This has nothing to do with ADD, but, what the hell...

I withhold the right to write about, or link to, any damned thing I want to. If you don’t like it, tough noogies to you.

Here’s a great piece about one of my hobby horses, namely, how and why SEPTA sucks so badly. This guy understands that an agency whose responsibilities--or one of them, anyway--is to run passenger trains in and around a big city ought to run the damned things, not cut back on branches for the hell of it, and even, though SEPTA seems not to grasp this bit here, to broaden the system. Philadelphia and its outlying counties have hundreds of miles of tracks that once had passenger trains running along them, some up until as lately as 1986. SEPTA needs to get off its collective ass and get trains running beyond where they’re doing it now.

What got me on this tangent was that we went up to Philadelphia this weekend to see my mother, and we stayed at one of those hotels out near the airport. To get from it to where she is, and back, we had to go through Essington, which lies along the old Chester Branch of the Reading Railroad. This is the branch that SEPTA, in a fit of atypical behavior, started running trains along to get to the airport, but the last bit, the fishhook to the airport, is a spur off the main branch. Anyway, the branch is still there, running along through Essington, through Eddystone, and into Chester, all the way to Marcus Hook.

Those of you who never lived in or near Philadelphia won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but that’s all right. Feel free to bail out here.

Well, so, back to the topic at hand. The tracks run out beyond the airport, by a whole slew of airport hotels, right by a big Boeing plant, by all kinds of other industries, and by a casino. Think how great it would be if people could fly into the airport, and just hop on a train and be at their hotel in 15 minutes, or how great it would be if some of the hundreds of people who work at Boeing could take the train to work. I happen to think that the last thing a blighted city trying to come back (like Chester) needs is a fucking casino; but the damned thing is there now, and it isn’t going to be going anywhere, so as long as people are going to it, it would be nice if they all didn’t have to drive through Chester and clog all the streets up.

So, that’s my intemperate, and irrelevant screed for tonight. If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry, but, come on, you have nobody to blame for that but yourself. You didn’t have to read it. I even told you as much.