He couldn’t tell a lie.
An NYC Transit worker who resisted relentless pressure to load up his logbook with signal inspections that never happened told The Post yesterday about the harsh punishment and ostracizing that he endured in retaliation.
“They were intimidating us,” said the 11-year veteran from Brooklyn, who asked that his name be withheld to avoid further retaliation. “They would say that it had to be done, but you can’t build a house from the ground up in a month.”
A sweeping investigation by the MTA inspector general — first reported by The Post on Friday — revealed thousands of bogus signal inspections across the subway system.
The potentially deadly inaction was blamed in part on ramped-up demands to meet federal standards that required monthly signal inspections. Managers simply faked the work as done, the IG found, and subordinates who didn’t play along were subjected to harsh punishment.
About two years ago, the signal maintainer was ordered to inspect multiple switches on the F line at 34th Street in just one day — an impossible workload.
The signals, which prevent trains from colliding, are spaced between 100 and 700 feet apart. A maintainer, on foot and carrying a heavy bag of tools, must spend at least an hour checking each one and has to stop every time a train passes.
He inspected three switches and did maintenance on another but didn’t have time to do the rest. He told his boss the truth and was met with abject hostility — because “it’s an unwritten rule” that you log the incomplete work as having been done, he was told.
It was “a long, drawn-out argument,” he recalled.
The worker was banished from his home base in Manhattan to the Queensbridge station on the F line, where he was tasked with the grueling job of removing track rails with a 70-pound, hand-powered drill, he said. The backbreaking work is one of the lowest rungs on the transit ladder.
Only a handful of the department’s 1,000 signal maintainers takes a stand over the falsified reports, the worker said. The corner cutting is ingrained in the department’s culture, where maintainers who learn the practice later rise to become superinten dents, transit sources said.
Cheaters simply copy the specs on past inspection re ports for the signals they don’t hit, the worker said, or they fudge the main logbook, some times fibbing about dozens of signals that wouldn’t be in spected for weeks.
After the IG waved the red flag about the shocking practice in 2006, the MTA required that workers scan a bar code on the signal to verify they did the inspections. But the bar codes sometimes didn’t work, and managers continued to doctor reports, the worker said.
The MTA has shaken up management and conducted an across-the-board review of the system, transit and IG officials said. The signal system is safe, a transit spokesman insisted.