Nycsubway.org Blog

The Holidays at the NY Transit Museum

The holidays are coming up fast! The New York Transit Museum has posted their Holiday Gift Guide with something for every subway buff on your shopping list! Christmas tree ornaments, model trains, clothing... and get your MetroCard swag before OMNY takes over!

Also, beginning November 16th, 2023, the Holiday Train Show returns to the Grand Central Gallery. This year, pre-timed tickets are required.

UPDATE! The NY Transit Museum will continue their tradition of running historic trains for the holiday season. Ride the museum's 1930s R1/9 train every Saturday in December on the F and D lines as follows:

• Northbound, departs 2nd Avenue on the uptown F line in Lower Manhattan at: 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm
• Southbound, departs 145th Street on the downtown D line at: 11am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm

These rides are "free" with a paid regular subway fare (Metrocard swipe or OMNY tap).

Please note, nycsubway.org is not affiliated with the Transit Museum; we post information like this in support of their efforts!

Posted on 11/6/2023

NY Transit Museum Parade of Trains 2023

The Transit Museum’s vintage train cars return to the Brighton Line on Saturday, September 9th and Sunday, September 10th, 2023. Rides are free with a paid subway fare (MetroCard swipe or OMNY tap). Trains will shuttle between Kings Highway and Brighton Beach as in past years, but this year for the first time passengers may board at either station. (Note that Kings Highway Station is ADA accessible!) The Parade will include a number of cars from the Transit Museum's vintage fleet. Visit the Transit Museum site for official details.

Posted on 8/11/2023

Yankees Baseball Nostalgia Train Returns

New York City Transit and the New York Transit Museum are offering rides to Yankee Stadium aboard two trains from the nostalgia fleet. Departing from Grand Central Terminal at 11am sharp on March 30th, the IRT Low-V train will run non-stop to 161st Street – Yankee Stadium. Following the Low-Vs directly will be a train made up of six IRT SMEE cars from Train of Many Colors/Redbird fleet. Cost is one normal fare.

Posted on 3/27/2023

Holiday Nostalgia Train Returns

After a pandemic hiatus, New York City Transit and the New York Transit Museum are running a Holiday Nostalgia Train on Sundays between November 27 and December 18, 2022. To promote the Museum's new "Reign of the Redbird" exhibit, this year's Nostalgia Train will use the 1960s IRT "Redbird" cars, now known as the "Train of Many Colors" due to the many paint schemes the cars wore over their service lifetime. Two cars each sport the well known "Gunn Red" Redbird paint, a brighter "Tartar Red", a dark kale green, the 1970s MTA standardized silver with blue stripe, and the 1964 World's Fair "Bluebird" colors. For more information, including a schedule, visit NY Transit Museum Holiday Nostalgia Train.

Posted on 11/28/2022

New Coverage of New Streetcars

Thanks to long-time contributor Peter Ehrlich, we now have descriptions and photographs of three streetcar systems that opened in the last few years: Oklahoma City, El Paso, and Milwaukee. Peter has more in the pipeline so keep checking!

Posted on 11/24/2022

R-211T Open Gangway Test Train Arrives

The first R-211T Open Gangway train is on the NYC Transit property and ready to begin testing in the near future. Cars 4040-4044 arrived November 2, and cars 4045-4049 arrived November 16, 2022. Twenty such cars were ordered to test the feasibility of open gangway cars in New York City. Such trains are common in European metro fleets but haven't been tried in New York since the BMT's pre-war triplex and multiunit articulated trains. The R-211T trains will not be articulated (meaning, two cars sharing a single truck), but will have an open connection with an accordion-shaped rubber gasket between the cars, allowing passengers to walk freely between the cars of a five-car set.

Posted on 11/17/2022

End of the Line for the R-32 Fleet

Sunday, January 9, 2022 was the last day of public service for the venerable 1964 R-32 fleet. MTA New York City Transit sent them into retirement with several Sundays of trips on the D and Q lines, open to the public. The "Brightliners" ran on nearly every IND and BMT line during their lifetimes. The runs were not without some hitches, but the MTA and New York Transit Museum staff went all out to make the last runs a memorable event. One pair of cars, 3360-3361, was cosmetically restored to close to original appearance, including blue doors and pantograph gates, simulated end signage, rollsigns, and number plates. Thanks to our contributors for photos!

Posted on 01/10/2022

Been a long time...

Welcome to nycsubway.org - born in 1995, one of the largest New York City Subway history and fan sites on the web.

Regular visitors have probably noticed that there haven't been many updates over the past few years. Our pages about subway stations, rolling stock, and, especially, the pages about transit systems around the world, have become somewhat stale. Free (and paid) photo hosting, social media, and (especially) Wikipedia have outstripped one webmaster's ability to keep up.

The redesigned main page has links that will help you navigate nycsubway.org's content and highlight its strengths vs. what you can now find on social media sites and Wikipedia. Some other recent updates:

• Lots of new images from the 1960s and the 1980s
• Subway Art Guide revamped; now sortable by station, line, and year of installation; missing entries added (but some still need photos)
• Wind-down of the "virtual host" bus.nycsubway.org (bus content and caption database integrated with main site - see Bus Transportation)
• All content now being served SSL/https (this is why it looks like all the pages were recently updated)
• Various script/code and cosmetic fixes
• New slideshow of some of the new 1960s-era images I've been getting off Ebay: click here for the slideshow.

Posted on 09/29/2020

Second Avenue Subway Phase I Opens

The first phase of the Second Avenue Subway finally opened on 1/1/2017. After some previews for press and invited guests, including a New Year's Eve party, the first three stations, at 96th Street, 86th Street, and 72nd Street opened for service at 12:00 noon on New Year's Day. Lots of press coverage is available online; the New York Times covered the opening and the first business day's operations. Thanks to Aahd Tahar for updating our route map.

Posted on 01/04/2017

New York's Subway Art, Decades in the Making

The New York Times profiles author Philip Ashforth Coppola and his Silver Connections book series in this article, One Man’s Opus to New York’s Subway Art, Decades in the Making. Philip has been painstakingly sketching the tile artwork and other station decoration of New York's subway since 1978. I was unaware of this until now, but Philip used my photo of 18th Street on the original IRT to do the corresponding sketches, as he had never been in this abandoned station. Awesome! :-)

Posted on 10/07/2015

New OSX Version of NXSYS Interlocking Simulator

The developer has released a new version of NXSYS, Signalling and Interlocking Simulator for the Apple Mac OSX operating system. NXSYS/Mac is a port of NXSYS Version 2 which allows for unrestricted two-dimensional track and panel layouts and comes with four sample interlockings: Version 2 ports of Progman St. and Islington from Version 1, and full implementations of two actual fairly complex New York City interlockings, Atlantic Avenue on the IRT (Division A) and Broadway-Myrtle on the BMT (Division B). Full HTML documentation of the new Macintosh features as well as a thorough upgrading of the extensive Version 1 helpfile are included. (The Microsoft Windows release of NXSYS Version 2 is not ready yet).

Posted on 11/17/2014

Contributions from Transit Historian Brian J. Cudahy

Noted transit historian (and frequent contributor of photos to this website) Brian J. Cudahy has contributed several articles, including Me and the BMT, A Memoir, West of Hudson Passenger Terminals, and a railfan's-eye view of London Main Line Rail operations (no great detail but handy for a visitor). All are illustrated with his own photographs. Brian is the author of several books of New York City rapid transit history, notably Under the Sidewalks of New York, A Century of Subways: Celebrating 100 Years of New York's Underground Railways, and a volume about the infamous Malbone Street Wreck. "Me and the BMT, A Memoir" is less scholarly and more his personal recollections of growing up riding the BMT in Brooklyn. Thanks go out to Brian for letting nycsubway.org host this work!

Posted on 08/27/2012