Late Friday Links 10/18

I took a nice long extended Columbus Day weekend (and I've subsequently been swamped with all the work I put off the last couple days!), so I've been a bit out of the loop as to some of the more minor stories that popped up on the news wire over the past week or so.  Here are a couple late Friday links for your commute home:

• Platform Jumping
• On Tuesday, a video emerged online of a bunch of fools attempting to jump between platforms at Babylon station.  The video linked shows one of the clown's attempting to jump between the platforms.  He fails pretty miserably.  And it's kinda embarrassing too, since the gap between the platforms is only one track wide...Babylon, Hicksville, Ronkonkoma, and Jamaica are the only stations which can have a train's doors open on both sides.  If  this had been any other side platform station where the gap was double the size, he'd be cooked for sure!
• Grade Crossing Outage on the Far Rockaway Branch
• Around 2:30pm on Tuesday afternoon a LIPA power outage resulted in the loss of power to three grade crossings on the Far Rockaway Branch.  The Dubois Avenue crossing in Valley Stream, and the West Broadway and Franklin Avenue crossings in Hewlett all lost power.  As a built-in safety feature, whenever the power is cut, the gates drop automatically, protecting the crossing.  As you might've guessed, traffic was backed up in the local towns the branch bisected, but LIPA was able to restore power around 4:00pm and the gates were lifted and traffic once again begun flowing.  Train service wasn't adversely affected.  Even if they had to stop and flag the three crossings, with an MAS of 40 m.p.h. along the branch, the delays couldn't have been that bad!
• Trespasser Strike
• A non-passenger train heading back west through Syosset around 4:30pm struck and killed an unauthorized trespasser on the tracks.  These incidents, which are awful for everyone, tied up service along the branch resulting in quite a few cancellation and a couple painful combinations.  The LIRR says that the incident is being investigated as a suicide.  Hopefully people will learn that suicide's never the route, and that you will never win when you tempt fate on the rails.
• The LIRR Rainbow
• LIRR Monthly tickets change color from month-to-month to easily spot who's trying to pass last month's past.  I was going through some of my drawer's last weekend and I found a whole sleu of my past LIRR monthlies.  I even found ones from over five years ago back when I was still living in Nassau County.  Since then my commute time has tripped and I've gone from paying $203 to $466!  The real sad part about that photo is the fact that, including the tickets from my "weekly phase" from when I was still in school, there's probably like $30-grand worth of tickets right there!

Enjoy the last couple hours remaining on this Friday, and if you're riding the rails this weekend, remember there's extra trains for the Oyster Festival at Oyster Bay, buses replace trains for most of the day between Huntington and Port Jefferson, and DIVIDE switch replacement moves to the Ronkonkoma Branch, so they'll be some boarding changes at Bethpage station and five hours of overnight busing early Monday morning.

Have a good weekend!