And the tunnel comes and the tunnel goes

Work on the Central Line MRT reached some point near the Harbourfront MRT, the southwestern end of the North-East Line, and construction required that one of the two platforms at Harbourfront be shut down. So they ran the normal traffic just to Outram Park, the penultimate station, and required everyone to get off the train there. But there are still people who need to get to Harbourfront -- I'm among them, since there's a convenient bus ride to my apartment from there -- so they also ran a special train just between Harbourfront and Outram Park, with one of these trains arriving between successive trains running the remaining length of the track.

To be honest, I don't get the point. The special train did go from Outram Park to Harbourfront in the `opposite' direction, using the track ordinarily used for Harbourfront out; and they took this stretch rather slowly, despite being the one and only train on that segment of track. They also added many people on the trains warning passengers about the abnormal routing, to the point that passengers stopped listening, which is a danger of trying to make sure nobody misses the announcement.

And in nightmare images BBC Prime just gave a Creepy CGI Effect Host From The Weakest Link, daring people to spend a couple hours watching her show for Halloween. Take Anne Robinson, make her look plastic and have motion lines all wrong, and put on plastic-looking black pointy witch's hat and you do have something, which you may keep.

Trivia: Despite its lines being repeatedly raided by Union and Confederate armies, the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad reported a profit of over $140,000 between October 1862 and October 1864. Source: The Railroads of the Confederacy, Robert C Black III. (It's not clear to me whether that was US or Confederate dollars.)

Currently Reading: Science Fiction: The Best of 2002, Edited by Robert Silverberg, Karen Haber.