Char and I were coming home on the T yesterday on the redline going southbound. The train had just passed the Charles/MGH stop and was at Park Street. A voice came on the loudspeaker and said “the next stop will be Charles/MGH.” This of course makes no sense, since we just came from there.
The stop after Park is Downtown Crossing, and that’s where we were going to transfer to the Orange Line to get home. There’s an underground concourse that connects Park Street and Downtown Crossing, so we decided to get off the train and walk underground to the station.
Unfortunately, there were a bunch of police and fire officials at the underground concourse, and they told us we should walk to Downtown above ground. I asked if the station was closed too, or just the concourse. The policeman said yeah, the station’s still open.
At this point I was thinking a water main had busted and flooded the tunnel. The concourse might be flooded, making underground travel to Downtown impossible (or at least very wet).
When we got to Downtown (now above ground), there were more fire trucks, and more police cars. We tried to go into the station from one entrance, and the firefighter there said to use the other entrance. We used the other entrance, and _finally_ someone told us that, in fact, the whole station was closed after all. It’s amazing how poor the communication between these guys was over a mere 500 feet.
We ended up walking to Chinatown and taking the train from there.
Today I found this in the paper:
