Brian drives up to Beverly from Boston in the dark every morning to hand out copies of Boston Now to commuters boarding the trains at Beverly Depot. He works along side of Paul, who sells copies of the Boston Globe to the same crowd.

They’re usually among the first ones in Beverly who can tell if there’s a problem on the Newburyport/Rockport commuter rail line, and on Tuesday they knew something was up.

“They canceled the first train and they were running about 10 or 15 minutes behind, but it looks like they’re catching up. It’s that bridge,” says Brian as he nods in the direction of Salem.

The Beverly-Salem railroad bridge has been a problem since just before Christmas, when a barge carrying around 100 tons of muck dredged from the Danvers River hit the bridge as it was passing through to Beverly Harbor. The accident caused about $25,000 in damage to mechanical parts that allow the bridge to swing open for waterway traffic.

 It’s also caused an unknown amount of frustration for commuters who, on three different mornings, learned the bridge was closed for repairs needed because of that accident. Depending on whom you talk to and on what day, the problem has been a gearbox, a shaft or maybe something a little more serious. Commuters have been boarded onto buses and shuttled to Salem, where they could reboard trains and continue on to work — at stations further north up the line, LED signs advised riders that it might be a good idea to find alternative transportation.

For Paul, the recent spate of problems has been a real pain, because it puts people in bad moods and

nobody wants to buy the newspaper.

“It hurts me and it hurts my business,” he says. So, on Tuesday, when the trains were late, Paul and a crowd of commuters were wondering if it was the bridge again.

It was, but according the Joe Pesaturo, spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the trains weren’t off by 10 or 15 minutes. There’s some rustling of paper on Pesaturo’s end of the phone line before he announces that one train was off schedule by six minutes, another by four minutes and a third by two minutes.

And that was because the night before repair crews were working on the bridge and a shaft was broken. Trains that normally pass over the bridge at 30 mph were forced to cut their speed in half.

 Some North Shore commuters, who by all accounts are a particularly hardy bunch, seem to take those delays in stride.

“My attitude is that it’s life — deal with it,” says Paula, a travel agent who commutes from Beverly to Boston every day. “The train is definitely the lesser of the two evils.”

And the Beverly Depot does seem to be one of the more rider-friendly stations on the line. The Depot Restaurant opens up the bar section of the building in the morning and riders can step inside and watch the news on television while they wait for a train. There even used to be an honor system coffee pot set up, but the restaurant took that out a couple months ago.

Paul says the one big problem at the Beverly Depot station is the wood-and-rail crosswalk that riders who come from the Rantoul Street side of the station need to pass over to get to the platform for Boston-bound trains. During the winter and on rainy days, the wood gets pretty slick.

People come running across that in the morning in their dress shoes and they slip and drop like flies, says Paul. But other than that — and other than the bridge getting stuck lately, and the trains being late, and the big fare increase that people still grumble about even through it’s been in effect for more than a year — Paul says the trains aren’t half bad.

Brian agrees, although there was that trip to Foxboro to see a Pats game when the train didn’t quite make it to the station.

“We had to get out into a four-foot ditch,” he says. “It was bad for me, but it was hard for my 70-year-old father. I kind of had to lift him out and down.” Still, the newspaper guys are die-hards.

“The service normally is good and the conductors and engineers are nice,” says Paul.

But just as Paul offers that opinion, a commuter named Susanne walks by.

“Are you kidding?” she asks. “A lot of people who ride this line think it’s the worst in the system. The equipment is in terrible shape, often there aren’t enough conductors to open the doors and too many times the bridge is out. It’s been happening this month, it happens in the summer — you would think by now they would have a clue.”

Actually, they do have a clue. The MBTA and the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Company, the organization that operates and manages the commuter rail system, know passengers are unhappy. And it’s not just the 10,000 or so North Shore commuters who board the Newburyport/Rockport line every day during peak hours. It’s just about everyone who rides the commuter rail.

“We agree with our customers on all the lines that there needs to be improvement,” says Pesaturo.

But there are a couple of things in the way of improvement, including budget constraints and some fancy finger pointing that seems to go on between the MBTA and the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Company. And meanwhile, even the most stoic of the North Shore’s morning commuters have to wonder every morning when they head to work if this will be a day they get there on time.

Who runs the trains

The problems with the Beverly-Salem bridge probably couldn’t come at a worse moment from a management perspective, not only because it’s winter, but because the shortcomings of the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Company were in the spotlight last December when the MBTA extended its contract for three more years.

The MBCR was originally hired to take over the commuter rail from Amtrak back in 2003 when they signed a 5-year /$1 billion contract. But who exactly is the MBCR?

It’s actually a partnership of three companies — Veolia Transportation, a huge European transportation conglomerate based in France, owns 60 percent of the company. Next up is Bombardier Transportation, a Canadian company that bills itself as a world leader in manufacturing passenger rail vehicles. Bombardier owns 20 percent of the MBCR. The last 20 percent is owned by Alternate Concepts, Inc. is a Boston-based transportation operations and consulting firm founded in 1989 by several former MBTA senior managers.

The MBCR took over back in 2003 with the promise of managing the state’s commuter rail system, the fifth largest in the country, with an emphasis on customer service. They got their first big test in July of 2006 when the roof of a tunnel that was part of Boston’s Big Dig project collapsed and killed Milena Delvalle, who was driving to the airport with her husband.

Roads and tunnels were closed and commuters who normally drove into Boston every day turned to the trains to get them there. And nobody could believe how bad it was. The trains were late, overcrowded, dirty and stiflingly hot.

It was so bad, in fact, that representatives from Veolia flew in from France to say, zeere must be change. They promised to help get the air conditioning going in all of the coaches. Meanwhile, Gloucester’s Paul Lundburg, who was then head of the MBCR, resigned and was replaced by James O’Leary, who ran the MBTA through the 1980s.

The following January, the complaints about late trains were sidetracked, probably because commuters were stunned by the 25 percent hike in fares. But that didn’t mean the trains were running on time.

Last year, 85 percent of commuter rail trains were on schedule. Most other rail systems throughout the country get at least 90 percent of their trains in on time. In October and November of last year, the MBCR hit an all-time low when three out of every 10 trains were late.

And then, in early in December, the MBTA extended the MBCR contract for three more years. One blogger on a commuter rail Web site — and there are several online communities out there where commuters commiserate — called the new contract one great big FU to every commuter in the state.

But MBTA officials said they had no choice but to renew MBCR’s contract to run the rail system. They say it takes a couple of years to put the contract out to bid and find another company to take it over. But why didn’t they do that in the summer of 2006, when commuters were screaming about conditions on the trains?

“The board of directors felt that they were turning a corner and things were improving after that,” says Pesaturo, who adds that, according to their contract, the MBCR must pay a penalty every time a train is late by five minutes or more — unless it’s due to circumstances beyond their control.

Pesaturo didn’t have the exact figure of how much the MBCR was penalized for the poor service, but he did say it was in the millions.

Problems all around

Over at the MBCR, they tell a slightly different story. MBCR officials have blamed labor disputes over scheduling and old equipment and infrastructure as part of the reason they aren’t able to get riders to work on time.

Scott Farmelant, spokesman for the MBCR, says the fleet is just old. The MBTA has ordered 75 new coaches, but they take years to manufacture and won’t be up and running until 2011.

 And then there are the locomotives. Farmelant says the average age of the MBTA’s locomotives is 18 years. Most locomotives have a shelf life of 12-13 years before they need a major overhaul to keep them in service for a while longer. And that work just hasn’t been done.

But MBTA spokesman Pesaturo says if that’s the MBCR’s story, it’s just nonsense. Pesaturo says they knew exactly what they were getting when they signed their $1billion contract.

But Farmelant insists his bosses are up against old trains and aging infrastructure, like the Beverly-Salem bridge that was build in 1886 and then rebuilt on the old design with some of the old parts after a 1985 fire shut it down for nearly a year.

According to Farmelant, there are 320 track bridges in the rail system and more than 42 of them are better than a century old. Any major fixes would come out of the MBTA’s five-year capital improvement plan — something the MBCR has no control over.

But the line item for bridges in that plan is relatively small — with $56.5 million or 1.4 percent of the budget earmarked to maintain them. By way of comparison, the MBTA has earmarked $75 million or almost 2 percent of its capital improvements budget to “infrastructure associated with the collection of fares.”

Meanwhile the problems on the Beverly-Salem bridge may be a little more extensive than rail officials originally thought.

Farmelant says the accident with the barge may have knocked the bridge out of alignment, and the MBCR is now estimating it will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 million to fix it. And it’s not clear yet who going to pay for it, because it’s not clear yet who exactly was at fault in the accident.

Although the MBCR says the barge hit the bridge, some have speculated that the bridge tender may have started to close the bridge a little too soon — or maybe it wasn’t opened all the way to begin with.

Danvers Harbormaster Chris Sanborn wasn’t there that morning, but he wonders why everyone is simply accepting the railroad’s version of the accident. Sanborn says he’s waiting for the final report from the Coast Guard, which has been investigating.

But whatever that Coast Guard report says, it seems to make little difference to commuters who lately don’t know whether they’ll get to work on time — or at all, if they happen to be taking a train on the Newburyport/ Rockport line.

“It’s awful,” says Peter Welch, who rides from Beverly to his job at an investment company in Boston every day. “The trains just aren’t something you can depend on.”

E-mail Barbara Taormina at btaormin@cnc.com.