NY Daily News.

It wasn't easy getting on the train. It was even harder getting off. After a flight from Boston and a day working at JFK airport, I got on the Airtrain around 7 p.m. Sunday only to find the tracks were iced over and it couldn't move.
Taxis weren't an option either, and car services laughed at people who called to request pickups.
So after a long wait, hundreds of stranded travelers shoved their way through the snow with their luggage onto packed airport shuttle buses - which got stuck again and again, finally letting passengers out to trudge the last stretch of road to the Howard Beach A train station.

Then, we waited well over an hour in the driving snow for a train, watching two A trains pass through without stopping. "The hard part's over," a fellow traveler said as we got on an A train that finally did pick us up. He was dead wrong.
The train ground to a halt just before 1 a.m. on the tracks between the Aqueduct and Rockaway Blvd. stations. It sat there for seven hours as cold, hungry, tired passengers watched the blizzard rage outside and, eventually, the sun rise over Queens.

Officials said snow on the third rail caused the train to lose electrical power. Translation? "This train is completely dead," a conductor said. So we waited - without food, water, bathrooms, and most of the time without heat. Skipping meals all day and drinking three cups of coffee quickly came back to haunt me, but fortunately I had an extra jacket in my backpack to pile on top of my winter coat. "I've been cold for seven hours," said Courtney Thorpe, 29, of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who was supposed to spend Sunday night celebrating the holidays in Warsaw with her fiancee and his family.
She opted to head home instead of bunking at the airport, but quickly regretted it.
"I figured staying at the airport for 24 hours is ridiculous, and now I would kill to be in the most uncomfortable metal airport chair," she said.
MTA workers scrambled to restore power, but came up short. Spirits rose when they announced a rescue train was coming to fetch us - but sunk again at the news: "The rescue train is stuck."
As the hours ticked by, conductors admitted they were as clueless as we were. They pleaded over the radio for help, but no help came.
"You've got a whole bunch of managers sitting around trying to figure out what the hell to do," a conductor said.
Calm prevailed for the most part throughout the ordeal, with passengers cracking jokes and sharing cell phones and the rare snack.
Tempers flared occasionally:

One passenger banged on the windows and screamed "I want to go home!" Others lashed out at the MTA. "They know how to raise the f---ing fare every two months but they don't know how to move a train off the track or people off the train," said Keith Roberts, 51, of East New York. While many of the 500 passengers on the train were coming off long travel odysseys, for some New Yorkers it was just a regular Sunday commute - one that took over 12 hours.
"I have to go to the bathroom. I'm tired. I'm cold. I just want to get off this train," said April Owens, 27, of Far Rockaway.
Finally, a rescue train arrived and dragged us to the next station, where we got another train that slowly but surely completed its route. I got to my Brooklyn apartment just after 10 a.m., 15 hours after I first left the airport terminal.
"You got breakfast on that train?" Roberts asked as the rescuers pulled up.
One shook his head.
"What," Roberts said. "No free MetroCard, nothing?"