Longest, and Possibly Coolest, a Train Still a-Thrumming at 75

[Trainspotter]

Longest, and Possibly Coolest, a Train Still a-Thrumming at 75

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

September 10, 2007

 

On Sept. 10, 1932, one minute after midnight, a 7-year-old boy named Billy Reilly dropped a nickel into a turnstile and boarded an A train at 42nd Street. It was a southbound express, and it was Billy’s first ride on an A.

 

[Float=right]

Riders boarded an A train on March

20, 1933, during the opening of the

Bergen Street station in Brooklyn.

The A train started running in 1932.[/float]It was the city’s first ride, too — 171,267 passengers rode it that September day in 1932, its first day of operation. The line, then called the Eighth Avenue subway, spanned only 12 miles and 28 stations, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom.

 

Some 75 years later, the A line stretches farther than it did back then, literally and culturally.

 

Over the years, the A line has become less of a train and more of an icon, a symbol of the nearly 500,000 varied and eclectic New Yorkers and others it carries through the city daily. The A line is certainly not the oldest run in New York’s subway system, nor has it ever been the smoothest-running, the most punctual or even the cleanest. But an argument could be made, thanks in part to Duke Ellington’s up-tempo stamp of approval, that it is perhaps the coolest.

 

“There’s no 6 train song or D train song,” said Dr. John Morrow, 33, a cardiologist who rode a packed A train recently on his way to lunch. “The A train has a little more cultural significance.”

 

Today, on the A line’s 75th birthday, transit officials will celebrate with a ceremony at the start of the line at the Inwood/207th Street station. A special train made up of six prewar cars is scheduled to provide service along the line’s original route to the Chambers Street stop in Lower Manhattan.

 

Back in 1932, the new subway was part of the Independent Subway System, or the IND, the first city-owned subway network. The IND competed with two private subway systems, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, which opened first, in 1904. The city took control of the BMT and IRT in 1940.

 

The Eighth Avenue subway, which took seven years to build, was the IND’s first line, and it dazzled riders with longer stations to accommodate 10- and 11-car trains, wider platforms and sleek R1 cars manufactured by Pullman Standard.

 

“The R1 cars that ran on the A train at that time were phenomenal,” said Stan Fischler, a subway historian who has written several books about the city’s subway system. “If you had put air-conditioning into them, they’d be good enough to run today.”

 

The A train is the longest line in the system — 31 miles, from northern Manhattan through Brooklyn to Far Rockaway in Queens. New York City Transit, the arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that operates the subways, says it is the longest subway line in the world.

 

The A often feels like the city’s very own transcontinental railroad, traveling deep under the ground and soaring high above it, below the bustle of Washington Heights, past old tombstones in graveyards in Ozone Park, over the waters of Jamaica Bay. Perhaps the most famous section is the run under Harlem heard between the notes of Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”

 

“Think about what a bargain it is,” Mr. Fischler said. “For two bucks you go all the way to Rockaway. Do you realize what that would cost you in a taxi? You couldn’t afford the tip.”

 

There is a strange symmetry to the line. You step on at the 207th Street station in Inwood in northern Manhattan, and you step off at the Far Rockaway/Mott Avenue terminal in Queens, near a western Long Island hamlet named Inwood. (Some trips end in Ozone Park and some in Rockaway Park.)

 

Those riding the A train the weekend before its anniversary, however, could hardly enjoy such uninterrupted, long-distance travel: Because of weekend track work, people had to board shuttle buses to get from Howard Beach to the Rockaways.

 

“I did not know I was going to be on a bus, but you kind of expect it on weekends,” said Shamiyah Brown, 27, who rode the shuttle bus with her seven children and her niece on Saturday. “I’m not surprised.”

 

The A train’s first registered complaint was apparently made just minutes after it began running, when a man at the Chambers Street station became upset because he had put two nickels into a malfunctioning turnstile.

 

Since then, the line has gotten mixed reviews from passengers and the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. In the group’s latest report card, which ranks the city’s 22 main subway lines from best to worst, the A train was tied for 12th place. The group found, among other things, that the line arrives with below-average regularity.

 

The A line has been crippled by fires (the January 2005 blaze at the Chambers Street station, for instance) and has seen its share of tragic and bizarre occurrences.

 

The limbs and torso of a 19-year-old Brooklyn man were found in a blue plastic bag in a tunnel in 2005. Pigeons have been known to step aboard trains at the outdoor Far Rockaway stop and casually step off at the next station. In May 1993, a man posing as a subway motorman took an A train with hundreds of passengers for a three-and-a-half-hour ride. He made 85 stops, and arrived on time at the Ozone Park/Lefferts Boulevard station.

 

On Saturday afternoon, the line that carried Billy Reilly on its inaugural run — he moved to the front of the crowd at the 42nd Street station when a transportation commissioner learned he was born the day of the new subway’s groundbreaking, March 14, 1925 — carried Dr. Morrow, who sat reading and listening to a Tom Waits song on his iPod.

 

It carried Ernest Rivera, 28, an unemployed father of three from Brooklyn. It carried Gunther, a Manhattan couple’s white puppy. It carried a middle-aged woman with a tattoo on her chest, a man holding a surfboard and another man who had remembered to wear his A train T-shirt.

 

Rudy Worrell, 54, knelt on the floor and played his flute and duct-taped keyboard. Mr. Worrell remembered taking the A train as a boy, to play hooky from school. Years later, he would return to the A, unemployed and homeless, playing his music aboard it for small donations.

 

“This is my bread and butter,” he said as the train rumbled along. “Ain’t nothing like the A train.”

[NJTransitFan]

Great story for a great line.

[sebbieprops]

The was actually the very last train in the system that I got around to riding. Until July of this year, I had been on every line except the , which I went on for the first time then.

[Harry]

The was actually the very last train in the system that I got around to riding. Until July of this year, I had been on every line except the , which I went on for the first time then.

 

It took you almost the whole entire 75 years to finally do it.

[Eastman346]

Good story.

[sebbieprops]

It took you almost the whole entire 75 years to finally do it.

 

Ah. Good one.

 

More like the whole 19 years of my life, though.