Tag: Transport

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Catching the Vintage Train

New York Transit Museum operates a special subway train made out of a ragtag selection of vintage trains.  Normally these trains are used as a stationary exhibit, sometimes as a vehicle for special events (like the Old City Hall station tour), but sometimes all straphangers are in for a treat: the train operates on normal subway lines.

Most people view subway trains as uniform utilitarian objects, stainless steel worms that swallow them in point A and if everything goes well spit them out in point B. But in reality the modern NYCTA system is made out of a hodgepodge of different train models, a legacy of three different subway systems. Many old train models have been retired, like the beloved “Redbird” trains. And by retired I mean dumped into the ocean to become artificial reefs in NJ. I remember riding redbirds, and sometimes used to encounter other old trains before they have been scrapped in favor of the more technologically advanced, but poorly designed R160-style trains. The museum train is a special case of this.

The rivets and a mishmash of large windows and steel panels give the old R1 cars look of living prehistoric creatures. Graffiti writers of the 70s hated these cars because they did not have a lot of flat surface to cover in paint and called them “ridgys”. Modern train cars mostly do away with the front windows, cutting off the whole front for a spacious machinist’s cab.

This unfortunate design decision leaves less space for passenger and does not allow kids of all ages to get “machinist’s view”.

 

These trains don’t sound like the new ones: they don’t make the “ding-dong” sound when the doors are closing, but produce a pleasant “ksssht-pfft” noise of a pneumatic actuator. Instead of whining a few melodic notes like the R160s, R1s roar like propeller planes.


One unique feature is the lack of large plastic American flag stickers that were added to all trains after 9-11.

Helvetica was not dominating the typography of the subways yet. In fact, it was not yet created.

The alternate reality feeling permeates the cars. Dangerous looking ceiling fans, exposed incandescent lightbulbs and vinyl seats were from an era less concerned with vandalism.

State of the art pre-war climate control: rider-accessible vents

and futuristic fans

 

The tiny little rattan seat behind the machinist’s cab and the completely different design of the hand strap.

One of the biggest difference with the modern trains is how the conductor works. He operates the train with the two hand grips while standing precariously between the cars.

 

Here’s a video that shows this a little better

One of the coolest parts is the fact that you can ride between the cars (something that is against the modern MTA rules. “<a href=”http://www.deadprogrammer.com/looking-at-the-things-flashing-by/”>Looking at the things flashing by</a>” normally gets you a ticket, even if it’s an amazing experience.

 

Here’s a video:

Gold and pinstripe “CITY OF NEW YORK” signs are gorgeous, but the ad reproductions are more entertaining than authentic.

A friend of mine who remembered these trains from his youth told me that the part that he hated the most about them were the rattan seats: they tended to fray and fragment into pin-sharp pieces of fiber. Rattan seats look beautiful and are extremely comfortable when new, but I indeed sat down on one seat that had a broken section that was uncomfortably sharp. On the other hand all of these trains feature “conversation-style seats” turned 90 degrees to each other instead of the horisontal rows of benches that are the standard today.

Some dubious advice, although I’ve seen this happen.

I’m pretty sure this patent ran out by now.

Currently this train operates every Saturday through January 19th. This page lists the schedule of departures. A round trip to Queens takes about an hour. The best way to catch the train is to arrive on 2nd Avenue stop of the F line in Manhattan. The train spends about 10-20 minutes standing in the station there, so it’s easier to catch. In Queens it does not stand on the platform, but the departure times are pretty accurate. If it’s more convenient, you can just spend a 15 mintues to half an hour waiting along the weekday M train stops, like 47-50th Street/Rockefeller Center.

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Prius – the perfect drive-by vehicle

The area around WTC 7 where I work has one of the densest concentrations of Toyota Priuses in New York: a lot of them were purchased by the governmental agencies. Whole blocks near Centre street are filled in the followng manner: Prius, Prius, Prius, rusty Dodge Ram, Crown Vic, Prius, Prius, Prius. Yesterday I was almost run over by a Prius double parked near an intersection: it started moving, but it did not register with me because it made no sound at all. Modern cars are very quet, but they all vrooom when starting up, and you kind of epect that from a parked car. This made me remember a scene in The Weeds, where gang leader U-Turn buys himself a Prius because it’s a great car for drive-by shooting: very quiet in electric mode, great for sneaking up on people.

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Unlucky Luciano

” ‘I feel you’re being a little harsh on your more eccentric callers.’

‘Of the Howardly persuasion?’

‘Precisely. You undervalue them. Viruses in cashew nuts, visual organs in trees, subversive bus drivers waving secret messages to one another as they pass, impending collisions with celestial bodies. Citizens like Howard are the dreams and shadows that a city forges when it awakes. They are purer than I.'”

Luisa Rey on the Bat Segundo’s show in David Mitchell’s “Ghostwritten”

One of the skills that you learn as a New Yorker is tuning out the mentally ill or simply obnoxious people, with cell phone headsets or without, who constantly assault your hearing. As tuning out a subway preacher who constantly modulates her voice is next to impossible, I usually carry a pair of earplugs in my bag.

Yesterday, as I was riding the Brighton line while reading an interesting book, a man sitting a couple of seats from me began ranting. Looking like Isaak Asimov in his later years, but more disheveled, the dude had a voice of a PBS announcer. A couple of minutes into the rant, I suddenly realized that he was talking about something rather familiar to me — the history of the BMT and BRT, and the Malbone Street Wreck in particular.

The Malbone Street Wreck was the worst subway disaster in New York’s history. 93 people perished in a horrible crash caused by Edward Luciano, a crew dispatcher pressed into service as a motorman during a subway strike. He hit an S-curve designed for 6mph at 30mph. I happened in 1918, when the trains were still made out of wood and there were only 4 cars in a train. The first and fourth cars survived the crash mostly intact, but the middle two cars derailed and slammed into a tunnel wall under Malbone street.

As the unwelcome subway tour guide was pointing out, we were passing by what used to be Malbone Street, but is now called Empire Boulevard. The street was renamed because of the accident, kind of to dim the memory of the crash. What is even more disturbing, there is no memorial at the station where this happened. Well, at least I don’t remember seeing one.

All these years I mistakenly thought that the crash happened somewhere on the 2 line, nearer to Brooklyn College. I guess it took a disturbed man’s rant to set me straight on the matter.

In New York City we pass through places where horrible tragedies happened. My wife had classes at what is now known as the Brown Building of Science. I spend a lot of time fishing at a place where 10 illegal immigrants drowned trying to reach the shore in the Golden Venture incident. There’s a place in the Empire State Building where a B-25 bomber crashed into it, killing 11 people. I still shop at the Staples store that was built in place of a Waldbaums supermarket where 6 firemen perished. And everybody knows what the horrible emptiness in New York’s skyline means.

The fabric of the city closes around disasters, some sooner than others. But the ghosts will not let you forget them. They still lurk in the shadows, whisper their stories to you as you pass by. As the subway ranter finished his rant, a young man wearing a hoodie with a Donny Darko-like skeleton on it sat down next to him. I took a picture of the two of them with my Treo, but all of my Treo photos got destroyed during the software update that I did today.

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Airplane!

While I’ve done less blogging recently, I’ve done a lot more flying. Watching flight attendants do their ancient dance over and over, I could not stop wondering if a single airliner passenger ever had to use the seat cushion as a flotation device after a “water landing.”

As it turns out, airliner pilots performed “water landings” or “ditchings” as they are properly called, successfully several times. In fact, while not technically ditching, jets (and their passengers) go a-swimming in the East River after running off the runway at our own LaGuardia Airport all the time. Well, twice.

I was traveling on Southwest Airlines the evening of the JetBlue debacle. My flight was 5 hours late, which would have not been too bad since I had an interesting book with me, but the Southwest Airlines employees made absolutely sure that I would not send much of it reading. For a couple of hours they bounced me from a long line to a long line just to check in. Then I spent a couple of hours in other lines trying to figure out why my ticket did not have a seat assignment. Finally, after 5 hours, just as the plane was finally filled with passengers, I was told that there would not be a seat for me, and I would need to go back out past the security checkpoint to talk to customer service. As I was standing in yet another line, I finally won a reprieve, was given a seat somehow, but not before having to go back through the security checkpoint again.

Most of Southwest Airlines employees seem to be incapable of two things: apologizing and operating public announcement systems. While the first is understandable, the second kind of mystified me at first. A woman behind a check-in desk repeated the same bit of information (we have no idea when the plane will be here) to a long line of customers one by one, for the first 4 hours not a single announcement was made over the PA system.

Later another, seemingly more competent and caring employee made a few announcements over the PA. Every time she would talk into the microphone, a few customers milling about would start screaming – “it doesn’t work!” and “what are you, stupid? It doesn’t work!”, not realizing, of course, that the PA system would first record the message spoken into a microphone and then release it with a delay, as to eliminate feedback. The poor woman’s face was really miserable: she must hear “your microphone does not work” from clueless customers every day.

As we were preparing for takeoff, the pilot did not make much of an apology for the 5 hour delay. He did say something funny, though. “Uhh, folks, here’s the update. We are waiting our turn to take off, and not sure when it’ll be. But the only good news is, uhh, if it can be considered good news, we are 4 hours ahead of JetBlue.”

JetBlue might have screwed the pooch in this particular instance, with passengers stuck in planes for astronaut-diaper kind of times and what not. But given any opportunity, I’ll fly with them instead of Southwest. I just can’t stand companies whose employees offer you something other than a proper apology when they screw up and treat you like dirt that you are (or they think you are).

My hosting company, Dreamhost, has been providing really crappy service lately. I don’t make a living off of my blog, and frequent outages would not really be enough to make me leave. Besides, it’s 8 bucks a month for a ridiculous amount of bandwidth and space. But a flippant and insulting “apology” that they posted on their blog after the last outage really got on my nerves. I am so leaving Dreamhost, it’s not even funny. I’ll pay more, I’ll spend my time moving, but I won’t host my sites with Dreamhost. In fact, when I’ll finally get my ad system up and running, besides giving free ads to the only person who asked for it, I’ll run some “Dreamhost Sucks” ads as well. As soon as I’ll have a bit of free time.

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The Pigeon Washer

I ducked into the Hidden Starbucks to get a sandwich and a Venti Quad Iced Latte for lunch, then sat down outside on the parapet of the weird little plaza to eat. There were a few salariemen and women sitting on the curb, eating, drinking coffee and smoking. But once I got up to return to my cubicle, I noticed something very strange. See, there was this woman sitting on the parapet, and she had a blue plastic bucket with soapy water and a washcloth. In her hand she held a particularly gnarly sick pigeon. She was giving the pigeon a bath. Unless she’s washing the poor bird for food (hey, you never know), Nikola Tesla, who lived and worked close by would have approved.

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I Want a Skyhook in Brooklyn, Like Yesterday

Congratulations are due to Liftport for 1000ft skyhook crawl! (You can see a video and more pictures in their blog).

Notable quote: “This lifter is much smarter than our previous versions. It’s our 18th version,” he said, with the Mark VII robot named Sword Over Damocles or “Sword” for short. The belt-driven robot is battery-powered, featuring two motors and an expanded cargo area due to increased intelligence built into the device”

Ad:

A sci-fi book written like a sci-fi book should be written. A comic book written and drawn the way a comic book should be drawn. This is madness!

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Dream A Little Dream Of S-40

If you’ve been readin my journal for a while, you might know how important dreams are to me.

There are a lot of important and famous dreams recorded in history – Mendeleev seeing the periodic table; Kekule seeing the worm Oroborous and understanding the benzine ring; Chief Sitting Bull seeing soldiers falling upside down and predicting victory of the Little Big Horn, Hitler seeing the trench engulfed in molten lava in his dream and leaving it thus saving himself, Julius Caesar having a dream in which one website that will be left unnamed says “his mother appeared” and then “taking” Rome, etc.

Over the weekend I was reading Igor Sikorsky, His Three Careers in Aviation by Frank DeLear, and in it was an example of a forshadowing dream that I haven’t encountered before.

The book says that when he was 11 years old, Sikorsky had a dream in which he was standing in a narrow passageway. There was a bluish light overhead and the floor with a fine carpet under his feet. The floor was vibrating, but for some reason he immediately realized that it wasn’t a train or a boat, but a flying machine. He walked through to a door that led to a richly decorated lounge and then woke up. Since he was born in 1889, this would make it the year of 1900 when he had the dream. The Wright Brothers flight was three years away.

Years later, in America Sikorsky was walking through his latest design, the S-40 plane and was struck by a sense of deja vu. There it was, bluish light of fluorescent lamps overhead, the vibration and the fine carpet and even the smoking lounge at the end.

(the photo is from Igor Sikorsky, His Three Careers in Aviation) by Frank DeLear

Next in my reading queue: John C. Wright’s The Last Guardian of Everness – a fantasy that deals with dream worlds and such. Figures.

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The Little Cement Platform

I had some of the best times of my life fishing in Odessa. There were two piers (jetties) that I frequented, the I and the L shaped one. 

I probably fished the most on the I shaped pier. I must have known every little nook and cranny there.

The L (Russian Г ) shaped pier for some reason had less fish around it, but allowed for fishing even in windy conditions – the water behind it was calm even when the wind was high.

All the piers were connected by a wave breaker structure, an underwater wall that ran parallel to the shore and about half a meter below the surface. You could walk on it and fish from it. My father would not allow me to wear his waders because I could have drowned in them, so I had to spend many hours fishing from the wave breaker cold, wet, miserable and with feet cut up by mussels.

In theory you could walk on the wave breaker from the I pier, passing a few more piers and reaching a small cement platform a little bit higher than the L pier (it can barely be seen in the photograph). I never got there because there was a break in the wave breaker somewhere in the middle. I could easily swim over it, but for some reason that break always freaked me out, and I never reached that cement platform, although a lot of people did. 

A few days ago I had a dream where I was looking at the little platform from the L pier.