Flashes of Panic

I’m back on EDT.

Rather than spend thirty-odd euros on a cab to the airport, I walked to Bad Cannstatt and spent 2.50 on an S-bahn ticket which got me there in plenty of time. At some point in the trip I had made a faulty deduction, I think based on obsolete experience in Berlin, that “S-bahn” was “Strassenbahn” or streetcars, and “U-bahn” was the underground. Maybe that is true in Berlin; in Stuttgart, U-bahn is both, and S-bahn is the equivalent of what we call “commuter rail” here in the land of the MBTA.

So the trip was balanced: I walked to Bad Cannstatt Banhof, took a train to the airport, flew to Logan, and took the T back out to Davis Square and walked home, with everything balancing on a close connection in Zurich. (I made it easily, plus a joke from one of the security screeners about my last name, which I’ve heard a few dozen times before, but never with a Swiss-German accent.)

What I really can’t figure out, with such a close comparison to the European rail systems now in hand, is why the MBTA trains are so damned loud. Noise, as I understand it, represents some kind of drag or wasted energy in a mechanical system, and compared to the whisper-quiet S-bahn, most T trains (the blue line in particular) sound like they’re rolling over crushed stone rather than steel rails. I suspect this is a T issue more than a US/Germany issue simply because on the line that passes through Medford, I noticed that the commuter rail trains were louder than the Amtrak trains on the same line by a multiple of at least two.

Can they not take care of the cars, or do they simply not care how much of a racket they make?

(I can’t believe that’s the only thing sticking in my mind now; I must really be tired. I complain about traveling and working, sure, but I like the opportunities my little sideline has opened up for me, and when my life situation changes in a way that keeps me from doing this as much, I will miss it.)

Now Playing: This Light Is For The World from Universal Hall by The Waterboys

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