Anyone who rides the Long Island Railroad without both a sense of humor and zest for life's mystery will end up having a sudden heart attack or fall into the pits of depression.

Last evening I took the 8:15 from Penn Station in Manhattan to Farmingdale on Long Island. It is supposed to take fifty five minutes to go 30 miles. That’s slower than English inventor George Stephenson's locomotive on its maiden run in 1831. Stephenson's locomotive pulled six loaded coal cars and 21 passenger cars with 450 passengers over 9 miles in about one hour. If anything points to weakness in the Darwin's Theory of Evolution, the phenomenon I observed last night does.

The train wasn’t out of Penn Station five minutes when what ballooned into an afternoon soap opera started. The train stopped and stood like a mentally defective mule. Then the dialogue between a conductor and the engineer began. They hardly spoke the same language.

"The breaks won’t release. Call ahead and get some mechanics here." But then suddenly the train lurched forward until it actually going about 40 miles an hour. Imagine the fireworks shooting out from the wheels if they weren’t rotating.

"Look, I said to the other passengers nearby. It’s obvious these people don’t own cars. Sometimes the electronic system goes haywire. The dash indicator shows that the brake release is on. But it can’t be since a cop with siren blaring is trying to get you to pull over for speeding. The problem is not mechanical but a seventy-five dollar fine.

More times than I can remember exactly the train pulled to a halt and sat there while these mental giants tried to deal with a problem that didn’t exist. Again and again the train would jump into action, cruising at 40 mph only to stop again.

Once the train actually kept up this speed for several minutes. As the conductor walked by I asked him if they hitched two more dray horses to the train. I also told him we had to get this train on the move since I had nothing to wear for a four day cruise.

Finally, one hour and a half out of Penn Station, the crew took matters into their wobbly hands. It was obvious the whole drama was bureaucratic. They were covering their rear ends.

"We will wait here for the trains behind us to pass. When there are no more trains, we ought to be able to move nonstop at 30 mph the rest of the trip."

"When there are no more trains behind!" Why that means if I had waited an hour and took the 9:15 I’d be home earlier. And skeptics doubt Einstein theory of the relativity of time and space and that gravity warps the surface of the universe. Warps! On the Long Island Railroad all the oddities of astrophysics collide. We have quarks, dwarfs, neutrons and at the larger stations, supernova.

As the conductor clipped the tickets again east of Jamaica, he apologized for the delay. I leaned over to the lady across the aisle. "You notice not a word about a refund."

"A refund," whispered a little man whose presence I hadn’t even noticed before, "why should they? Next month the rates are going up."

Just before the train reached Farmingdale at 10:30pm I said out loud to no one in particular. "Going into the city this morning the train was on time. I should have realized that was a bad omen."