Most museums have impressive, even grand, entrances, but the New York City Transit Museum stays true to its subject; the entrance is just a set of subway steps set into the sidewalk; at the bottom lies not a grand lobby but the concourse of an out-of-service station.
Although the concourse has an exhibit of historic and current turnstiles, that’s not how you actually enter the museum; after paying at a former change booth, you’re directed down a side corridor to the history of how New Yorkers have been squeezed, delayed, jostled, but above all transported by the millions to home, work and entertainment.
More of the history another time; it’s a story in itself. On this trip, my first to the museum in over 25 years, I kept my focus on the rolling stock and my own memories of growing up with some seriously old parts of it. In part, that’s because in the 1950s and 1960s there was still a good bit of ancient history still running!
The so-called ‘redbirds’ were the first really new trains on the line I lived along, starting in the 1950s. They were bought in the thousands, they lasted far longer than expected, and they only became ‘redbirds’ when they were repainted after their first rebuilding in the late 1970s. The one below was one of several painted in a white graffiti-resistant coating, a sort of ‘screw you’ from the city to the artists who had made the subway their canvas for ten years.
Below, the 207th Street maintenance facility, one of two that does major repairs and rebuilding of subway cars; the other is in Coney Island.
But transit in New York didn’t start with the trains, obviously; they came along about a hundred years into the public transit era, which really only began in the early 1800s. Before that, the cities of New York and Brooklyn were each small enough to walk, and any travel between them and the surrounding villages was either on foot or horseback.
But as they grew, ‘mass transit’ became a necessity, and wagons and coaches that had been available only to a few became public omnibuses pulled by horses along regular routes. Eventually, laying rails along those routes enabled horses to pull heavier loads along horse-car routes, and finally, near the end of the century, the horse-cars were replaced by electric trolleys and trams.
And then, along with the subways, motor buses came into the picture; by mid-20th century New York had (foolishly) abandoned the last of the electric surface fleet. Now, in the 21st century, the city is talking tram lines again, but that, too, is another story, with too much politics in it for here.
These days we have electronic bus stop signs being installed and hundreds of shelters to wait in while getting texts about arrival of the next bus…but in my childhood, this was it. A heavy metal sign set in a round concrete base, and easily moved to any corner when needed (or when a prankster wanted to cause confusion).
If shifting bus stops could cause confusion, so could our spaghetti-like collection of subway and elevated routes. Until around 1970 when an Italian designer developed the simplified colored-line style of transit map that practically every city uses, the subway map could be confusing because many of our routes are closer together than you can show on a map, so distances were often distorted. The museum has an exhibit showing how modern maps developed and made compromises between readability and accuracy.
The lunchroom space provided for school visits is decorated with a variety of stern warnings savaged from stations and cars across the system.
But so far, we’ve just been on the concourse below the street but above the tracks. Signs on the stairway direct visitors to the trains, along with a warning that this is still a ‘live’ station, with 600v power running through the third rail. In fact, all the cars on display can operate, and do, several times a year on ‘nostalgia train’ runs. The museum has even more cars than are on display, so repeated visits are not quite repeats.
The newest cars on display will look very familiar to many visitors; the last of the R-42s above only retired earlier this year after having their time extended by door problems on the new cars that were to replace them. Stainless steel has been the anti-graffiti and easily-cleaned exterior of choice for quite a while now. Below, an older series that ran into the early 2000s; the interior is not much different from the R-42
But when you step a little further down the platform, the scene changes quite a bit. These two pictures are from one of the most unusual models in the system, although their wicker seats and movable windows were like many others. The secret to these is that they were built as triplexes: three cars that were joined by pivoting sections, like an articulated bus has.
The idea worked well and the cars ran for decades, but the idea never spread and most other trains were ordered in ‘married pairs’ with half the running gear in one car and the rest under the other. Saved money, saved weight, meant that if one car had a problem two were out of service. More recent cars are all-in-ones.
The museum has done its best to match cars up with period-appropriate car-card ads; the Miss Subways promotion ran for many years and promoted a now-dated view: All the young women were working, and nearly all had the same future plans as this one: Marriage and family. Few were planning serious careers or achievements outside the home.
Another pair of fairly-recent models with our now-standard resin seating (no more little wicker ends coming loose and scratching, and easy to clean). Insider history note: New York’s first subway, once called the IRT and now “the numbered lines” has narrower and shorter cars than the BMT and IND (now merged into “the lettered lines.”) That’s why a glance at the seating arrangement tells you that the first picture is an IRT car; benches along the walls open up standing space. The IND/BMT car below can afford the luxury of more varied seating.
The museum has more than the passenger vehicles; it also displays a pump car used to clear flooding, and has other work cars not on view now as well, including plows, vacuums and the ‘money car’ that used to travel the system at night, collecting from the station booths. Below a small electric locomotive with steeple cab that was used to move cars in the yards, and is now used to move cars in and out of the museum’s display area.
Back to some seriously old rolling stock. This IRT ‘vestibule car’ dates to just after the First World War; when I was growing up just after the Second, they were still in service and only slowly being replaced until the Redbirds arrived. I used to always stand in the vestibule and spin that wheel; it actually operates a manual braking system, but unless a conductor inserted his pin into it, it did nothing but entertain a six-year-old me.
Early modern: Still wicker in the seats, but compare the fans and lights between the newer car below and the one above.
For the World’s Fair that opened in 1964, the city bought new cars with a paint scheme all their own for the Flushing Line that served the fair; they didn’t want to be embarrassed at their big show by the ancient cars that had apparently been ‘good enough’ for the New Yorkers along the route.
And this is what makes the cars run. It’s a ‘motor truck,’ and it weighs a bit over twelve tons. It contains wheels, electric motor, braking and regeneration systems, and a series of little ‘shoes’ that maintain contact with the power coming from the third rail. The better models have outlived the car bodies that were placed on them!
Two of the oldest cars on hand had wooden bodies, common up until the WWI. After a disastrous crash and fire in 1918, they were restricted to the elevated lines.
The Court Street Station in downtown Brooklyn, which houses the museum, was built in the early 1930s as part of the new IND subway system; it was originally to be the last Brooklyn station before tunneling under the river to join the planned Second Avenue line. When that plan was put off into the future, it became a dead end, mothballed until the Transit Museum was established in 1976.
It’s also been a movie star featuring under other names in a dozen or more movies, including both versions of The Taking of Pelham 123. Here it is, in the second version.
And, just to end on a musical note, here’s a display from the platform giving the musical history of perhaps the most famous song about the New York subway: Billy Strayhorn’s Take the A Train, written for the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
