Victorya McEvoy left Grand Central Terminal on a Metro North train with two big jars of home-made lentil soup in a bag. She put them under her seat. When she got back to New Haven she schlepped her other luggage off the train — and forgot all about the soup.
Once in Union Station, she realized her mistake. She never recovered her soup. (“I don’t cook much, so making all that soup was a big deal,” said McEvoy, who planned to give it to friends.) But she did learn what happens when riders leave stuff on the train.
McEvoy approached a ticket agent with her tale. The agent was sympathetic. But he informed her Union Station has no lost and found.
“Someone comes here [to the ticket booth] every other day who’s lost something — a bag, a jacket,” the agent said in a subsequent conversation. (He didn’t want to be named in an article because of Metro-North rules against talking to the press. “There used to be a lost and found here, years ago, but they’ve all been consolidated back at Grand Central.” He said everything left on the trains is removed in the train yard, at some distance from the station, and put in a big lock box. “And the key to the box is in New York.”
Everything — minus perishables like McEvoy’s soup, which are discarded — is shipped to New York.
The agent said employees at Union Station have been lobbying to get a lost and found back at the station.
An official comment came from Metro-North spokeswoman Marjorie Anders in New York. She said the consolidated system has been in place for 26 years. She said about 20,000 left-behind items from all the train lines and all the stations, including Grand Central, are turned in every year. “Between 65 and 70 percent of items get returned,” she said. “It’s astonishing.”
She said the overwhelming majority of patrons pick up their lost items in person. But it’s also possible to identify an item via Metro-North’s sophisticated online tracking system and have it mailed back. The patron pays “only postage, not handling.”
The MTA website leads (after some searching) to a form that requires sufficient detail, Anders said, in order to convince the keeper of the lock box that one is truly the owner of the item in question.
Anders said there are no plans to return a lost and found to the New Haven station. “It’s more cost-effective and organized” to have it in one place, she said.
What if a bag innocently left on board rouses the suspicion of other passengers or officials? Maybe there’s a bomb in there. Anders said it depends on the item. “If it’s an abandoned backpack, then we might bring in our bomb-sniffing dogs.”