R10 2952

I don't remember why they ran on the in 2012, but I honestly think that's where all 50 should've gone after 2009. Having them on the Eastern Division with the 3/5 conductor position never made sense to me..

With the Sixth Avenue Line, it would've been interesting to see how things turned out if the Second System tunnel from 2nd-Houston to South 4th had been constructed and tied in somewhere to the Crosstown or Franklin Avenue Line; I feel such a thing could've brought many benefits. A Culver local service to Manhattan, or relief for the Dekalb Junction and Manhattan Bridge- perhaps this is something that the MTA ought to plan for in the long term. Moving trains off the Manhattan Bridge before it starts disintegrating again would spare us another 20-year headache of "temporary" reroute gymnastics.

@Armandito You mis-attributed @LaGuardia Link N Tra's quote to me.

I lived off the all those years; in 2012 it wasn't all 50 R42s assigned to Pitkin; it was 20 at most IINM, and only for 2 months in the summer. 2015-16 there couldn't have been R42s in revenue service on the , or I would have seen them. So unless you find those videos you're talking about... R42s haven't been a regular sight on the since 2009, and even then they weren't the remaining 50- they were the other 335 or so waiting their turn to be scrapped at 207th.

To me, the easiest solution would be to reinstate the , and send the to 95th-4th to replace the in Brooklyn. 1. How so? There are switches north of 57th-7th that would allow the to remain express after 34th; in all honesty, the should never have been switching at 34th in the first place. 2. All they'd have to do is install a crossover north of Whitehall.

Interestingly, the original BMT plan for a Brooklyn Crosstown line actually involved running a two-track line from the northern end of the Franklin Avenue Line to the Astoria Line, if I'm not mistaken.

@Bay Ridge Express Yes, this is precisely what I was getting at. If the is shortened to run from 71st Ave to Whitehall St, you get a shorter, more manageable route and make all three tracks at Whitehall available for trains to terminate at. Send the to 95th, and then the can be eliminated as redundant, with some of its runs folded into the .

Personally, I never had that big of a problem with the running along 4th Avenue. It did get decent ridership until the mid-1990s (when it ran there during middays), although I will admit part of the reason for that was the Manhattan Bridge being out for most of the '90s- it helped balance some of the loads off the . Once it became a rush-only service and then the Bridge fully reopened a few years after that, ridership did drop significantly. For what it's worth, at least it was a better service pattern than the route it had before 1986- Stillwell Ave via Brighton. That never made sense to me. As to 4th Avenue, I believe back in the '80s some of the Nassau <R> trains ran between Metropolitan and 95th, or at least they were scheduled to do so; have yet to find any pictures of it, though. In any case, I definitely think the needs to be changed; we've had several decades to witness that the current route is not working as well as it could. I'm also not a fan of the current - it shares trackage with the /, , , the , and runs shorter trains than the . The M+V combo was not a marriage made in heaven, not by a long shot.

Yeah, unexpected incidents like this happen all the time. Why bother keeping track? It's not a contest...

On a side note, I'm surprised we have a yellow RR bullet here on the site, but we don't have the brown R diamond...

Yeah that actually remained a problem right up until the Redbirds retired in 2003; after GOH, they started wearing down again mechanically. To paraphrase what was said by another member here several years ago, it was the result of multiple circuit failures within the door control system giving false positives- the end result was definitely shitty. Now that I think of it, most of the Redbirds were in bad shape already in the late '90s. Either mechanical wrecks or rusting through. Not to mention all the cars with busted A/C, much more than the R32s.

@Armandito Well the certainly benefited from the shadowing it as a local from Forest Hills to the Lower East Side, the benefits from the offloading some of the crush between Franklin Ave and 149th St... same story with the providing relief for the and . These secondary services all exist for good reason.

Well, I don't know about that. Granted, the along West End carried air and was mostly useless as a rush hour supplement to the post-1995, and the MTA should certainly be trying to avoid zero-chance service patterns that don't generate sufficient ridership. There is also another side to that coin, though; a route becoming a victim of it's own success/popularity- the M and the R in their current incarnations are direct examples of this. There has to be a reasonable balance. You don't want empty trains, but you don't want crush-loaded ones, either. There is something to be said for relief/supplemental lines like the and ..

@JeremiahC99 I have no idea; I don't immerse myself in those kind of operational details. Best answer I can offer you is that having more than one local along 4th Avenue will/would definitely limit capacity to and from 95th.

I was waiting for someone to bring this up; some of the others on here act like the R179 situation was a total shocker. To me it wasn't. Not after all the incidents I heard about that happened in the late '70s and early '80s- traction motors falling out of their mounts, exploding controllers, R12/14/15 consists so shot that they didn't have enough power to make it up the grades in the Joralemon and Clark tubes, and so on. Not sure why people take cleanliness and error-free operation for granted these days, but I suspect it has something to do with the 24-hour news cycle, social media and instant gratification. 21st-century society in a nutshell i guess. Personally, I think the MTA's primary motivation for pulling the R179s and keeping them out of service for so long probably has something to do with litigation/liability/lawyers- another thing in the present day that we have way too much of.

Regarding the whole / thing, I may have mentioned this before, but 36th Street Yard is supposed to become a revenue yard in the long term. I'm assuming it would essentially be a satellite yard to Coney Island, but either way it would probably allow for shortening the route- 95th to Ditmars, 71st to Whitehall (I guess the only question would be which route gets which letter). The Whitehall bottleneck would still be an issue; only practical solutions I see to that would either be have trains terminate at City Hall's lower level, or have the run to 95th...

Personally, I was surprised when the older O5s at KB all got junked in '09-'10; if memory serves me correctly, they had just displaced the remaining RTSes there ('07-'08). They didn't seem to be in bad shape at the time, but I guess if the rust was under the surface then I'd have no way of knowing, anyway. People point out the non-stainless frames of the O5s as a flaw, but carbon steel was actually the standard for bus construction much longer than it was for trains. For what it's worth, it is (or rather was) a common practice for transit agencies in other parts of the world to give their buses a mid-life overhaul; replacing rusted areas of the chassis/undercarriage by welding in new metal was considered normal and relatively cost-effective. Too expensive to do over here?

THIS. These two sentences should be pinned to the top of the thread.

I'd prefer that option as well, but if the TA did that, it would probably increase crowding on the and at the lower-level platforms on the / , which aren't very wide to begin with. Maybe if the Myrtle Line was extended somewhere (tied into the IND Crosstown, BMT Franklin or whatever) it could work, but I don't see them doing that anytime soon. I could see the being pushed off 6th Avenue, maybe as a replacement for the to 95th-4th, but people would complain. 🤷‍♂️

Been reflecting on certain travels I used to do 5-10 years ago on commuter rail in Downstate NY, mostly Metro-North. All this talk in the news currently about a "coin shortage" reminds me of all the times the MNRR ticket-vending machines spouted unwanted amounts of dollar coins at me. One TVM I was at wasn't accepting cards, so I had to get a round trip with a $50 bill; thing literally spit out like 35 dollars' worth of spare change, like one of those old Vegas slot machines. Made for a damn awkward scene, not to mention carrying all that metal home... Used to be other funny shit that happened too, over the years- a druggie using the payphone at White Plains station, a 100-car CSX freight train rumbling through Spuyten Duyvil in the middle of the day, people from an Amtrak train galloping down the stairs to catch the commuter train at New Rochelle. Funny stuff, lot of it's changed now..

Yeah, past Willowbrook the ridership on the 75 was even less; I guess over time the 194 simply became the go-to for people in outer Passaic County. When exactly did the 11 stop going past Willowbrook, anyway? It must've been before my time because I don't remember the old routing at all.

@B35 via Church well the RFW on the West End used to be fun when the R42s were still on the ; I stopped caring about that years ago though... the 4th Avenue ridership began to really drop off after the M was relegated to rush-only in 1995.

THIS right here. Ultimately, that's what the issue really boils down to; it's a kneejerk reaction on the MTA's part, and it makes the cops look stupid that they can't catch him. Reminds me of the story I was told as a kid about the High Bridge on the Harlem River being closed; "oh, some kids threw rocks at a tour boat in the '70s, so they closed it." Like really, a vandalism incident is enough to shut down an entire bridge for 40 years? Freaking ridiculous.

Yeah ridership-wise, the 75 mostly carried air. No idea why NJT kept it around for as long as they did. My point was more about the route itself; the idea of having to drive a bus via Butler-Bloomingdale-Pompton-Paterson-Passaic-Newark and back using local (non-highway) roads makes the 190 seem like a picnic. The 75 was interesting from a bus-fanning perspective, I think, but from the perspective of being a potential driver of said route? Hell naw.

Well at least the 190 is not as bad as the old 75; that thing was like being stuck in an extended version of the opening credits from The Sopranos...