SEPTA stars on TV's "World's Toughest Fixes"

It's a dangerous job: You're surrounded by live electrical wires, dangling 30 feet in the air, and dodging oncoming trains - and that's in a single shift.

You're trying to prevent a catastrophe, be it from a flood, an explosion, or a mechanical failure.

Does that sound like the SEPTA we know, sometimes love, and occasionally hate?

That's the SEPTA that will be shown tomorrow night on the National Geographic Channel's "World's Toughest Fixes." A special premiere for city bigwigs was held last night at the Comcast Center.

"A common question I've gotten is why SEPTA," host Sean Riley said yesterday, pre-premiere. "The answer is, there are a lot of other transit systems, but this is one of the largest and unique in that there are many modes of transportation under one umbrella . . . It was an opportunity to look at an entire transit system as an organization that keeps the blood of the city pumping."

Forget the uninterested token clerks and the occasionally comedic train announcers. SEPTA has 9,000 employees handling 2,200 square miles of tracks, and this is serious - and sometimes dangerous - stuff.

The show, now in its third season, usually features Riley as he joins crews that repair things such as nuclear turbines, Alaskan oil pipelines, and ski lifts.

The SEPTA show - titled "Philly Mega Transit" - features multiple projects intended to show the round-the-clock nature of SEPTA's work.

There's Riley in the morning with "the wire train," working around live power lines and warning his sound man to keep the boom down or risk death.

There's Riley in the late afternoon with the wire crew, "SEPTA's cowboys," he calls them, as they climb high up poles and work while hanging over the tracks.

There's Riley in the middle of the night with the track maintenance crew, cutting and laying new rail by hand.

Spokesman Richard Maloney said SEPTA was thrilled to showcase its workers on national television.

"I've been dying to get someone to look at how things work," he said. "Day to day, the media look at how things don't work. It's a mark of pride how proud our people are to show the world what they do. This is their moment in the sun."

The hour-long show is made to appear as if all of the action takes place over a two-day span, but film crews actually spent more than a month working with SEPTA.