subway dream fulfilled

In the last week I finally finished a quest that began more than forty years ago...I have ridden the New York subway to everywhere it goes.

There were a couple of years in elementary school that I had to take the subway to school, and that was when the interest was sparked. But I generally shared that ride with my father and sister, and it was a relatively short ride in a relatively safe part of the city. I was too young to go off on my own riding everywhere the system went. But the itch had begun.

In high shool, living in Eastern Queens and attending high school in Manhattan, I had my first taste of the freedom to ride to subway on my own, unsupervised. The optimal route had me taking the F train to 14th Street and transferring to the LL (which is now the L), but I made a point of taking other routes -- the E to the LL, the F to the GG (now the G) to the LL, the F to the 7 to the 4, 5 or 6 to the LL...there were a few others. And there was a stretch where, on Wednesdays I would take a train to Brooklyn to ride a route that I'd never been on before. But in that time, I didn't go on most of the routes in the Bronx -- This was the late 1970's and early 1980's, and there were areas that were unsafe.

Since then, there were a few more places that I have gone (e.g., Yankee Stadium), and I went on some of the new routes that have opened since my high school years.

So, going into the end-of-year season, I was missing most of the Bronx, the 2 and 3 trains north of 110th Street, and the 2nd Avenue line north of 72nd Street. And, for some reason, I decided that, while taking a few days off work, I would finally get to these places. I did it in three afternoons, one of which was with Ethan. I could have pushed myself and done it in one, but I wanted to be able to enjoy the experience -- not be thing "Geez, when will it be done?"

Railfanning isn't as much fun as it was when I was a kid. Back then, the motorman's cab only took up about a third of the width of the car. So you could stand by the front door and look through the window. On the newer trains, the cab takes up the full car width. It's much better for the motorman. But now the best you can do is look through the door into the motorman's cab and see through to the door in front of the car. You don't get the same wide angle, and you don';t feel the same closeness to the space in front of the train. For a taste of what real railfanning was like, watch this video that someone took on an A train going from 207 Street in Manhattan to Rockaway Park. It was taken on an R-32 subway car, which is significant because the R-32s had passenger-accessible front windows. Most of the route is underground, but at around 72 minutes it emerges. The remainder of the ride -- especially the parts as it approaches and goes through Jamaica Bay -- is one of the most scenic sections of the system. I watched it at 2X speed.

I won't bore you with the exact itinerary. Instead, I'll bore you with a few observations from the trips.

• The D train in the Bronx is very boring.
• The 5 train, out to Eastchester/Dyre Avenue, is a relatively interesting ride, as a good part of it runs on an embankment. So you see lots of varied scenery, including people's backyards.
• I wasn't aware that the northern terminal of the 3 train in Harlem is above-ground. The 1 train has elevated stretches in Norther Manhattan, but I thought that was it for elevated subways in Manhattan.* It was fun to see that station, though it could definitely use some maintenance.
• When the 2 and 3 trains split from each each other, north of the 135th Street station, the downtown 2 track crosses the uptown 3 track. Most other places where routes split one or more tracks are graded downward or upward so that they go under and over each other. Building tracks and tunnels the way they did for the 2 and 3 trains is cheaper, but it makes the signalling more complicated and crashes more likely. That said, I am not aware of there having ever been any train crashes at that spot. The only other place I can think of where tracks cross each other like that (and I'm limiting this to tracks that are used in customer service in the New York subway) is just west of the Myrtle Avenue station on the J and M trains.
• On the 2 train in the Bronx, I kept my eyes out around the Gun Hill Road station to see if any remnants of the old 3rd Avenue el (AKA the 8 train) were visible. That train was discontinued in 1973, so I wouldn't really expect to see anything anymore. On the other hand, the old MJ train was discontinued earlier (I think in 1969), and its trestle is still clearly visible over the aforementioned Myrtle Avenue station that services the J and M. Anyway, I couldn;t make out any infrastructure that I could say for sure was part of the old el. North of the Gun Hill Road station, it looked like the trestle had room for what had at one time been extra tracks. But I don't know if that was related. Did the old el  merge with the White Plains Road line at Gun Hill Road? Or did it kind of hit it at a perpendicular?
• Most of the routes that I polished off were old IRT lines. They are, in parts, deliciously twisty.
• The Second Avenue line (or at least what's been built and opened of it) is beautiful, clean and roomy. And boring. WHy did they build it as a two-track line, instead of a four track line that allows for express service. A bajillion years from now, when it's finally extended southward, they'll regret building it as a local only. Maybe -- just maybe -- they actually dug a four track tunnel, and the express tracks are on an as-yet-unopened lower level? It sounds crazy, but when the Lexington Avenue/63rd Street station opened on the F train, there was one track on each level, and the platforms were half-width. There were no visible clues that there was room for another half platform and track on the other side of the wall.

Having said all that, I note that some stretches of subway route have been shut down during my lifetime, and I will never get to ride those. These include (but are not necessarily limited to):

• The Culver Shuttle (which connected the old Sea Beach line (now part of the D) to the Culver line (now part of the F) in Brooklyn.
• The old end of the QJ** (now the J) in Queens. When I was a kid, the QJ, went to 168th Street and Jamaica Avenue. It was shortened to 121st Street. Since then it was extended on a route similar to the old one. It ends underground at Parsons Blvd ("Jamaica Center," whatever the fuck that is). The old line was elevated the whole way.
• The aforementioned 8 train in the Bronx, which was the last remnant of the Third Avenue el.
• The aforementioned MJ in Brooklyn, which was part of the BMT's Myrtle Avenue line.

Mission Accomplished
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*I am not counting the short stretches where trains come above-ground for the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges.
**Trivia: QJ stands for Brighton to Jamaica.