If we were living in the model train set of some giant kid, the Norwalk River railroad bridge would be one of his favorite pieces. It's 562 feet long, and 202 feet of that can "swing" or pivot on an axis to let boats come through.
Of course, it's a two-step process. Step one is swinging open. Step two is swinging closed, so the trains can roll over the bridge. Step two has been tricky of late. Twice in several weeks, the bridge got stuck in the open position. Good for the boats. Bad for the trains.
The bridge was built in 1896, so the good news is: We really got our money's worth! Grover Cleveland was president when this bridge was born. In 1896, the big railroad news was that tracks finally reached a strange place called Miami, where hardly anybody lived. But because there was now passenger rail service, people started moving there, and that same year Miami was incorporated. So one way to think about this is: We've been using the same swing bridge for the entire time that Miami has existed.
There are lots of other ways to think about the fact that the bridge sometimes does not close. One way is: This is an inconvenience! Metro-North Railroad President Joseph Giulietti recently said, "We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused."
Another way to think about this the bridge is: "This is a horrible emergency because hundreds of people could die if the bridge gets stuck open and the train doesn't stop! We must do something now!"
Almost nobody seems to think about it that way, although it's difficult to say why not. Scientists in Argentina established that semi-terrestrial crabs will habituate to a danger stimulus if they see it over and over but a heron never eats them. (This process accelerated when the scientists injected them with morphine. Seriously. They needed to do experiments to prove that crabs get less worried if you give them morphine?)
It would be one thing if nothing ever went wrong with Metro-North trains, but things go wrong all the time, especially last year when people died in three separate Metro-North incidents, added to which were a series of other power failures, disruptions and glitches. So why is everybody so sure that the train will stop before it gets to the stuck-open bridge? Are we just junkie crabs?
Another way to look at is: This is so much better than India! India's rail infrastructure is 150 years old in some places, and thousands of people die train-related deaths every year. If I were Joseph Giulietti, I would circulate the terrifying 2012 report of India's so-called Kakodkar Committee, with a little Post-it reading, "You see? It's all relative!"
So what are we doing? U.S Sen. Richard Blumenthal proposed an exciting initiative called “Tough Noogies, Boats!” He persuaded the Coast Guard to keep the bridge closed for at least a few weeks while crews patch up Ol' Creaky. Boats would be re-routed through the Arctic Circle, which is increasingly navigable thanks to global warming. Meanwhile, it will cost more than $450 million to build a new bridge and take at least three years, which will be preceded, apparently, by hemming and hawing about where this money is going to come from — as opposed to doing it right away while Superman lies on the tracks and lets the trains run over him.
I blame the contractors who build these things. If they had taken the time to learn more about John Rowland's hopes and dreams for home improvement and luxury travel, this thing could have been fast-tracked in the 1990s.
Instead, let it stand as a magnificent symbol of Connecticut's myopia about mass transit. We have the same system Pete Campbell uses on "Mad Men." Our cities are stagnating without rapid transit. Try to build something new, and it's shouted down, like the Griffin Line, or treated as a satanic plot, like the Hartford-New Britain busway. Our old stuff is falling apart from decades of malignant neglect.
For now, the swing bridge can be part of our "Still Revolutionary" campaign. Who wouldn't want to ride across something that remembers the Spanish-American War?