When 23-year-old Patrick J. Stewart reviews a subway car for his subway-centric YouTube channel, he sometimes brings a white glove to stroke the poles, checking how besmirched his fingertips get. It is a good way to gauge how well a car is maintained, he says, and, by extension, how caring its overseers back at the rail depot are: The finger-swab is a health check on the entire system.
But a pristine car does not necessarily guarantee a good review. Subway cars, he believes, are supposed to be a little grimy. This is New York, after all.
“I love the subway system because of the fact that there is still some grit to it, some New York type of grit to it; there is still some of the old New York to be found,” said Mr. Stewart, a self-described subway fanatic and part of a posse called the Super Subway Bros., which over the past seven years has reviewed hundreds of trains and their lines in YouTube videos that cover every cranny of every car. “Everybody wants to come to New York City because of the fact that it’s New York City, not another city,” he said.
Rail fans are a phenomenon wherever there are locomotives, but the city’s subway system has its own ardent followers who study its maps and its tunnels, its history and its rail yards. The Super Subway Bros. are a group of young men, some from hard-luck backgrounds, who find an outlet for their obsession — and a measure of solace — in the labyrinthine train lines running stolidly beneath the streets. The members differ from many rail fans not just in their personal backgrounds (all of the Super Subway Bros. belong to racial minority groups), but in how they communicate their fandom: the internet. There, they supply a steady stream of videos, reviewing each subway line, critiquing car models or simply posting footage of trains coming and going. Though the footage might seem stultifying, it racks up views.
Mr. Stewart, who goes by Knuckles in his videos, after his favorite game character, spoke about his white gloves on a recent morning in September. He stood in the middle of a sleek car (model R160) on his favorite line, the N, as it hurtled toward Astoria, Queens. He was wearing, as he always does, one of several shirts he designed that featured a subway car. That day, his chest was emblazoned with the image of a somewhat ramshackle model that sometimes ran along this line: the R32. “If you ride in one of these, an R160,” he said, gesturing to the glossy cabin around him as the N swept along the elevated track over Sunnyside, “you’ll feel like you’re somewhere in the Midwest or California. If you ride an R32, you’ll feel like you’re in New York City.”
Mr. Stewart and his colleagues are the sort who take the lack of a window — known as a “rail fan window,” where enthusiasts like to peer at the tracks — as a personal affront. They don’t mind when a subway is dirty or late: it’s more authentic that way. The five young men who make up the Super Subway Bros. are a digitally savvy pocket in a wider world of subway fanaticism, a group sometimes called “foamers” because of how the details of all things subway seem to make them drool.
The digital cohort includes subway gurus like DJ Hammers, a.k.a. Max Diamond, a young man from Westchester County whose videos of passing trains have tens of thousands of views, and transiTALK Transportation Media Group, which provides “transportation enthusiasts with online media entertainment” its website says — in particular videos of different modes of transportation set to pop music. These fans trade online pictures of undercarriages, share audio of new door chimes, and tangle over which subway line is superior. But not every interaction is online: above all, they ride and ride the rails.
In New York City, rail fans are “as diverse as the subway ride itself,” said Regina Asborno, the acting director of the New York Transit Museum,which is in a decommissioned subway station in Downtown Brooklyn, and has many aficionados among its more than 3,000 members. “I think the transit system is really a bloodline for the city,” she said. “These guys are putting it out in the world through social media, but I think there are a lot of secret addicts.”
As with most communities, there are beefs. The Straphangers Campaign, a consumer advocacy organization that lobbies the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for improvements, is a particular source of ire. The campaign also reviews trains, but where the Super Subway Bros. value the veneer of authenticity, the Straphangers organization rates trains based on things such as punctuality. The beloved N train does not always score high.
“Transit advocates are from Mars, and those who are obsessed with transit are from Venus,” Gene Russianoff, the staff attorney for the Straphangers, said. “We come from very different places psychologically.” Rail fans, he added, are more “interested in what lug nuts were attached to the outside of the train than they were with how much it costs to take a ride.”
Mr. Stewart wears his love for the N train on his lapel: The line’s yellow circle symbol is pinned to the red leather jacket he always wears, and the train got an entire month of online episodes devoted to its virtues and demerits. Like several of the Super Subway Bros., his first memory is of riding his favorite train.
For Adam Southerland, 22, it was the old maroon “Redbird” train cars,where he would sit on his mother’s shoulders in the first car of the No. 2 line so he could gaze through the front window, or into the control room when his cousin, a conductor, would let him take a peek. “I like the scenery, being underground, feeling the beat of the train,” said Mr. Southerland, whose love of transport is all encompassing: He works for Hertz and aspires to be a train conductor, or start his own charter bus business. Sometimes he leaves early for work just to ride the subway an extra few stops.
For many New Yorkers the system is a harrying experience — fraught and stressful. For rail fans like the Super Subway Bros., it is often a refuge — from bullies, spats with parents and, for Mr. Stewart and Mr. Southerland, from the Red Hook Houses, where they grew up but only met as teens through train fan gatherings. On the subway they could be themselves.
It is a sentiment shared widely among rail fans, who consider themselves misfits who have found their tribe. Christopher Henderson, a member of the Super Subway Bros., met Mr. Stewart a decade ago on a train, two boys standing by the window at the front. Their first exchange was the model number of the subway car.
THEY HAVE BEEN BEST FRIENDS EVER SINCE.
Five and a half years into his tenure as governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo has finally said that he will make mass transit “a personal priority.”
That is an important shift for a governor who has largely kept his distance from his Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs subways, commuter rails and buses in the New York City region. As the largest mass transit system in the country, the M.T.A. serves a population of 15.3 million people. And as riders know, the whole network is overcrowded, overworked and falling apart.
Mr. Cuomo said this week that he was ready to take charge of the transportation system and engineer a “massive re-creation of the infrastructure as we know it.” The sweeping promise came as heannounced that in the next four years the M.T.A. would be purchasing more than 1,000 new subway cars, 750 of which would have advanced features like wider doors and spaces to walk between cars.
Mr. Cuomo said his grand transportation plan would eventually include revamping La Guardia Airport, redoing the Penn Station complex, fixing bridges, creating a new tunnel and repairing the old ones under the Hudson River and, of course, modernizing the M.T.A.
Such an overhaul will cost enormous amounts of money. For the exciting parts, like new airport terminals or a new Hudson River tunnel, much of the financing will come from the federal government, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and private financing.
But it is the M.T.A., an antiquated workhorse, that needs basic and sustained financial support. Ridership on subways, buses and railroads is up to 2.73 billion trips a year, almost double the number from 15 years ago. Delays have increased as workers struggle to maintain the network and to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy nearly four years ago.
M.T.A. managers pleaded with Mr. Cuomo last year to help pay for a five-year capital plan of $32 billion for modernizing tracks, stations, signals and other equipment. The agency could come up with only $17 billion on its own. Mr. Cuomo was less than enthusiastic, and he dismissed the M.T.A.’s budget as “bloated” even though most transportation advocates argued that it was short by billions of dollars.
After the governor promised to contribute only about $1 billion in state funds, legislators and transit activists from the city lobbied for more. He finally agreed to provide $8.3 billion, with New York City increasing its contribution to $2.5 billion, and the M.T.A. agreed to scale back its costs to $27 billion.
If Mr. Cuomo is serious about “a redesign of the M.T.A. on every level,” he should look for new ways to pay for mass transit. Raising the gas tax would be one option. Another is to support the strategies promoted in a proposal called the “Move NY Fair Plan.”
The Move NY proposal, which would need legislative approval, would raise about $1.35 billion a year in new revenue. It would adjust tolls on bridges — adding ones on Manhattan’s four free East River bridges and lowering the cost for other bridges. Taxis and some cars like Uber and Lyft would be charged a per-mile fee for coming into the crowded parts of Manhattan. The extra money could go to adding subway lines in underserved areas outside Manhattan.
Like raising the gas tax, getting Move NY through Albany would take sustained political effort by the governor. Mr. Cuomo has now declared himself to be New York’s primary transportation advocate, and millions of commuters in the metropolitan area need him to act.
מטאןצקד
Did you check out the jam session with the girl with the ukelele and the guy with the drums that pops up after the singing conductor? Cool!
Overmod
And remember the days when you could not find one single subway car on some lines that was not covered by graffitti.
"The People?" Could have been worse, she didn't say "THOSE people..."
Maybe Uber wasn't running that day so she had to visit the "underworld."
At least the Soupy Sales classic from the 60s, "As The Subway Goes Rolling Along" was written in fun. Hey, Soupy wasn't a whiner!
If she is a native New Yorker, she's evidently grown up in post-Giuliani conditions. Before then, I remember well the sound, the conditions, the smell, the ancient, failing trains covered with graffiti, not to mention the winos and muggers that were far more endemic than now...
I can only dimly remember how bad it was in the late Fifties, when the IRT banged and shrieked so loudly that even hands over ears wouldn't help. Not a cat under the car, a cat being flayed alive under each car. Burn marks and flats all over the railheads, and presumptively building up on the wheels as well. And then along come the Democrats in the mid-Seventies, and no money, and no West Side Highway ... and 'postwar technology' arrives on some lines. Four bolts hold the air conditioner... and all four are made to come loose without comment.
By comparison, this sounds like a child of privilege who thinks her writing is more clever than it is, and appears to be under the delusion that lots of people on the Internet will concur.
The subway is crowded at rush hour? Who knew? Yes, let's all work from home, bar tenders, waitresses, car mechanics, bus drivers, cops and firemen. That will work out nice, won't it? What a jerk.
BroadwayLion Read all about it.
Read all about it.
What a whiner.
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
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