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If you ride the T you are familiar with the mysterious disabled train that haunts the punctual among us. I have never been lucky enough to happen on one. Tonight’s experience suggests that more often than the MBTA would like to admint, a poorly trained operator barrels into the station a bit too fast, is slow on the breaks and overshoots the exit.
If you ever find yourself in a position where someone asks if the subway car you are building needs to be able to reverse, please say “yes.” Consider the occasion that some operator misses the exit and needs to back up a few feet. Suggesting that such incidents are so rare that one could easily deploy a reverse pushing vehicle to facilitate is a poor choice.

I’ve seen Back to the Future III at least a half dozen times and it just dawned on me that there’s a major (potential) plot hole. The move takes place in 1885, 100 years before the original. Marty and Doc are trapped because the time machine that Marty took back ripped a fuel line and ran out of gas. Putting aside the whole why not just change the speed at which the time circuits activate, they still have the time machine that Doc got sent back in. The can’t use it as is to get back (because the time circuits fried and in any case it would create a temporal paradox and disrupt the time space continuum). But there’s no reason they couldn’t siphon the gas from the first machine to get back in the second. The first would stay put for 70 years until 1995 when they refuel it to send Marty back. I guess if it’s taken me this long to figure that out maybe it’s reasonable that Marty and Doc didn’t think of it.