Hmmm…lived half my life in Boston and half in NYC, and never ever heard anybody, NYer or tourist, refer to the NY subway system as their colors.
And yes, the subways (and the El lines, which have all been torn down in Manhattan) were built over a period of several decades by bitterly competing companies, so it’s murder to try and connect them now, and it usually results in complicated transfers (try switching from the D to the downtown 1 train at 59th St).
I work at a building one block from Ground Zero on Fulton St., and they’re digging up Dey Street to make a tunnel to connect the new station there to the rest of the Fulton Street complex. It’s a big job and really hard, because of everything from historical sites to simple geology (seepage problems in one part of the stations, tough bedrock in another) and they’re trying to integrate twelve different subway lines that were designed to compete with one another.
As for crosstown subway lines, well, that’s what the trolley system was for.
Yeah, exactly. Seriously, thanks for the explanations, but I’m not familiar enough with the locations to get your references. I’d rather just take a cab and avoid the hassle. (Which is what I do in Sofia, at least. They don’t even have signs up at most of the Sofia trolley stops, so unless you actually know where you are at every given moment, forget about it, you’re screwed.)
BTW, Hello Again, the Chicago El has two lines that run 24 hours a day: the Blue Line (which goes to O’Hare, so of course it has constant traffic) and…the Red Line.
I moved from Chicago to NYC, and I occasionally find myself referring to the groups of trains by color. I don’t see what the big deal is. I work on the Upper East Side, and when I’m telling people how I get there, I can either say “I sometimes take the 4 or the 5 partway and then transfer to the 6 to get to 68th Street, and sometimes I just take the 6” or I can say “I take a green train to get to 68th Street.” People know what I mean.
I don’t hear a lot of people doing it, so I don’t think there’s some major transition to calling all the lines by colors, or a conspiracy to turn NYC into Boston. It’s a pretty uncommon thing.
It would be far more accurate to say “I take the Lexington line,” as there are “green trains” that go to multiple destinations in The Bronx and Brooklyn.
Hey, I used to live in Cambridge, and plenty of streets in Boston are labled. In fact, Boston is so generous with labels (and house numbers) that they change them every few blocks for the same street.
Nor should you if you’re from Boston, unless you have a death wish. It is a little-spoken fact that Paul Revere made for the tower of the Old North Church because his nerves were shot from riding around Boston at ground level, even at midnight.
Nore relevant to the OP: I am a born-and-bred NYCer, and often refer to subways by their color if I’m directing someone to a stop which all trains of a given color have in common. However, I have never referred to them as the “(x-color) Line.”
And, just because it wasn’t mentioned yet: Light Blue was the old JFK Express. No letter or number, but an airplane icon.
The only real difference of significance is the width of the car bodies. (One other technical difference is the side on which the emergency stop levers are normally set, but that’s only of interest to hardcore subway tech-heads.) All of the work equipment used on the system is built to IRT (numbered line) standards and can be used anywhere on the system. In fact, some of the work trains are made up of IRT equipment out of regular service.
When a work train pulls into a IND/BMT (lettered lines) station, the main difference you can see is that there is an extra three or so inches of gap between the train and the platform. That’s unacceptable for passenger service, but fine for work crews.
I think the key reason for the popularity of the “red line” descriptors is that the MTA aggressively eliminated the old IRT, IND and BMT descriptors for the lines. It was easy enough to tell someone to “take the west side IRT to Times Square”, but when nobody understands IRT, how else can you describe the 1-2-3 lines.