Friendships Forged on Rails

The train passengers leaving Union Station jostle about, squeezing by one another with plates stacked high with tamales, taquitos and buffalo wings. Headed toward San Bernardino on a Metrolink train, they hustle in the compressed space, grabbing another slice of pizza or a bit of smoked salmon. They talk of sports and shout over conversations to pass another soda.

At the center of the party is Lucy Reinhardt-Ulatowski, doling out eggrolls, homemade broccoli salad and sandwiches, which she spent hours making the night before.

When Reinhardt-Ulatowski began commuting by Metrolink in 2001 -- a grueling five-hour round-trip commute from Victorville to downtown Los Angeles -- she worried it would be painfully monotonous. On her first few trips, she stared out at the passing landscape of foothills, warehouses and housing tracts as her fellow commuters read, typed on their laptops and listened to music.

“It was kind of scary, all by yourself,” she said, “trying to look cool.”

But over time, she began chatting with the people on her car, conversations that evolved into relationships. Today, the friendships she forged during those long commutes are stronger than those at work or in her suburban subdivision.

She and her train friends organize potluck parties aboard the trains, vacation together and socialize off the tracks. And when one member of the extended family was mangled in a bicycle accident last year, Reinhardt-Ulatowski held a fundraiser to help him out.

Reinhardt-Ulatowski is part of what transit experts say is a small but remarkable subculture that has developed inside Southern California’s commuter trains. What starts as a smile and a nod unfolds into in-depth discussions of football and families.

Metrolink, which operates the region’s commuter trains, has at least three rail cars in its network in which groups have organized. The “party trains” are definitely the exception, with most Metrolink riders using their commute for decidedly more singular pursuits, such as reading, paying bills or working on their laptop computers.

But train officials and others are intrigued about how these groups form and the lasting bonds of these commuter friendships.

“People tend to sit in the same place every day, and as they see each other again and again, they start talking,” said Metrolink spokeswoman Sharon Gavin. “It’s a way to de-stress about your day before you get home. By the time you get home, you don’t really have to complain to your family.”

The groups formed spontaneously without any help from Metrolink, but “it’s something that we encourage,” Gavin said. “Get to know your fellow riders. It adds a level of humanness to the commute.”

Club cars where commuters socialize have long been a part of the East Coast train culture, but it’s something new to Southern California.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, chairwoman of UCLA’s department of urban planning, said the groups “attest to the fact that a mode of transportation like a train is much more of a social mode than a car. When you are in a train, you have to interact with other people.”

That’s something Sheila Fisher and other passengers on the Metrolink between Los Angeles and Orange County discovered.

When she first began her daily travels from Los Angeles to Orange County eight years ago, Fisher was still mourning the death of her husband. Sitting alone on the train, she would watch from afar as a boisterous group huddled farther up her car laughed and chatted every afternoon on the ride home. It made her feel even lonelier.

One afternoon, the whole group came over. “They said, ‘Why don’t you come and join us? We’d like to know who you are,’ ” Fisher recalled. “For me, it was like a reawakening. I met more people than I ever had before.”

Since then, Fisher, a 61-year-old Eagle Rock resident who works as a collections manager for the Orange County Credit Union, has become one of the group’s main party organizers. She played host to 10 people from her train for a weekend getaway to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, and held several parties on the train. But the group is now doing more than socializing. Fisher and others have volunteered together at the Los Angeles Police Museum and for a nonprofit medical clinic in Lancaster.

“We’ve helped people write resumes, helped people prepare for interviews, we’ve mentored people,” Fisher said. “If someone is going to be out of a job, we network.”

*

Earlier this year, the party was in full swing on the Metrolink San Bernardino train.

Weeks earlier, Reinhardt-Ulatowski solicited food for a potluck celebration, climbing aboard with lists of names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Wearing a gray pinstripe skirt suit and sneakers, with her $200 monthly pass secured at her lapel, Reinhardt-Ulatowski parks her rolling briefcase in a corner of the train car. She moves cautiously among about 30 pairs of knees and bags, and negotiates such items as an Ambrosia-style salad, green beverages and chicken wings.

Most cars in the train are relatively quiet, but Reinhardt-Ulatowski’s train was bustling.

At the end of one car, two games of dominoes were going. Players rotated in and out as the train pulled into stations.

Reinhardt-Ulatowski “brings a lot of people together,” said Allen Scott of Fontana, as he watched one of the games.

That’s not how she felt when she began taking the train.

Reinhardt-Ulatowski, who worked at Ontario Airport for 10 years as a police official’s secretary, was later promoted to a job in downtown Los Angeles.

The commute was a big issue, but neither she nor her husband wanted to give up their 1,600-square-foot home in Victorville, which sits on 1 1/3 acres. Wild quail and rabbits visit them regularly.

“The prices of property are way lower than even Rancho Cucamonga,” she said, of another Inland Empire suburb closer to downtown.

Her daily travels begin at 5 a.m., when she arrives at a Victorville station and catches a bus to Rancho Cucamonga to the train, which departs about 6:15 a.m. The train pulls into Los Angeles just over an hour later. From there, Reinhardt-Ulatowski jumps on another bus, which delivers her at 7:30 a.m. to 6th and Spring streets, where she works as an executive secretary for the city.

Each evening, the 85-mile trek is reversed, and she plops down on her living room couch by 9 p.m.

For a while, her train journeys were lengthy and solitary. Home. Train. Work. Train. Home. Read the newspaper. Twiddle thumbs. Abandon the crossword.

Until the scent of chicken reached her empty stomach.

“These guys would get on every day with chicken, and you could smell it on the whole train,” she said. “One day, someone offered me some.”

Although she declined the offer, it sparked a conversation.

She met John Kerby, 32, a Ford dealership manager, and Joe Chavez, 48. They talked football, and Kerby accused Reinhardt-Ulatowski of always defending the underdog team.

Conversations evolved to talk of families, work and vacations, and soon the three were planning a trip to Las Vegas.

“When you spend an hour a day on the train, you get to know a person,” Kerby said at a recent wedding party thrown by Reinhardt-Ulatowski for a bartender at Union Station. “We spend so much time together, more time than I spend with my brother or my father.”

What started as a few people killing time discussing touchdowns and field goals became a crew of 40 people -- a fraction of the roughly 360 people on the San Bernardino train.

“There are no politics on the train,” said Reinhardt-Ulatowski. “No games to play, no one to compete with or impress.”

The San Bernardino line group is made up of people of different races, ages and professions. People come and go as jobs and schedules change. But what unites them is the fact that they have long commutes and that they are trying to make them more tolerable.

Michael Harvey lives in Ontario and takes the train as part of his commute to Compton.

“It’s a lot less stress” to take the train, he said, and factoring in the cost of gasoline, “this is so much better.... I love watching traffic go by.”

Harvey and the gang can sometimes be a little loud, but they said they don’t get many complaints from others on the train

“We’re just having a good time, and most people understand that we’re just letting off steam,” said Harvey, 40, a manager at the Compton Water Department.

*

Until last year, the friendships on the train were casual -- confined to the potlucks and occasional vacations.

Then, one of the commuters, Mike Yanez, was critically injured when a car struck his bicycle. He blacked out for 16 days. Doctors put plates in his cheeks, reconstructed his eyebrows, pulled out his jaw and fixed his nose. The dog groomer also required knee surgery.

News of the accident traveled fast on the train. Yanez stood out because he often lugged his bike aboard.

“The more we found out about him and how badly he’d been hurt,” said Reinhardt-Ulatowski, “the more we wanted to do something for him.”

She started a collection to send in a get-well card. Then she and other riders held a raffle onboard, and with the money raised, they bought him a new bike and helmet.

They surprised Yanez with the bike when he returned to the train. “I was touched.... Not everybody does stuff like that,” he said.

For the group’s Fourth of July party, Reinhardt-Ulatowski decked herself out in a red skirt suit with an American flag shirt and scarf, and red-white-and-blue earrings.

Reinhardt-Ulatowski stood in the train waiting for the Rancho Cucamonga stop. “We got through another one,” she said. She turned to those riders left on the train -- hers is not quite the last stop.

“You guys, thanks for everything,” Reinhardt-Ulatowski said.

“Bye, Lucy.”

“Thanks, Lucy.”

“We love you, Lucy.”

Reinhardt-Ulatowski rolled her eyes.

“You’ll see me again,” she said. “Tomorrow.”