Adventures in Mass Transit

Early this morning I had a brief foreshadowing of the things to come when my train pulled up with only three cars attached instead of the usual six. As we trudged forward, I discovered that my train would not be running express and instead I had to transfer to a red line train. Since I knew that I would have to navigate the reorganized train system I chose not to listen to my iPod which made made the trip seem a little longer than it should have been. After several muffled announcements I thought I figured out the reason for the delay and the path of the train that I was on. It turns out that another train derailed ahead of where I was and caused a mass rerouting of the transit system. Basically, I was on a red line train to Fullerton at which point it became a brown line train running express through Armitage until Merchandise Mart where it became an orange line train until it hit the southeast corner of the loop where it tranformed back into a red line. It seemed easy enough, but for some reason I had to explain this simple path to several of the other commuters. Ultimately it took me over an hour and a half to make a 35 minute trip to make me at least a half hour late for the second time this week.