news Twenty-Five Years Ago Today NYCT Subways Became Graffiti-Free

[Via Garibaldi 8]

Twenty-five years ago today, NYC Transit celebrated a milestone many believed could never be achieved when a paint-scarred  train reached its terminal, was pulled from service and sent to the showers.  What was so special?  At that point, the largest subway system in North America was finally graffiti-free. The nearly two decade-long scourge of vandalism began with felt-tip markers and soon escalated to spray-paint.  The practice turned the subway system into an unwelcome underworld where it seemed that all official control had been lost.  

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[Tokkemon]

Joy! Silvery-shiney-goodness!!!

[realizm]

Now if only they can figure out alternatives on commercialized graffiti i.e wrap ads.....

 

Now before anyone responds, think of the fact that an increase in state funding would do wonders to eliminate this latest threat to the natural stylish looks of the rolling stock we have....

 

Then the MTA will not have to resort to trains looking like moving billboards.

[Ethan777]

When I browsed through pictures of the SMEEs back in the 70s and 80s, I was shocked by the extent of the vandalism in and outside of the train. I couldn't believe that people had to ride such subways everyday. Now when I compare the bright NTTs and those dirty cars back then, I just feel happy that we don't need to live with such dirty cars. That stark contrast does show how much the NYC subway has progressed over the decades. 

 

The state of the subway cars back then has also made me treasure the cleanliness of the trains I have back home and the strict vandalism laws Singapore has even more. The first graffiti case on our trains only popped up in 2010, after 23 years of holding a record of having a graffiti-free transit system and it sparked a huge uproar amongst us Singaporeans about how our authorities could make such a security lapse. We had another case of it in 2011 and a third one just a few days ago. Depot security is in the midst of being beefed up because of this. Once any car gets tagged, it must be pulled out of service immediately to get cleaned. 

 

There are videos of the vandalised trains online too.

[realizm]

Blame the City Of New York and the fiscal crisis. If it wasn't for NYS cutting funding for the MTA this would have never happened. As much as I am avid of legal street art, but give acknowledgement to the fact that bombing trains is illegal, I will blame Albany for failing to help the MTA with operating costs and watching it crumble. Forget graffiti bombed trains.... We had R44s and R46s falling apart with cracked trucks and shot electronic systems, rail spikes raining down from the Els into the streets, and tons of unrepairable slow zones due to broken rails everywhere.

 

Station infrastructure falling apart and more. Infrequency of service and deferred maintainance of the trains. Thats the bigger picture of the MTA during the 70's and 80's and a crying shame for New York State, the dirtbags. And even up to today its the same old nonsense. See Queens Blvd derailment and the LIRR ESA tunnel to nowhere.....

 

Nice publicity stunt here on the part of the MTA and that article, I am not worried about 25 years ago, I am concerned about the problems today with this system, now not during a time I wasn't even barely born yet.

 

Wanna talk about MNRR and NYC Transit derailments, resulting in injuries and curtailment in service. Its happening all over again. And they are flaunting their praise over 25 years ago? Why dont they get their crap together now and do some work on TODAY's deferred lines, and replace SMEES that are 50 years old, constantly break down, and shouldn't be running in the first place..... something that they should have done yesteryears ago....

 

It shouldn't have took until Dec 2015 to decide hey.... lets put the first R179 on the line? Give me a break with this MTA publicity garbage. Meanwhile commercialized corporate graffiti (Ad wrapped trains) running rampant on new NTTs taking away from the silver shine is aye ok and so cool....

 

Let me not even start with the 2010 budget cuts....

 

MTA executive committee and the State of New York - Effin' hypocrites....

[Ethan777]

Blame the City Of New York and the fiscal crisis. If it wasn't for NYS cutting funding for the MTA this would have never happened. As much as I am avid of legal street art, but give acknowledgement to the fact that bombing trains is illegal, I will blame Albany for failing to help the MTA with operating costs and watching it crumble. Forget graffiti bombed trains.... We had R44s and R46s falling apart with cracked trucks and shot electronic systems, rail spikes raining down from the Els into the streets, and tons of unrepairable slow zones due to broken rails everywhere.

 

Station infrastructure falling apart and more. Infrequency of service and deferred maintainance of the trains. Thats the bigger picture of the MTA during the 70's and 80's and a crying shame for New York State, the dirtbags. And even up to today its the same old nonsense. See Queens Blvd derailment and the LIRR ESA tunnel to nowhere.....

 

Nice publicity stunt here on the part of the MTA and that article, I am not worried about 25 years ago, I am concerned about the problems today with this system, now not during a time I wasn't even barely born yet.

 

Wanna talk about MNRR and NYC Transit derailments, resulting in injuries and curtailment in service. Its happening all over again. And they are flaunting their praise over 25 years ago? Why dont they get their crap together now and do some work on TODAY's deferred lines, and replace SMEES that are 50 years old, constantly break down, and shouldn't be running in the first place..... something that they should have done yesteryears ago....

 

It shouldn't have took until Dec 2015 to decide hey.... lets put the first R179 on the line? Give me a break with this MTA publicity garbage. Meanwhile commercialized corporate graffiti (Ad wrapped trains) running rampant on new NTTs taking away from the silver shine is aye ok and so cool....

 

Let me not even start with the 2010 budget cuts....

 

MTA executive committee and the State of New York - Effin' hypocrites....

Is it true that the R42s are in very bad state now? In what ways uh

[realizm]

Is it true that the R42s are in very bad state now? In what ways uh

 

 

 

See pdf. http://web.mta.info/mta/news/books/pdf/131112_1030_transit-bus.pdf

 

The MDBF for R42s stands at 39,192 miles between failures which is pathetic. The absolute worst of the worst.

 

What they should have done was not scrap the R44's. They never took them out of service due to out of the blue sky  'unforseen' defects, impossible. Rumors have it the MTA screwed up on the renumbering schemes of the NYC Transit cars during its GOH and when it was discovered, they scrapped them all instead of fixing the problem claiming it was 'too costly'. Yeah right!

[T to Dyre Avenue]

They renumbered the R44s and R46s after they came back from GOH - more than 20 years ago. And the R46s are still in service. It couldn't have been the renumbering scheme, although I don't see why they had to do that anyway. What was wrong with the original R44 and R46 car numbers?

 

For whatever issues they had, the R44s did have a fairly long service career of 38-39 years before the MTA ordered them out of service. But I wonder if all of them had the structural issues the MTA gave as the reason for withdrawing them from service. Or was it just a portion of the fleet that had them?

[realizm]

They renumbered the R44s and R46s after they came back from GOH - more than 20 years ago. And the R46s are still in service. It couldn't have been the renumbering scheme, although I don't see why they had to do that anyway. What was wrong with the original R44 and R46 car numbers?

 

For whatever issues they had, the R44s did have a fairly long service career of 38-39 years before the MTA ordered them out of service. But I wonder if all of them had the structural issues the MTA gave as the reason for withdrawing them from service. Or was it just a portion of the fleet that had them?

 

During the rollout of the R160's they only investigated out of the entire fleet of 270 R44s, only 8 cars that had defects. Eight! I mean thats it?

 

This is the alternative theory I have heard behind the reasons for the sudden scrapping of the R44s as opposed to the official MTA statement: During the GOH at 207th Street yard between 1991-1993 the R44 fleet was renumbered from 100-387 to 5202-5479. True. However from what anonymous insider information that apparently surfaced at the time through various forums of social media on the net, it was stated that they misnumbered many of the cars and resultantly  lost track of the GOH of the space age 75' cars.

 

According to this alternative theory it would have cost them extra money to track the right number of the cars pre GOH to the same rebuilt cars post GOH let alone perform a future SMS as needed to lengthen their useful lives until the R179's arrived to replace the R44's as once originally planned.

 

So they decided to scrap the entire NYC Transit fleet while making a official statement that does not reveal such details. The rest is history. The reefing of the SMEEs suddenly stopped out of the blue. The R160's ended up at Coney Island but also Jamaica Yard and that wasn't the original plan. As we saw as the originally displaced R42s, R40Ms and R32s originally running on Queens Blvd was taken off and replaced with R160s instead. 

 

Why would they 'suddenly' by wild coincidence find defects in the R44s in the first place when they already had made the prior desision to replace them with the R179's after they have reached their end of their useful lives as originally planned? Shouldnt they have known this prior to beginning the scrapping the SMEEs to begin with? 

 

The official counterarguement of course is that they just 'happened' to find the defect as they were scrapping the majority of the SMEE fleets but seriously theres alot of gaps to this that makes one wonder what the truth to this really is.

 

*Disclaimer: This is based on what was said by 'unofficial' anonymous sources. This is only a theory. Is it true? Thats left up to the unknown but it cannot be ruled out.

[Ethan777]

They could have gone thru GOH first before renumbering. Its so much more organised and u cant screw up then

[Lance]

They renumbered the R44s and R46s after they came back from GOH - more than 20 years ago. And the R46s are still in service. It couldn't have been the renumbering scheme, although I don't see why they had to do that anyway. What was wrong with the original R44 and R46 car numbers?

 

For whatever issues they had, the R44s did have a fairly long service career of 38-39 years before the MTA ordered them out of service. But I wonder if all of them had the structural issues the MTA gave as the reason for withdrawing them from service. Or was it just a portion of the fleet that had them?

I don't think all of the 44s had structural problems. There were several reports of like 60 or 70 cars that could've been fit for service. However, many of them could not be run safely because of the cars falling apart. There were reports of this as well.

 

During the rollout of the R160's they only investigated out of the entire fleet of 270 R44s, only 8 cars that had defects. Eight! I mean thats it?

 

This is the alternative theory I have heard behind the reasons for the sudden scrapping of the R44s as opposed to the official MTA statement: During the GOH at 207th Street yard between 1991-1993 the R44 fleet was renumbered from 100-387 to 5202-5479. True. However from what anonymous insider information that apparently surfaced at the time through various forums of social media on the net, it was stated that they misnumbered many of the cars and resultantly  lost track of the GOH of the space age 75' cars.

 

According to this alternative theory it would have cost them extra money to track the right number of the cars pre GOH to the same rebuilt cars post GOH let alone perform a future SMS as needed to lengthen their useful lives until the R179's arrived to replace the R44's as once originally planned.

 

So they decided to scrap the entire NYC Transit fleet while making a official statement that does not reveal such details. The rest is history. The reefing of the SMEEs suddenly stopped out of the blue. The R160's ended up at Coney Island but also Jamaica Yard and that wasn't the original plan. As we saw as the originally displaced R42s, R40Ms and R32s originally running on Queens Blvd was taken off and replaced with R160s instead. 

 

Why would they 'suddenly' by wild coincidence find defects in the R44s in the first place when they already had made the prior desision to replace them with the R179's after they have reached their end of their useful lives as originally planned? Shouldnt they have known this prior to beginning the scrapping the SMEEs to begin with? 

 

The official counterarguement of course is that they just 'happened' to find the defect as they were scrapping the majority of the SMEE fleets but seriously theres alot of gaps to this that makes one wonder what the truth to this really is.

 

*Disclaimer: This is based on what was said by 'unofficial' anonymous sources. This is only a theory. Is it true? Thats left up to the unknown but it cannot be ruled out.

It really wouldn't matter which cars were overhauled first. They would've all had to be maintained eventually, regardless of whether they were overhauled in 1991 or 1993. That's why I'm taking this "renumbering error" with a very large grain of salt. If anything, the MTA acted with too much haste in retiring the entire fleet instead of testing each and every car.

 

EDIT: I've done a bit of digging and found something that should be of interest concerning the 44s.

http://www.subchat.com/read.asp?Id=887778

 

Regarding the 160 car assignments, Coney Island and Jamaica were going to get the new cars whether or not the 44s were retired. The 44s would've stayed at 207th or Pitkin for A and C service along with some 46s from Jamaica to replace the retired and/or displaced 32s (the M/V combo wasn't confirmed by this point).

[T to Dyre Avenue]

They could have gone thru GOH first before renumbering. Its so much more organised and u cant screw up then

They did that with the R46s. In 1992-early 1994, I remember riding R46s with LCD side route signs and no blue stripes that still had three-digit numbers or 1000, 1100 or 1200-series numbers. They began renumbering them in 1994.

[MCID4500Lover92]

Wooow that's amazing that's a huge accomplish, but I still do miss those trains from Back in the day.

[realizm]

EDIT: I've done a bit of digging and found something that should be of interest concerning the 44s.

http://www.subchat.com/read.asp?Id=887778

Yes I saw it initially before the prior post during my fact checking as well, and it is evident by even simply looking at the state of the R44s before its retirement, but still I have to wonder. But you bring up a good point. The R44s on NYC Transit went through a heck of alot of abuse during its career, I wouldn't deny that.