Snow horror stories: Max and Amtrak down, smokers suffer, your comments.

By Guest opinion,

Max down. The yellow and red lines are down and being served by buses. The blue line is partially down. Last week’s failure was, in part, due to metal vandalism, but today it is frozen switches. Those expensive rails systems are down and vulnerable to bad weather and crime, especially crime, because metal thieves in Portland would not spend time in jail. Why you ask? because Wapato jail is empty because liberals choose to overspend millions on pork barrel transportation projects and not prisons. Liberals even fight anti-crime ballot measures.

Amtrak down: the news reported this morning over 150 people stranded for 12 hours through-out the night at the train station with no food at the station. The passengers were mad because Amtrak (your heavily government subsidized business) kept promising that the train was moving and would arrive any minute now. What Amtrak didn’t know is that the stranded passengers were calling their friends on the Seattle southbound train via cell phone who told them that the train that was comign any minute now was not moving at all. When one train did arrive Amtrak refused to move it because they wouldn’t allow their workers to work beyond an 8 hour shift. The stranded passengers complaint was simple “If you would have told us that there was a delay (both in weather and shift problems) instead of promising the train would leave any minute, many of the 150 people would have stayed in a hotel instead of sleeping on the floor!!!!!” Luckily some stranded Willamette University music students pulled out their instruments and began playing Christmas carols as all the stranded sang joyously along to these (censored) songs in, gasp, a public space.

Smokers suffer: I am amazed at watching chain smokers deal with the driving conditions. You see, they can’t open the window fully because the high winds and vertical snow blow right into the car. So every know and then you see a smoke drive on ice with one hand on the wheel and the other hand holding the cigarette between a tiny crack in the window to let the smoke out. Driving under such stressful conditions would only drive a person to puff a few more.

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