Photo: William J. Rugen from Art Huneke Collection
Dan’s Papers October 8, 2010 danshamptons.com Page 17
The “Scoot” to Sag Harbor, photographed at the Sag Harbor Station
Scoot
Railroad Finds a Solution in the Old Sag Harbor Scoot By Dan Rattiner The Long Island Railroad has been fiddling around in recent weeks trying to reconfigure their schedule to better match the needs of their customers. There have been some missteps. Early on in this, they announced that they would cease running the year-round, daily train that goes to Greenport. They’ve got a couple of other trains going out there in the summertime only, but by cancelling this one, they would leave Greenport and the other North Fork stops bereft of train service eight months a year. They backed off from this idea after a big howl went up, but soon thereafter announced that one of the four daily trains that go to the South Fork year-round would be cut in the fall. Here it is the fall. They cut it. But there are three others. The railroad has also been sued about these
cuts. Since the railroad is part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and the MTA considers that when it comes to taxes, the South Fork and North Fork are equal to the rest of Long Island. That there are a gazillion trains every hour as far as the rest of Long Island is concerned and only four or five here doesn’t seem to matter to them, so a local group, spearheaded by the Hampton Luxury Liner Bus Company, filed a suit to stop this tax being imposed on those in the “New York Metropolitan Area” as completely unfair to the East End community. Concurrently, our local state and county officials, also outraged at this new tax, have proposed that the two forks start their own railroad service. The service would consist of little two-car commuter trains chugging from station to station out here. And that service would be separate from the dreaded MTA and immune
from their taxation. The latest news is that the Long Island Rail Road seems to have taken to the idea of the little two-car commuter train idea. And so now they have proposed that they run such a service for the two forks. Before I continue on I would like to note that the one train that finally did get cut is not cut all the way between Montauk and Penn Station. The LIRR seems to have drawn a line in the cinders about halfway out—at the station in Ronkonkoma. The train cut this fall does go out from Manhattan to Ronkonkoma. But it now stops there instead of continuing on. In theory, one could take the old scheduled train from Manhattan to Montauk, get off at the new end of the line at Ronkonkoma, then have a friend drive 50 miles from the Hamptons to pick you up there. So the train (continued on next page)
MAN BUYS A COMPANY AND IT KILLS HIM By Dan Rattiner Last Sunday, rumors went out that the man who had invented the Segway scooter 10 years ago had driven it off a cliff in California and died. An accident? A suicide? Disobeying the law about not texting while driving? The first reaction to this seemed to be it’s all very sad of course that this man died, but then, he died doing what he loved to do. People always say that they want to do that, either die doing what they love to do or die suddenly of a brain aneurysm so, just like that, all the lights go out. One knows what Hugh Hefner would like to die doing. It is sad for everybody else that he or she left, of course, especially family and friends, and especially if he was a nice guy, but other than that,
there are indeed all kinds of different ways that a person can die, and some of them do seem either preposterous or bizarre or sometimes, just plain funny. This one seemed that way. But then, it turned out, that the media got it all wrong. As the story unfolded it turned out that Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway in 2001, was still alive and well and living in California. It turns out that the man who died, Jimi Heselden, was just the multi-millionaire businessman who bought the company a year ago. He has a big estate about 100 miles north of London, so big that hikers and hunters come on it and he is happy to have them, and he was out Segwaying down a dirt path with the latest model, rounded a bend and didn’t make the turn. He and the Segway fell
80 feet down a cliff into the River Wharfe, and two hikers nearby saw this and ran over but the man was already dead, they reported. Investigations later revealed that, just to make sure there were no tongues wagging, he did die from having driven his Segway off his cliff. At this point, the media, having righted itself from its earlier spasm of getting the wrong man on the wrong continent, then came to the conclusion that James Heselden was close enough to being the inventor of the Segway to be able to allow reporters to proceed to phase two. You know what’s coming. It’s sort of in the mode of THE WILDEST POLICE CHASES or AMERICA’S GREATEST CAR CRASHES. The headline is KILLED BY THEIR OWN (continued on page 22)