I was waiting for the train at Columbus Circle the other day, when this old metal box on wheels rattled up. I was shocked, partly because I had never seen a train car this old before, and partly because I immediately thought of how long the C line is, running all the way from Washington Heights to East New York (that’s a very long trip). I was convinced this had to be some sort of promotional stunt by the NYC Transit museum, similar to the way the MTA sometimes runs really old-timey subway cars to let people experience what it would have been like to live in old New York. But after a quick google, I came upon this article, which explains that these train cars are in fact standard for the C line, never mind the fact that the model is over fifty years old! Some quick highlights from the article:
- The C train cars are the oldest in continuous daily operation in the world (though I don’t know that this is something to brag about).
- The cars, known as or Brightliners or R32, were the city’s first stainless steel cars when they hit the tracks in 1965.
- They break down a lot more than other cars in the system, “averaging just 33,527 miles between failures. The average subway car can travel 400,000 miles before breaking down. And the newest cars in the fleet average more than 750,000 miles.”
I also started to think about the massive carbon footprint of running trains this old, so often and over such long distances. I mean, I’m no expert but these really can’t be that good for the environment, and I’m just basing this assumption on the awful noise they made as the clattered into the station. It’s kind of unsettling to think that the very same cars in the attached a picture, taken when they were bright and shiny and new in the 1960s, are still running up and down the tracks, and that we are trusting them to get us from place to place in safely and in one piece.
How are we allowing these trains to get us from point A to point B if they’ve been around for this long without any major improvements? The lack of interest in infrastructural changes is frightening; are we going to wait for one of the cars to collapse before we start investing more money into the subway system?
Aside from the C line, this train is also popular on the J/Z line, which I take all the time, and I can definitely vouch for the excessive breakdowns (particularly during the summer when it’s extra packed and hot, unfortunately). The good news is that the MTA is (slowly) replacing these older models with current models – aka the model that literally almost every other line uses: the ones with the digital stops and clocks. The bad news is that these old cars will still be in use until 2022 due to a delay in the delivery of the newer cars (what a shock).
Aside from this, your post really got me thinking about the different types of subway cars. In my mind, there are about 5 different subway cars:
1. The new model.
2. The old C/J/Z model.
3. The not-as-old B/D model.
4. The 4/5 model.
5. The 6 model.
Wikipedia, however, actually lists around 10 different types (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling_stock) and now I’m really left wondering why we have so many different types of subway cars, especially when so many of the older models are difficult and expensive to maintain. Understandably, it’s too late and expensive to replace all the lines with one model now, but I’m just wondering why the MTA didn’t just have one design instead of introducing so many different models.