22, 2008

Two friends took in the Jimmy Buffett concert at Madison Square Garden two weeks ago. And then, ecstatic, they hopped a Long Island Rail Road train bound for Huntington.

The pair was ecstatic because, as one told me Friday, "Jimmy always puts on a good show."

And it didn't hurt that he finished up early, which allowed them to grab an 11:04 train out of Penn Station instead of the later train they had planned to catch by sprinting to the track.

They settled in for a quick, sweet ride to their stop in New Hyde Park. Instead, their night went, as one told me Friday, "from Margaritaville to the Twilight Zone."

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But the story's going to have to wait while we revisit last week's brouhaha over comments from David S. Mack, vice chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

"Why should I ride [the LIRR] and inconvenience myself when I can ride in a car?" David S. Mack told Newsday reporter Steve Ritea during a break between MTA committee meetings on Wednesday. He said he wouldn't use the railroad if not for free passes he and other board members - current and former - receive as a perk.

His frankness bought him so much grief that Mack had to take it all back within 24 hours. Come Wednesday, he said, he will vote to support a proposed change in policy that would give free passes only to current board members who are on official MTA business.

On Friday, one of the Jimmy Buffett fans and I pored over photographs of the 22 MTA board members who appeared in the paper, along with news of Mack's wicked fast retreat that day from his statements.

"Did you see any of them that night?" I asked her.

"I don't recognize anyone," came the reply. "But I wish they were there, to go through exactly what we went through."

And then, she suggested I call her friend, Kelly Staikopoulos, who agreed to tell their story.

"We were so happy to get that early train, to get home early," Staikopoulos said. "We got off on time, but stopped dead, just east of Hollis."

The train went almost dark. The air-conditioning stopped. And it began to grow tight in a car crowded with concertgoers, some of whom had been drinking.

As time dragged on, she said, passengers did not hear any announcements. That's because the 12-car train's public address system was dead, too, an LIRR spokesman would say later.

Staikopoulos and her friend began to eavesdrop on radio conversations between the conductor and the motorman.

The train was "dead on the tracks," she said she heard. She also said she smelled something burning.

At one point, Staikopoulos said, they saw several MTA officers pry open doors on her car and help each other make the climb up from the tracks.

She said she heard radio chatter about the possibility of passengers having to leave the train and maybe walk along the tracks; about the option of placing planks between their train and a "rescue train" and having passengers walk across; about having a rescue train "push" the disabled train to the next station.

"It got to be scary," said Staikopoulos, a freelance writer and photographer who has a suit pending against the LIRR for injuries she said she received on a train in 2006. "It wasn't pleasant."

Finally, the train moved on to Floral Park.