Forget about trains with bedbugs. At least those trains were on the right track.
A subway operator on the A line recently piloted an express train uptown — on a downtown track — for several minutes before coming to a stop, according to sources.
A dispatcher tried to contact the crew by radio after realizing the train had pulled out of the Canal St. hub on the wrong track, and was moving against the regular flow of traffic.
But the crew later told authorities they never heard the emergency radio broadcasts, the source said.
The operator only halted the A train after she already had passed through the Spring St. station and spotted the headlights of a southbound express idling ahead of her at the next station, W. 4th St., the source said. An A express train went the wrong way on a a downtown track.
The passengers on the Aug. 11 ride apparently remained clueless that they essentially were going the wrong way on a one-way street.
Luckily, the screwup happened on a stretch that, for the most part, is a straight track with good visibility, a veteran motorman said. If the train operator had been going around sharp curves, and wasn’t hearing or receiving dispatchers calling out on the radio, this could have ended with a serious crash, the knowledgeable old-timer said.
“She could have had a head-on collision,” he said. “That’s the only way to say it. There’s no nicer way to put it.”
A MTA spokesman and a union official both agreed this was a serious breach of safety protocols, but said there was no real threat of a collision. The train at W. 4th was ordered to remain in the station. The A train operator was only traveling at 10 mph or less, the union officials said, and was proceeding very carefully.
The A train originally was traveling south when signal problems started causing extensive delays in the system. Dispatchers began rerouting service, and the A train operator was told to was told go back uptown from Canal, sources said.So how does a train wind up going the wrong direction?
The proper series of steps would have been to empty the train of passengers, pull into a spur track just south of Canal, and then maneuver through a switch to the northbound express track, authorities said.
Instead, operator simply went north on the same southbound track, apparently thinking she would soon encounter the crossover switch she needed by going in that direction.
The MTA has reassigned the A train crew to desk duty as it investigates the misadventure, the spokesman said. Before it pins all blame on the train operator, the MTA has to answer these questions: Are the crews’ radios inferior to an earlier model, as some workers have claimed? Was that part of the problem here? And why, despite all the advances in technology, are motormen and conductors claiming they still encounter “dead zones” underground where all radio communications are lost?