There’s an entire subculture of people who follow trains around or are fascinated by them. In England, they’re called “trainspotters” and here in NYC, there are a group of rabid fans…

I first stumbled on the “High Line,” or officially, the West Side Elevated Freight Railroad, way back in about 1983, when it had just run its last shipment of frozen turkeys…

  LIVING FOR THE CITY, PART 1    City Hall Park New York’s present City Hall was completed in 1811 and is the third City Hall overall. Though most of the…

EVEN though I have chronicled NYC’s lost, magnificent City Hall Station a number of times in Forgotten NY I had only visited once before, in a 1998 Transit Museum tour that…

Original 28, Part One Subway design reached its apotheosis in the original 28 subway stations, designed by architects George Heins and Christopher LaFarge, engineered and built by William Barclay Parsons and…

Like many things, the subways disappoint more often than not. The waits are too long, graffiti is creeping back again, the express won’t wait for passengers to cross the platform from…

NOW HEAR THIS: the subway/MTA photo ban lives. Snapped a photo of a track indicator at Flatbush LIRR. With the renovations going on, these may soon vanish. Two cops rush over. One…

EVEN though ancient subway car tours are kind of pricey at $20-$25 a trip (for Transit Museum members) I try to make at least a couple of tours a year. The…

YOU’VE felt the heat already. New York City’s 722 miles of subways are among the dirtiest, hottest and most woebegone in the country. Other, newer systems are cleaner, cooler and run…

ATTENTION has been paid, and rightly so, to the NYC subway system on its 100th anniversary in 2004, but there’s an even older transit system in New York existing alongside the…

Title card: Mid-1980s IRT retro-kiosk at Astor Place, ca. 1985 In New York City, just about every subway entrance on the system’s 460-plus stations is somehow different, and that’s no mean feat.…

Fresh from its 1930 IND and Brooklyn elevated car fantrip to Rockaway Park, the MTA continued its centennial celebration on October 23, 2004 with a run of elevated and subway cars from four decades,…