Don't believe this was posted on here but apologies if so: Fitchburg Train 427 (7:15 outbound) hit a tow truck at the Brighton St. crossing in Belmont on 2/8. Train was delayed 90 minutes because the foreman wanted to come out to inspect (damage to train and truck was minor) and a new crew was needed because the engineer was shaken up, can't say I blame her, I probably would have been shaken up if I hit something with a train. Only things I noticed as a passenger in the car behind the locomotive was the horn being "consistently on" in our approach to the (quiet zone) crossing and a barely-perceptible jolt; at first I assumed we hit a pedestrian. No injuries to the driver of the truck that I am aware of; I was a bit surprised there wasn't something in the local news like there seems to be every time one of these things happens.
These were tough circumstances, and I do not envy the crew for having to deal with it, but the whole incident would have been slightly less aggravating if A. there was a contingency plan in place besides keeping everyone on a train for 90 minutes (we were about 400 yards from Belmont station) and B. if the dispatcher's time estimates weren't genuinely terrible..."15 minutes" for the foreman and crew to arrive turned out to be about 50, and then "the new crew just got out of the cab, they're two minutes away" meant that the train ended up moving about a half-hour later. I get that those are just estimates and that traffic plagues the Greater Boston area, and that it's not likely as simple as "the crew shows up, the train moves," but the estimates were just genuinely awful; I would rather get bad news than blatantly inaccurate news. Meanwhile the original conductor had the gall to tell a (admittedly obnoxious) passenger "give me a break" like he was the one being especially hard done by...I was thinking 'dude, you're still getting paid and we're all sitting here on a Friday night getting zero compensation for our time.' Again, not denying that this was a tough situation, but I (nor the other passengers) didn't think it was handled super well.