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Wed | January 04, 2006
the perfect seat
It is good that I am not a working stiff. When you're a working stiff, your goals become, "Today I'm going to drink water." "Today I will get a good seat on the train."
One of the first accomplishments of the day (besides getting up at all) is to get a good seat. This means not only sitting in the right place, but also a tolerable person then sitting next to you. You do have some influence over who sits next to you, via eye contact and body language. I am sure I wrote about it at my penn station blog.
So I know how to get the best seat possible on the 8:05 train-- the Dover line. It differs depending on what part of the line you get on. Chatham is in the middle, so some people have gotten on already. The window seats fill first, on either side. People who board at Chatham sit in the aisle seat on the three-seater. In fact it is possible, by looking at a person's seat on the train, to have some idea what town he or she is from. The ones by the window are from before Chatham. The ones in the aisle seats are Chatham and Summit. The ones in the middle seat on the three-seater, are South Orange.
The 8:05 is an express and so it skips the other stops on the line-- Short Hills and Millburn and all them. It just goes Chatham, Summit, South Orange, New York. I can recite the stops on the way back like an alphabet-- Secaucus, Newark Broad Street, Brick Church, Orange, South Orange, Maplewood, Millburn, Short Hills, Summit, Chatham, Madison, Convent Station, Morristown, Morris Plains, Mount Tabor, Denville and Dover.
The aisle seats are pretty good for the morning rush hour. While one could argue that a window seat is best, there is the disadvantage of not being able to easily get up as the train pulls into Penn Station, to wait by the door and be one of the first ones off the train.
Today I sat in a three-seater aisle seat in the middle of the first half of the second car, next to a woman in a grey overcoat.
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