Masked menace strands 7 train over Queens

A Manhattan-bound 7 train sat dead on the elevated track above Queensboro Plaza for 47 minutes on Sunday morning after a 40-foot web, the kind only one person in this city leaves behind, wrapped itself around the switch that moves trains from the local to the express track.

Roughly 600 riders were on board. Most of them were on their way to work. Several of them were on their way to church. One of them, a nurse from Woodside named Carla Reyes, was on her way home from a 12-hour shift and told the Bugle she "could see my own building from the window and still couldn't get to it."

The MTA confirmed the web at 7:15 a.m. in a statement that used the phrase "non-standard obstruction" four times and the word "Spider-Man" zero times. A transit source was less careful. "It was a web," the source said. "A big one. We had to cut it with the saw we use for fallen trees."

How a web stops a train

Switches on the elevated line are moved by a motor housed in a steel box beside the track. According to two track workers who spoke on condition of anonymity, the web had wrapped the box, the rail and a signal post into what one of them called "a cocoon with a timetable."

The switch locked in the half-open position. The signal went red. The train behind it stopped. The train behind that one stopped. By 6:30 a.m. the line was backed up to Flushing.

“I could see my own building from the window and still couldn't get to it.”

Carla Reyes, nurse, Woodside

The web was cleared at 7:29 a.m. Service resumed with delays until 9 a.m. The MTA said the switch would need "inspection and possibly replacement," at a cost it put at "not yet known" and this newspaper puts at a lot.

Who pays

The authority said it would attempt to recover costs "from any responsible party." Asked how exactly one bills a man who does not have an address, a spokesperson said the agency "has recovered costs from unusual parties before," and declined to say which.

At City Hall, the mayor's office said it was "aware of the incident" and pointed to a review of vigilante-related insurance claims that is already under way. The city's comptroller has estimated that web removal alone cost public agencies $2.3 million last year, a figure that does not include private landlords, several of whom now bill tenants directly.

The view from the platform

By 8 a.m. the platform at Queensboro Plaza was back to its usual Sunday crowd, plus a few dozen people photographing the switch box. A man selling coffee from a cart on the stairs said it was his best morning of the year.

"People were stuck, they were mad, they wanted coffee," he said. "Every time that guy does something, I sell out. I'm not saying I'm a fan. I'm saying I had a good morning."

The Bugle's position on the matter is well known and will be restated on the editorial page, in capital letters, on Monday.