"Conductor, if you can hear your Motor, come to him"

Those were the words that came over the 2 train loud speaker about 30 minutes into our stay in between the 50th and 42nd Street stations. We'd been told it was "signal trouble", and after the conductor went to the front of the train, she announced that in fact, the power had gone out on the entire 7th Avenue line. We'd have to walk up to the front of the train to exit at 42nd Street, assuming the driver (or "motor", I guess he's called) could jerk us that far into the station. He did, and about 50 minutes after we'd first stopped, I walked out of the frontmost train doors, held open by two transit policemen.

It used to be that if the power went out and you were stuck in the subway tunnel, you had only emergency lights, and certainly no air conditioning. A 50-minute wait would have been agony. As it was, with a seat, lights, a/c and yesterday's New Yorker, it was actually fairly pleasant, when I wasn't imagining that they were lying to us about signal trouble, and really, the train in front of us had been blown up.