I'm quoted in it!
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/nyreg ... ref=slogin
October 8, 2006
New York Up Close
For the City’s Choo-Choo Charlies, the Shade Is Slowly Drawn
By ALEX MINDLIN
RACHAEL LAMBERT, a 24-year-old office worker and part-time student from Howard Beach, Queens, took a practiced stance on Tuesday at the head of a J train that was clattering eastward across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Peering out the scratched window at the front of the train, she offered in her slight Midwestern twang a running commentary on the view.
“You see the green-yellow?” she said, pointing to a pair of signal lights beside the elevated tracks. “We’re going, but we’re being diverted to the middle track.”
A few minutes later, the train reached one of Ms. Lambert’s favorite spots, near the Myrtle Avenue station, where the M line veers northward across the J line, and in doing so crosses a spaghetti-like tangle of rails.
“It’s great in winter,” she said. “When they’re afraid the switches are going to freeze, there are little pilot lights on them, and they light them, and it looks like the tracks are on fire.”
But Ms. Lambert’s is a dying pastime. Over the last few decades, and with increasing speed, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been phasing out cars with publicly accessible windows in front, a feature that is often called the rail-fan window because of its appeal to subway buffs. In 2000, nearly half of all cars had such windows, according to Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit. This year, they appear in only about one-fifth of the fleet’s roughly 6,200 cars.
And over the next decade, rail-fan windows will probably disappear entirely. A new model of car that lacks the rail-fan window is currently being tested on the A and N lines; the city has ordered 660 of the cars, set to arrive in 2008, and has an option to buy an additional 900 or so.
In these newer cars, the train operator’s cabin takes up the entire width of the cab, essentially blocking the tracks from public view. The redesigned cabs are more comfortable, and let conductors open doors on both sides of the train without walking from car to car. But subway buffs complain that the new cars are much less fun.
“It’s awful,” said Brian Weinberg, the owner of railfanwindow.com, a Web site featuring pictures of New York subway cars. “It’s totally going to remove a whole aspect of the subway.” And on Rider Diaries, an Internet message board for New York public transport fans, a user who identified himself as MikeGerald45 wrote: “It was a lot of fun just watching the ride from the front window of the train. Now, that will be something that we can tell our grandchildren about.”
Indeed, it is the young who seem to love the rail-fan window the most. “I don’t like to hog the window so much,” Ms. Lambert said, “because a lot of times little kids get on, and the first thing they do is run to the window.”
Ms. Lambert recommends a sideways stance anyway, for safety. During her first months in New York in 2001, she sometimes spent two hours a day riding the subway just for pleasure, she said. But she learned not to brace herself against the window with her arms. “If I try to hold on,” she explained, “I usually bang my face into the glass.”
Larry Furlong, a spokesman for the Electric Railroaders Association, a group of train enthusiasts, had a different strategy for rail-fan posture when he was a boy in Astoria, Queens.
“I was a member of the flat-nose society,” Mr. Furlong said. “At Christmastime my father would take us into Radio City Music Hall to see the show. You would stand at the front window, and you would press your nose against the glass. At the beginning, my father would have to hold me, and eventually I got tall enough.”
In a sign of the strong appeal of the rail-fan window, even Mr. Seaton, the New York City Transit spokesman, has fond memories of it. “I especially liked the ones that opened,” he said.
Will he miss the windows when they are gone? “No,” Mr. Seaton said, “because I’m not 10 years old anymore.”
_____________________
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/nyreg ... ref=slogin
October 8, 2006
New York Up Close
For the City’s Choo-Choo Charlies, the Shade Is Slowly Drawn
By ALEX MINDLIN
RACHAEL LAMBERT, a 24-year-old office worker and part-time student from Howard Beach, Queens, took a practiced stance on Tuesday at the head of a J train that was clattering eastward across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Peering out the scratched window at the front of the train, she offered in her slight Midwestern twang a running commentary on the view.
“You see the green-yellow?” she said, pointing to a pair of signal lights beside the elevated tracks. “We’re going, but we’re being diverted to the middle track.”
A few minutes later, the train reached one of Ms. Lambert’s favorite spots, near the Myrtle Avenue station, where the M line veers northward across the J line, and in doing so crosses a spaghetti-like tangle of rails.
“It’s great in winter,” she said. “When they’re afraid the switches are going to freeze, there are little pilot lights on them, and they light them, and it looks like the tracks are on fire.”
But Ms. Lambert’s is a dying pastime. Over the last few decades, and with increasing speed, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been phasing out cars with publicly accessible windows in front, a feature that is often called the rail-fan window because of its appeal to subway buffs. In 2000, nearly half of all cars had such windows, according to Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit. This year, they appear in only about one-fifth of the fleet’s roughly 6,200 cars.
And over the next decade, rail-fan windows will probably disappear entirely. A new model of car that lacks the rail-fan window is currently being tested on the A and N lines; the city has ordered 660 of the cars, set to arrive in 2008, and has an option to buy an additional 900 or so.
In these newer cars, the train operator’s cabin takes up the entire width of the cab, essentially blocking the tracks from public view. The redesigned cabs are more comfortable, and let conductors open doors on both sides of the train without walking from car to car. But subway buffs complain that the new cars are much less fun.
“It’s awful,” said Brian Weinberg, the owner of railfanwindow.com, a Web site featuring pictures of New York subway cars. “It’s totally going to remove a whole aspect of the subway.” And on Rider Diaries, an Internet message board for New York public transport fans, a user who identified himself as MikeGerald45 wrote: “It was a lot of fun just watching the ride from the front window of the train. Now, that will be something that we can tell our grandchildren about.”
Indeed, it is the young who seem to love the rail-fan window the most. “I don’t like to hog the window so much,” Ms. Lambert said, “because a lot of times little kids get on, and the first thing they do is run to the window.”
Ms. Lambert recommends a sideways stance anyway, for safety. During her first months in New York in 2001, she sometimes spent two hours a day riding the subway just for pleasure, she said. But she learned not to brace herself against the window with her arms. “If I try to hold on,” she explained, “I usually bang my face into the glass.”
Larry Furlong, a spokesman for the Electric Railroaders Association, a group of train enthusiasts, had a different strategy for rail-fan posture when he was a boy in Astoria, Queens.
“I was a member of the flat-nose society,” Mr. Furlong said. “At Christmastime my father would take us into Radio City Music Hall to see the show. You would stand at the front window, and you would press your nose against the glass. At the beginning, my father would have to hold me, and eventually I got tall enough.”
In a sign of the strong appeal of the rail-fan window, even Mr. Seaton, the New York City Transit spokesman, has fond memories of it. “I especially liked the ones that opened,” he said.
Will he miss the windows when they are gone? “No,” Mr. Seaton said, “because I’m not 10 years old anymore.”
