So it’s pre-dawn on a chilly November morning in Lancaster, PA, and you arrive at the Amtrak station to catch the train, but no one is around to open the station and now you can’t get to the platform. What do you do? The answer for some locked-out commuters this morning was to break down the door.

When the first commuters arrived to the locked station they were able to talk construction worked into letting them in through the work zone. But that only got them so far, as the doors to the actual platform remained locked.

According to Lancaster Online:

One found a way to dash across the train tracks and get up on the platform. Then the person ran up the stairs and tried to unlock the door from the other side.

But it was padlocked with a metal bar.

There was a brief discussion of finding a screw driver to unfasten the bar.

Then someone began pushing against the doors. Others helped.

They forced open the door and got access to the platform.

Amtrak is calling the snafu a “scheduling error” but couldn’t elaborate further.

“It caused a small deal in opening the station,” said the rep. “The good news is that they were able to get the station open and get passengers to their trains on time.”

One commuter tells Lancaster Online that this isn’t the first time Amtrak passengers have been locked out of this station. In the past, they’ve been able to take an elevator up to the platform, but that elevator was out of operation this morning.

“Amtrak is running this like a ma and pa operation,” one angry passenger explained. “They do nothing to increase the comfort of the person taking the train. They lock us out of the building. They are operating it like a general store in the 1800s.”

‘Scheduling error’ leaves early-morning commuters locked out of train station [LancasterOnline.com]

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