Call it the little commuter train that couldn't.
After watching the Orioles win an extra-inning game at Camden Yards, 85 fans sat and waited -- and waited and waited and waited -- on a train that was delayed more than three hours early yesterday morning, nearly two of them sitting idle in a remote railroad siding in the middle of Washington, officials said.
Adding to the frustration for the stranded passengers, some of whom didn't get home until after 5 a.m., was the primary reason for the holdup: The engineer running the Maryland Rail Commuter (MARC) train was ordered to stop by his dispatcher because he had come to the end of his 12-hour work shift.
"The engineer, an employee of CSX Transportation Inc., made an error," said Jay Westbrook, a spokesman for the Jacksonville, Fla.-based corporation that was responsible for operating the train. "It was an unfortunate mistake."
The MARC train involved in the incident was bound for the Brunswick line with stops in Montgomery and Frederick counties.
The Orioles game against the Chicago White Sox went 14 innings, instead of nine, ending at 12:16 a.m. The train departed Camden Station at 12:41 a.m. with 238 passengers, according to state officials.
It discharged 153 passengers on Camden Line stops before encountering signal and switch problems that delayed it 20 minutes near the Maryland-District border.
At 2:25 a.m., the train stopped less than one mile north of Union Station -- near where the train switches from the Camden line to the Brunswick line. There it sat for one hour and 42 minutes, waiting for a new engineer to take over.
"This is absolutely inexcusable. If they had been Maryland Department of Transportation employees, they'd have been terminated -- I guarantee you," said state Transportation Secretary O. James Lighthizer. "What if someone had had a heart attack or a crime had been committed? We've never had a stunt pulled like this before."
Federal law prohibits rail crews from working more than 12 hours straight.
The problem with the Brunswick train began not with the late game but with the fact that the 12-hour clock started early for one employee. The train's engineer was a replacement brought in from Baltimore.
That meant that he had already spent the first two hours of his shift in a taxi, riding from Baltimore to the western terminus in Brunswick before the train picked up its first passengers at 5:05 p.m.
