About the Site

nycsubway.org is a site dedicated to the history of the New York City Subway system, including photos, maps, and documents. We don't attempt to keep track of up to the minute, accurate information about fares, schedules, service outages, etc. That kind of information is best left to official transit agencies, e.g. www.mta.info. The site is maintained and managed by David Pirmann.

When did the site go online?

The first pages went up around August 1995. The first sections were photo essays about a New York Transit Museum tour of City Hall Station and a ride on their BMT D-Type "Nostalgia Train". These photo essays were inspired by seeing some other rail-related travelogues and photos on the then-infant World Wide Web. Back in the old days, before search engines, new web sites were "announced" via a Usenet newsgroup called comp.infosystems.www.misc; a posting describing this site was submitted on 11 November 1995.

How is the site funded?

The site is funded using the advertising placed by Google Adsense on the various pages of the site. In addition, items in the Subway Bibliography and Subway Movies and Documentaries are linked to Amazon.com, and if you purchase something by clicking thru from this site, Amazon contributes a (very) small percentage back to us. We don't sell direct advertising but if you are interested in that, you can "target" nycsubway.org in Google Adsense.

What does the site run on?

Prior to July 2001, the site ran on a variety of hand-me-down Sun hardware, including a Sparc 1+, a Sparc IPX, and a Sparc 20. From July 2001 to April 2002, the site ran on two servers, a Dell Poweredge 350 running RedHat Linux, and a dual processor Sun Sparcstation 20, running Solaris 8. In April 2002, the Dell server crashed and was replaced with a dual processor Sun Ultra 2. In May 2002 the database was converted from mSQL 2.x to MySQL. From 2002 to 2012, the site was hosted on a dedicated pair of Athlon 2200 machines running Linux, leased from a hosting facility. From July 2012, the site is hosted out of the Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud. The present content management system is MediaWiki and most of the photo gallery code is homegrown, in perl or php.

How can I contribute?

The web site always needs volunteers to continue to add new items to the site. Join a group of people who have given their time and talent to developing content for the largest NYC Subway web site around. You don't need to be proficient in web page coding or photo scanning or other technical aspects of developing web pages. I can do all that for you. What is most needed is development of new content, and that's where you come in to the picture. If you want to volunteer, please visit the Feedback Form and let us know!

Who are the contributors to the site?

nycsubway.org wouldn't be what it is today without the valuable contributions and hard work of many people, and without whom the site would not be nearly as interesting! There are over 900 photographers represented on the site.

The 50 most frequent contributors of photos are: Peter Ehrlich, Bernard Chatreau, David Pirmann, Richard Panse, John Dooley, Joe Testagrose, Robbie Rosenfeld, Zach Summer, Theo Neutelings, Steve Zabel, Salaam Allah, Doug Grotjahn, Michael Hodurski, Jos Straathof, Robert Mencher, Gary Chatterton, Jorge Arturo Monzón Abarca, Herman R. Silbiger, Glenn L. Rowe, Bob Wright, Roberto C. Tobar, Thierry Leleu, John Barnes, Brian J. Cudahy, David-Paul Gerber, Steffen Petrasch, Wayne Whitehorne, Matthias Frey, Paul Pesante, Chris Reidy, Eric Haas, Wilfredo Castillo, Tim Deakin, Seth McDermott, Bill E. , Nicholas Noel, Aliandro Brathwaite, Lee Winson, Brian Weinberg, Todd Glickman, Ed McKernan, Ian Folkard, Jean-Pierre Vergez, Oren H., Frank Pfuhler, Jason R. DeCesare, Adam J. Benjamin, Steve Hoskins, Mark S. Feinman, Bob Vogel. That's not to say that the rest don't deserve thanks, they do! The site wouldn't be the same without everyone's help.

Special thanks go to some of the site's earliest and/or most prolific contributors over the years: Joe Brennan, Michael Calcagno, Ed Crew, Brian J. Cudahy, Peggy Darlington, Jason R. DeCesare, Peter Dougherty, Peter Ehrlich, Mark S. Feinman, Bernard S. Greenberg, Steve Hoskins, Trevor Logan, Theo Neutelings, Rich Panse, Frank Pfuhler, Robbie Rosenfeld, David M. Rosenthal, Zach Summer, Joe Testagrose, Wayne Whitehorne.

The following people contributed material content to various sections around the site. I do apologize if I omitted anyone, this page hadn't been updated in a very long time! Duncan Allen, Ron Aryel, Adam J. Benjamin, Simon Billis, Brandon W. Bostian, Daniel Boyar, Alan Braunstein, Richard Chase, Bernard Chatreau, G. J. Christiano, Thurston Clark, Robert Clark, David S. Cole, George Cuhaj, Tim Deakin, Doug Diamond, James Dowden, Hank Eisenstein, Mike Farrell, Robert Ferreira, Howard Finkel, Christoph Franke, Matthias and Jonas Frey, Sanford Gardner, Slade Gellin, Todd Glickman, Mark Greenwald, Oren H., Eric Haas, Phil Hom, Rob Hutchinson, Daniel G. Jennings, Chris Jones, Gregory Jordan-Detamore, Sidney Keyles, Thierry Leleu, John Leung, C.K. Leverett, Ed Levine, Jeffrey Mora, Rob Morel, Seth Morgan, Bill Mosteller, Gerry O'Regan, Paul Pesante, Steffen Petrasch, Aaron Philipson, Bob Pickering, Marc Pitanza, Paul Polischuk, Matt Richman, Fytton Rowland, Ed Sachs, Jeff Saltzman, Chris Sattler, Paul Schlienz, David Shanske, Tenryu Shin, Chris Slaight, Dave Steckler, Constantine Steffan, Òscar Ureña, Jean-Pierre Vergez, Bob Vogel, Adam Weiss, Chris Wood, Bob Wright.

View the list of the "Top 100" photo contributors to the site.

Disclaimer

www.nycsubway.org is not sponsored by, approved by, or affiliated with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City Transit or any other transit agency. None of the pages contained on the www.nycsubway.org site are provided by transit agencies and are not to be considered official, unless specifically indicated. The use of the name www.nycsubway.org is not meant to cause confusion in this regard. The official New York City Transit web page is at http://www.mta.info/.