Well after Chambers the signals were working, or they at least appeared to be functioning normally. There was a lot of green because the next A was probably 20 minutes ahead. The non working signals had garbage bags over them, so I assume anything with a light on was working. Btw I think the reason with eliminating the C is that they can only have X amount of trains running, and the C can be replaced with easier with other lines. Either the A is reduced or the C goes.
Duct tape. Handyman’s secret weapon.
Didn’t know this, I thought they stopped it altogether. You familiar with the www.nysubway.org site? Great place.
Here are some selet bits from The New York Times article.
4000 feet of lines would take a while to lay in and test repeatedly.
also
I live on the C line in Brooklyn. It’s not too bad for me actually. The V train now runs on the C line from Jay Street to Eluclid. So I take that train and I just ride to 49th Roc Center and walk over to 50th and B’way. (where I work)
What is bad is that a lot of people took the A to JKF. They can ride the E the other way, which is faster from Manhattan anyway but I bet people arriving at JFK don’t know the A is only running on about 1/3 service right now.
Well, that would get me up and running…
Yup. I was planning on taking the E to the Airtrain to JFK tomorrow, and I’m glad that line isn’t being affected.
Thank you, Mr. Green.
Whenever we’re in the city for the day or the weekend, A and C are the trains we take. I guess we’ll have to learn to read a map, or something.
I’ve had it bookmarked for quite a while but haven’t been there in a couple of years. I don’t remember that Tracks of the Subway book being there last time. I’ll have to go pick it up. 
Not having read Anna Karenina (I’m terrfiied of Russian novels, and hope they all go very far away from me), can someone explain to me this joke?
I hesitate to post in another Pit thread so soon, but I’m probably one of the few people on this Board who has not only managed repairs to ancient controls systems, but I’ve done the physical and switch-work too, long ago. I’m sure others have but I don’t know their names so I can’t reference them.
There are lots of people in the industry who can suss out 1930’s era electronics, as we found when we did hundreds of millions of dollars of work upgrading systems at old power plants for Y2K. Sure, most of these things were too old to even tell the time, but once you started replacing one thing, you often had to keep going.
Many power plant controls are so old and so primitive that it’s like stepping into another world. Vacuum tubes, gutta-percha, wooden insulators, items with faded labels of companies so old and so obscure that you can’t even find them with Google.
I also hesitate to speak on this matter since I’m not involved and not a person on-site, but one thing I do know is that when old systems are damaged, it’s not just a matter or replacing them - even if you had a storage room of spare parts from that era. Many of these systems become subject to fire, electrical code, asbestos, safety, and liability-based codes the first time you try to repair them.
That is - working and happy, they were grandfathered in. But as soon as you touch it, bam - replacing a single set of electro-mechanical solenoids becomes a nightmare of filling out OSHA, EPA, and various permitting and insurance forms - and getting exclusive remedies clauses in place. Municipalities often demand very high liability risk from the Engineer (I’ve personally seen a demand of $100M insurance to be provided by the Engineer for a $50k job), and if I was managing a project where they wanted us to try to “repair it to where it was”, I’d likely say “screw it, I’m not giving you the liability indemnity you need unless you let us replace ALL components at-risk that were attached to this or impacted by it. In fact, we need to use a whole new system, where we can at least try to pass the liability buck upstream if we can.”
As to how hard or how easy it is, I can’t speculate, other than to say, from working on power plants of the same era (or older), it’s amazing just how complicated very simple-sounding things become when you try to replace them with new equipment. Even just running new wires “Oh, you can’t disturb that cable tray, it’s near asbestos, and if you touch anything we need to have the asbestos folks in here…and they take about 2 months to return your phone call, and about another month on-site…then we need to bring the WHOLE cable tray up to code…and the structural supports for the tray are rusted so badly we need new trays too…and may as well replace ALL the wires while we’re in there…yeah…say, does that oil leaking onto the tray contain PCBs?”
It can suck. Even if you’re the one getting paid.
It has to do with how the novel ends (it involves a train).
True, I didn’t even consider the immense bureaucracy that will be involved.
In the NYTimes they mention that the MTA could fix it much faster if they just shut down the whole thing.
They don’t mention how much faster though.
So, if they could just shut down an enter line and change it to the computerized switches so the trains can run much faster and you get the countdown clocks ect. ect. How long of a service disruption would you put up with?
Let’s say you have to take a bus for two months but after that, your commute would be half the time it is right now. Would you go for it?
It wouldn’t be half the time though, just back to your old crappy commute.
Instead of taking the A/C to Hoyt for the G these days, I can take a 2/3 to Hoyt, get out walk a block, and end up at the A/C/G Hoyt. To get to the city I take G to the L. My point is the A/C was a backup, I can go 6 months without them standing on my head.
No, I’m talking about the entire system, line by line.
They have been ‘upgrading’ the L for a loooooong time now. If they just shut down the L completly and got it over with, the trains are supposed to be able to run faster and closer together. This is supposed to cut commute times in half. (in theory) But upgrading the system will take decades with the way they do it now. What if they went line by line and just said, Ok for the next three months the entire Red Line (1 2 3 ) is gone. We’ll add more buses but just deal with it. In three monts, it will be back and much better.
Would you like that, when it came time to shut down your line?
I could take the G to the L to the 1 to get to work. It would be a pain in the ass for sure but if my commute on the C went from 40 to 20 minutes. If there was a clock (outside the station) telling me how long till the next late night/Weekend A train was coming so I could decide if I wanted to cab home to Brooklyn afterwards. I’d say, go for it. Shut down the entire line and upgrade it.
But if iwas four months, than fuck off MTA.
Tough to say. Personally I could do it, but that because I have several ways to get to work. I’m within walking distance (10-15 min walk) of Atlantic and DeKalb stations, which just about cover every subway line that exists. I know other people that are just near one line, who would be totally screwed. I also don’t think shuttle buses would work well, especially in Manhattan. Each train typically holds hundreds (maybe even a thousand or more?) people and they run every 10 minutes. Unless you literally have a nonstop line of buses I think you have problems. That and the traffic in Manhattan would be a nightmare.
Sounds like the perfect time to say fuck the antique 30s deathray controllers, and put in modern computerized goodies.
[QUOTE=Metacom]
[li]Education. A 55 year old EE would have been gone to school in 1970. Between the 1930’s and the 1970’s there were some major changes in electronics: transistors, electronic digital logic, computers, and lots of other stuff was invented. An EE designing a circuit in 1930 would have likely picked used techniques and paradigms that a modern EE wouldn’t have a clue about. Ask a recent EE grad to look at a circuit featuring a triode and be prepared to get asked “What’s a triode?”[/li][/QUOTE]
They thought it was an unfortunate waste of their time but the EEs I went to school with in the mid-70s got a thorough grounding in tube tech. Okay, it WAS a waste of their time but who knew when it could come in handy?
How the hell am I supposed to get to Harlem now?
(This is all I know about the NYC subway system.)