Route Name Usage

[Trainmaster5]

Just had a great conversation with some friends from my generation. We’re all post WWII and Korean War kids and our terminology concerning subway and bus lines is markedly different from most of my fellow posters. We are all Brooklynites no matter where we reside today. Some examples. The line that travels from DeKalb Avenue through Prospect Park and southward is always the Brighton line to us. When we were kids the line beginning at Franklin Avenue was either the Brighton line or later on the shuttle. Sea Beach and West End were similar. The BMT Southern Division had numbers on some equipment but we never used them. What posters call the IND Fulton Street line today was never called that by my peers. The  train was the Eighth Avenue line because our parents called it that. The Fulton Street el was the only thing that our parents and grandparents called Fulton. When I was a kid the Fulton Street line ran from Rockaway Avenue to Lefferts via Pitkin . Same thing applied to the Lexington Avenue el and the Myrtle el. For some reason the IRT in Brooklyn was just that. Nobody said the Livonia or Nostrand line. As far as buses go in my neighborhoods names were used more than the numbers. Nostrand, Utica, Pitkin, Rockaway, Flatbush, Fulton Street, Rogers, Church, Remsen, Bergen, Sumner, etc. . We knew the numbers but where one lived was the determining factor. To our children and grandkids we allowed them to use the numbers. Re-routes, name changes have made our street names obsolete 😃. I was just curious if this happened in other boroughs and in other generations. Any examples would be appreciated. Thanks. Carry on.

[Eric B]

Route letters and numbers were strictly an IND thing, and even there, as that old 30's map shows, they were really more for the towers, so transit routes were commonly known by names. Because our system grew and became so vast, with many branches of lines, individual routes became the norm, and finally officially spread from the IND to the BMT and IRT upon total unification in 1967.

[MHV9218]

Great posts. To this day, I think in the non-railfan world – and among a younger audience – it's really only "The Lex" which remains in common use. Some South Brooklynites still say Brighton, but I never hear anybody ever say Sea Beach. 

[Trainmaster5]

4 hours ago, MHV9218 said:

Great posts. To this day, I think in the non-railfan world – and among a younger audience – it's really only "The Lex" which remains in common use. Some South Brooklynites still say Brighton, but I never hear anybody ever say Sea Beach. 

Consider my Brighton line and it’s history. BMT Standards, Triplexes, SMEE equipment. #1, #7, QB, QT, Q, D, QJ, M and the NX at the southern end of the line which was actually a Sea Beach line along with the N. RR, RJ, and R were the Fourth Avenue local and the T, and the TT were the West End express and local. The IND connection over the Manhattan Bridge sent the D down the Brighton line and the F became the Culver line to Coney Island. I remember that the Brighton line riders hated the D train and they protested the loss of the Q variants to Manhattan. I take it as a generational thing but while NYCT can change the letters and numbers of the services that are run the names of the trackage traversed best describes the location and not the present day identifiers. Just my opinion. Carry on.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Trainmaster5

[R10 2952]

For what it's worth, I still remember some people calling the West End, Myrtle and Jamaica Lines by name back in the late '90s and early 2000s.  I even remember the Canarsie Line being referred to as such- before all the yuppies and hipsters came in and gentrified that part of North Brooklyn to death.

[zacster]

It was and always will be the Brighton, Sea Beach, West End and 4th Ave.  I was too young to have the Culver in the mix as that was IND and we NEVER took the IND, anywhere.  The IRT sometimes.