Lost on Metro-North, but Most Likely Found

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It is not too much of a stretch to say that Mike Nolan has seen just about everything there is to see in his line of work, from commuters searching for their false teeth to Pete Seeger’s banjo to thousands of dollars in cash tucked into a pair of socks.

But as chief of the lost-and-found for Metro-North Railroad, the studious-looking Mr. Nolan takes just as much pride in making sure that everyday black umbrellas, blue blazers and stainless-steel keys get returned to the train’s riders.

“It’s cool to work here because we’re incorporating customer service and inventory management with how the railroad works and state property law,” Mr. Nolan said recently as he hunched over a computer, searching for the owner of a black JanSport backpack stuffed with dirty gym clothes.

Like the 20,000 other items that make their way each year to the lost-and-found near Track 100 in Grand Central Terminal, the backpack had been tagged with a ticket number, description, contact information about the owner, if there is any, and when the railroad last tried to reach him or her.

Since joining Metro-North in 1994, Mr. 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.

“It’s great to have other people do my data-entry work for me,” he said.

It is a laborious process, but it goes a long way toward reuniting passengers with items that are collected at Metro-North stations and on its trains. Over all, about 60 percent of lost goods are reunited with their owners, though almost all valuable items like laptops are claimed.

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At the Long Island Rail Road, which said it expects to open a lost-and-found Web site by the end of the year, about half of lost items are found and claimed by their owners. New Jersey Transit launched a similar site last year, but it does not collect all of its lost items in one place. Instead, riders must go to one of the nearly two dozen train and bus stations that maintain a lost-and-found.

For items worth less than $100, Metro North gives riders 90 days to claim lost possessions. For more expensive goods, the deadline is up to three years. Most unclaimed items are sold to Unclaimed Baggage Center, based in Alabama, which resells the merchandise. (The company also buys luggage left at airports.) The $5,000 or so that the railroad receives each quarter from Unclaimed Baggage Center helps defray the costs of operating the lost-and-found.

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.

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

The shelves are also stocked with plenty of items that may never be reclaimed, including a few toy train sets and a President Bush doll that sings “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

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.

The company forbids Mr. Nolan and his staff from accepting gifts from grateful riders, and there are nine security cameras in their bunkerlike room to dissuade them from taking valuable items — like jewelry and iPods — that are kept in a safe.

Not that the integrity of the staff has come into question. In fact, Mr. Nolan was able to return a suitcase to a Peruvian woman with about $10,000 still tucked in a pair of socks. Her plane ticket, also in the luggage, provided the clues to track her down.

“When you see something like that, you say, ‘Wow,’ ” he said.

In almost a century since it opened, the lost-and-found has never been robbed. Of course, it does not hurt that it is next door to Grand Central’s police station.