Wanted: photos of old wooden escalators

Not sure if you ever found a picture, but here ya go!

https://www.universalhub.com/2014/wooden-slats-doom

The escalators at Forest Hills were wooden, but they had normal horizontal steps to stand on. As a kid I thought of them as a normal escalator made of wood, very different from the ramplike ones I discovered downtown as a teenager. The wooden slats and grooves were roughly the same width on both styles, though, so I imagine the Forest Hills ones also caught heels.

That photo captures the age and dustiness about right. Glad I got to ride the ones at Downtown Crossing, which were scary but fun. The T's modern replacements break down more frequently, and seem to cause mass casualty events more often than these old time ones.

It's the same quirkiness as riding a Cable Car in SF

Among my least pleasant Korean-War-era childhood memories are the long and noisy ascents from South Station Under to Atlantic Avenue. They didn't destroy me, so I must have gotten stronger.

These pictures are from the fall of 1992. Downtown Crossing IIRC.

Were the wooden escalators replaced in response to the November 1987 King's Cross fire in London?

Despite the seeming temporal connection, removal of the wooden escalators in Boston was not directly related to the Kings Cross fire (which was attributable to a number of factors, the wooden escalators themselves being only one of them). The escalators were replaced as part of programmed station modernizations. They were ancient and obsolete, and in latter days of their existence they were out of service more often than they were working. I can't imagine it was easy to find parts for those things - very likely the wizards at the Everett carpenters and machine shops kept them going longer than anyone else could have.

Even on London Underground they were not in a massive hurry to eradicate all of their wooden escalators as soon as humanly possible after the fire. While perhaps the tempo of replacement was increased, it took fully 27 years until the last ones on LU were finally replaced.

IIRC the modern escalators have had more problems, including breakdowns and malfunctions with injuries, than they had with the old wooden ones. Including poor maintenance and less inspection than required by law.

here is one I took at Egleston station on the Orange Line in 1979
http://viewoftheblue.com/photography/bel/bel22.jpg

A big improvement in escalators is ones that have a longer approach and exit flat running. As a kid the older ones only had one or 2 together that were flat before starting the slope,

Yes. On the London tube, their escalators operate at a higher speed than ours (if you step on at walking speed, it's fine. If you stop at the threshold, look, and step on, you may lose your balance), and because of that, there's 5+ steps worth of landing on each side.

Escalators have improved over the years despite not having much of a change in outward appearance!