8:54am - Leave 42nd St station on a Brooklyn-bound V train. I’m running a bit late today. Just barely caught the train; lucky me!
8:58am - Leave 28th St station
8:58am - Grind to a halt just seconds after leaving station. It was immediately clear that this was not a typical stop; I could hear the hissing of what must be the emergency brakes being applied and the stop was much more abrupt than one you’d typically get when the signals unexpectedly change.
8:59am - Conductor announces emergency brake was engaged, they’re investigating, and we should be moving shortly.
9:00am - Anticipating that we will, in fact,
not be moving shortly, I begin an epic gaming session of TowerBloxx 3D.
9:16am - MTA guy walks past doors in service aisle along the track, with flashlight pointed toward bottom of train.
Internal monologue: I always sit in the front car, but today ran to barely catch this train so I didn’t get to the front. Really wish I was in the front car today so I could overhear the engineer’s communications.
9:20am - Train begins moving, incredibly slowly
9:22am - Train pulls into 14th St Station
9:23am - Train stops again, this time gradually.
9:24am - Train in the station ahead of us, will be moving shortly. How is there a train ahead of us? We were stopped for 20 minutes! Did they reroute the local trains to express to bypass us?
9:25am - Train moving again, slowly.
9:27am - Pull into W. 4th St. I’m outta here.
9:27am - Bump into Matt Van Horn, who by complete coincidence is entering the train as I’m getting out. I catch up with him for a few minutes and warn him about the train problems.
9:29am - F train pulls in, Matt gets on it, doors close. Train is being held at the station.
9:30am - I ask the engineer what’s going on. He says train ahead of him (my train) had a BIE. I wonder what a BIE is, and he starts shouting questions about the signals to the command center located at the south end of the W. 4th St station. He closes the window and the F train starts moving.
9:31am - Start walking upstairs, wondering what a BIE is in MTA lingo. I assume it’s has something to do with Brake and Emergency, but hold out hope that this abbreviation might give me something more specific.
9:32am - I’m outside now, and Googling for “bie mta.” The first search result tells me something I didn’t expect: there’s a person named Bie Mta, and
they’re on Facebook.
9:33am - I tweet out what BIE stands for.
@amanda_nan and
@dr_ballon respond with Brakes In Emergency. I respond that I was kind of hoping for something more interesting, like Bobcat Inside Engine. Oh well.
9:37am - Seriously tempted to treat myself to a McGriddle.