It’s So Cold That Train Rails Are Breaking
It is really, really cold out there. How cold is it? Cold enough that city officials are worried about frostbite. Cold enough that the high for the day is in the teens. Cold enough that the words “bitter” and “brutal” apply. Cold enough that waiting outside on a train platform is a miserably experience, no matter how many layers you’ve managed to bundle under your puffy coat. But that’s what a bunch of Long Island Rail Road commuters had to do, because it’s also cold enough that several train tracks snapped thanks to the plunging temperatures.
Steel, you see, can get brittle in the cold, which leads to unfortunate things like broken rail tracks. MTA officials reported broken rails at the Westbury, Great Neck, Bay Shore, Babylon, and Far Rockaway stations. At Port Jefferson and Ronkonkoma, trains were suspended in both directions between Hicksville and Mineola, though service later returned. Kind of makes you rethink the whole premise of Snowpiercer.