Hamptons Subway Newsletter: Week of April 19–25, 2019

By Dan Rattiner

5 minute 04/22/2019

Hamptons Subway app - hsubway — Hamptons Subway app, Photo: Varin Rattanaburi, saiko3p, fffranz/123RF

Week of April 19–25, 2019
Riders this past week: 45,323
Rider miles this past week: 102,844

DOWN IN THE TUBE
Christie Brinkley and her daughter Sailor were seen traveling from Bridgehampton to Sag Harbor Wednesday morning. George Filopoulos of Gurney’s Star Island Resort & Marina was seen taking the new spur from Gurney’s Inn to Gurney’s Montauk Yacht Club. Paul Simon was seen coming down the escalator on Saturday night with his guitar at Amagansett, but our spotter lost sight of him after that.

GAP
Our negotiations with the Gap clothing company have fallen apart. The plan had been for the Gap to have kiosks on all our platforms alongside the Subway restaurant kiosks that have been in place for years and years. Buy a footlong, then a baseball cap with the word GAP on it. Or maybe a sweater.

Problem seems to have been with the particular vice president we were negotiating with. A higher-up at the firm, writing to us about the termination of the negotiations, said the vice president has been fired and the Board of Directors thought it was stupid to put the kiosks out there in this dusty environment just so we could have the voice on the subways say “watch out for the closing doors and before you go buy a shirt at the Gap.” Well, we tried.

TRACK YOUR TRIP
New this year is an app for your cell phone, consisting of a map and a little blue dot which moves along as you move along. It’s possible to track your trip. Just get down to a platform, tap HSubway, enter your destination station, press enter and the whole route will be shown to you along with the time it will take and when the next train will show up. It’s amazing that some of the big boy subway systems never thought of this before.

SPOTTER FAVORITES
Lists of celebrity riders who have been riding the subway since the first of the year will be posted on the east wall of every subway stop next week. See if your favorites are on the list. And no crossing out of names with a magic marker of celebrities you don’t like.

POODLES
Packs of wild poodles have been seen on the subway system. We think they may have been living in one of the tunnel storage rooms over the winter but now are out and about. They like being patted and petted. Just do that but otherwise let them be.

MUSK EXPERIMENT
Elon Musk was at the Westhampton Beach platform at 2 a.m. after the subway shuts down for the night, to demonstrate his new rocket vacuum subway train. Commissioner Aspinall and half a dozen vice presidents attended. The new subway train—a single car—looks like a silver rocket, really nice. And Musk, exactly at 2:15 a.m., pressed a button on his remote and the rocket, with a test pilot on board, shot down into the tunnel heading east, but then was never heard from again. We searched all night. At 6 a.m. when the system started up again, we stopped. Nothing doing.

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE
Summer approaches and we hope our staff will be more attentive to the passengers than they have been in the past. By the way, if you lost anything on the subway system last summer, please stop by our office in Hampton Bays to retrieve it. It’s beyond 90 days and could be considered ours to be sure, but we will trust that it’s yours on your say so. Crowds of volunteers went out last week to look in every crevice and corner of the tunnels and platforms and did find lots of stuff.