March Hats Become April Baseball Bats, May Notes For End-Of-Semester Classes And June Beach Towels And Sunglasses

Metro-North recently streamlined and modernized its lost-and-found system to make it easier to recover your misplaced prosthetic limb, sailor:

Since joining Metro-North in 1994, [lost-and-found chief Mike] Nolan has applied the analytical skills he honed as a Wall Street analyst to a tracking system that once depended on pen and paper and that in many ways had not changed in decades. He has modernized it, designing a database that allows agents to gather information over the phone from customers and see if an item has been found.

To streamline the process, Metro-North a few weeks ago unveiled a page on its Web site where customers can type in information about what they have lost. Mr. Nolan said he expects the online system to eliminate one-third, or about 500, of the phone calls that his office receives about lost items each month.

. . .

By computerizing so much of the process, Mr. Nolan’s workers have more time to deal with people like 68-year-old Gary Lewis, who walked up to the window at Grand Central last week and said he had lost his wide-brimmed brown hat on the ride into the city from the Croton-Harmon station.

John Pepe, one of Mr. Nolan’s employees, retrieved a hefty box marked “March Hats” and dumped the contents on the counter. He and Mr. Lewis rummaged through the pile without success.

“I’m known for losing things,” Mr. Lewis said with a shrug.

The number of lost hats, scarves, gloves and jackets explodes as the weather gets warmer. The lost-and-found is also a window into the latest trends. Just weeks after Motorola started selling its popular Razr cellphones a few years ago, for example, they began showing up in the lost-and-found.

The number of one-of-a-kind items also says a lot about Metro-North’s 125,000 daily riders. Mr. Nolan’s team has found and returned a violin worth $100,000, a packet with four season tickets to the Knicks — and two sets of false teeth that were lost about the same time.

When three people showed up for the dentures, the railroad had difficulty confirming the proper owners. But one man was so insistent that he volunteered to try them on.

“He was that desperate, so I gave them to him,” Mr. Nolan said.

. . .

Other items have become office lore. In the day when Metro-North trains stopped near a veterans’ hospital in Montrose, more than a few sailors and soldiers returning from New York after a night of drinking left behind their prosthetic limbs.

And one woman, so the story goes, purposely abandoned her late husband’s ashes to repay him for the nights he claimed to have fallen asleep on the last train home when, in fact, he was with his mistress. The railroad learned this months later when a woman called to confess. She never did pick up the ashes, though, and Metro-North had to get rid of them and the urn they came in.

The folk singer Pete Seeger stopped by the window not too long ago with his granddaughter to retrieve a banjo he had left on a train to Poughkeepsie, Mr. Nolan said.

Of course, there are limits to lost-and-found searches, something Mr. Nolan’s staff had to tell a man who called in 2003 looking for a duffel bag he lost in 1957.