CTA Tattler

I love it when the train is crowded because it's late, and then WE get the lecture/scolding.

It's been my experience that when a train is packed, it's running slow, because it's spending more time at each stop. There is usually a train right behind it, and it's not as jammed. I wait for the next train. It beats being buried in someone's armpit. But that's just me.

Every single time I've been told that there was a train immediately following, I waited, and you know what? There was. Sometimes it's almost empty. It usually pays to wait.

The train gets later the more time it takes for people to crush on and off of it, as well. I get really mad when I'm on a crowded train and we spend a whole extra minute at each stop with the doors trying to close around the people.

Actually, the times I've heard this there has been a train right behind. Going home, I take the red line north from Jackson, and very often see the headlights of the next train right down the tracks.

Better get ready to do this a lot if you use the Red Line on the north side. Especially on Saturdays with a Cubs game. I once had to wait for four jampacked trains to leave Washington station until the fifth one had some room for me. On one occasion, the motorman said "There are trains stacked up behind me all the way to Roosevelt." When he said this, his train (and I) were at Clark/Division. But you know, of course, that 99% of the people waiting to board were trying to wedge themselves into the fleshpack on that overloaded one, as though it were the last space shuttle off Planet Earth before a nuclear holocaust.

Whenever there's a night game at Wrigley, Ive had to wait through 4 or 5 trains trying to go home. I've given up--now I just take the 66 bus to the Ravenswood and take it going south. It's jammed by the time it makes it back to the Chicago stop, but I'm seated. I don't mind standing on the train, but I hate standing when no one will move away from the doors.