A very bad thing happened on the subway yesterday. Whether it was a fire at St George, or some undefined weirdness between Sherbourne and Bay, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that by 07:55 we were told to get off the train at Chester. 7:55 is the time that my train leaves from Union station, so things were bad already.
Me and several thousand other folks were crammed on the platform at Chester. No-one was going anywhere. There were supposed to be shuttle buses, but there was no movement. People were just on the edge of freaking out, and there were ‘helpful’ suggestions flying about. Things got especially unhinged when extra trains came in, making the platform impossibly crowded.
Then a train came in which wasn’t said to be out of service, so people surged into it. The picture below was nowhere near as crowded as it had been:
So then no-one knew where to go. It seemed that many people were locked by indecision, so when I finally managed to barge my way to the stairs (featuring non-working escalators, crowded with static people):
All told, I was stuck down there for about fifteem minutes. It was very nasty. I’ve never been in such a large crowd in such a small space. Things almost turned ugly.
It did mean I was nearly two hours late for work (streetcar from Broadview got me in five minutes after the 08:43 train had left). I didn’t enjoy a nearly four hour commute.