Repair shops where subway cars go for a makeover | Hacker News Reader

Repair shops where subway cars go for a makeover

nytimes.com

98 pointsianrahman44 comments

Gift Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/nyregion/subway-repair-sh...

Side question: Does NYT have any anti-abuse measures that will kill off a gift link if too many different people click it?

Here's what Chinese train factories look like for context https://www.alamy.com/180326-shijiazhuang-march-26-2018-xinh...

This is pretty remote context. OP's article is about subway car overhauls, that article is about building new inter-city trains.

If OP was about an Amtrak factory this would be more comparable.

None of the Amtrak rolling stock can really compare with the state-of-the-art high speed rail trainsets in that image though. Perhaps a better comparison would be, say, Siemens' facility for producing Velaro trainsets or Nippon Sharyo's Shinkansen-making factory: https://www.n-sharyo.co.jp/business/tetsudo/making/img-kouta...

The factories are really similar! Guess most factories are, but still, I figured there would be some major difference.

In fact, some of the shots of the Chinese train carridges without their aerodynamic shell look almost exactly like the subway cars. Cool convergent engineering

Well, there are only so many ways you can make a metal box with some wheels on the bottom.

> New York City has some of the oldest subway cars in the world — some have been in service since the 1980s.

If you count the SIR, some of the system's cars are over 50 years old[1]. The R46 is also approaching 50 and is still the standard trainset on the A/C and N/Q/W.

(The MTA also ran R32s[2] until very recently, which were approaching 60.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R44_(New_York_City_Subway_car)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R32_(New_York_City_Subway_car)

Not the oldest, though. There are still a few systems running 1945-era PCC trolleys -- San Francisco, Philadelphia, and a spur line in Boston (Ashmont-Mattapan), though a lot of those have been subject to pretty dramatic overhauls. For heavier rail, the MBTA Red Line still has cars in service (the 1500 series) that were built in 1969-1970, and BART just very recently retired their original cars which entered service in 1972.

Though at least in San Francisco it's sort of intentional to run the F line using historic rolling stock as a mixture between regular transit and tourist attraction.

> R46 is also approaching 50 and is still the standard trainset on [...] N

Which predates Glenn Curtiss Airfield of the 1930's (now LGA), which it still almost-but-not-quite reaches. Very not Shenzhen. Another 2 decades seniority would mean horses.

The photos show people doing their jobs skillfully and conscientiously.

That makes sense, because it's safety-critical important infrastructure for an economic powerhouse city.

But why don't we always see skill and conscientiousness in all the other jobs where that would be appropriate?

Are you asking why it isn't present, or why we don't see it/it isn't put on display? What areas do you have in mind?

Many places that appear skillful and conscientious on camera and in newspaper articles are really not that much.

Many companies offer a kind of tour to officials and journalists where they show what they want to show. Cleaning up what is visible, giving the right tasks to the right employees and generally hiding the mess. Journalists may be complicit, they have to if they want these pretty pictures. Essentially, that's an ad. Not saying it is the case here, but I know for a fact that it can happen.

I wonder. You can look at the Coney Island shops in Google Earth. That shop has a huge amount of junk outside, including an abandoned SUV, rusted shipping containers, overflowing debris boxes, rows of wheel assemblies, motors, and way too many randomly parked cars.

in general that's a weakly positive signal for good engineering and work ethic in this kind of a field imo

Because private companies in the United States have much more leeway to cut corners, even in heavily regulated industries.

Boeing spins off a manufacturing unit to save money and the FAA takes their word for quality control, with predictable results:

As part of the federal securities lawsuit, a Spirit employee allegedly told higher-ups about an “excessive amount of defects,” later telling a colleague he “believed it was just a matter of time until a major defect escaped to a customer.” According to the court filing, the company ignored the warnings.

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/boeing-subcontractor-sub...

Blackstone-owned meatpacking cleaning company hires 15 year olds to clean slaughterhouses, with predictable results:

Blackstone-owned slaughterhouse cleaning company Packers Sanitation Services (PSSI) in February paid a $1.5 million US Department of Labor (DOL) fine for “oppressive child labor.” DOL investigators found more than 100 children working in hazardous jobs, under illegal conditions, with multiple children suffering injuries.

https://pestakeholder.org/news/large-investors-challenge-bla...

Blackstone's CEO was paid a quarter BILLION dollars in 2022:

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

Pride is a powerful force.

I read a news story that the MTA wood shop employees make personal furniture on the clock using wood from work

The photos are gorgeous. The first one, of the motor disassembly area, has a bridge crane (labeled M-23) with a 1-ton capacity?? I didn't realize bridge cranes that size went that low.

I always right-click and "Open Image in New Tab"; you can see so much more than the Times makes available in the context of the article.

If you do that, you can see the "1-ton" rating marked on the trolley. It's possible the original crane was rated higher, but when the trolley needed replacing they just bought the size trolley they needed, leaving the girder overrated.

Interesting point. I am sure the steel beam that is stenciled with "1 ton" can hold more than that, but the plasticky thing that's the actual lifting mechanism looks pretty hardware-store grade.

I couldn't find a photo of this in the article:

> Attached to one component underneath that car — out of sight to virtually everyone but the rats, once the train resumes service — there was a round, black-and-white sticker. It featured a smiling cartoon face resembling Thomas the Tank Engine, and it proudly bore the words “Coney Island Overhaul Pneumatic Shop.”

Mayhap similar to this one: https://www.flickr.com/photos/115019478@N06/albums/721576694...

The photo of the functional AC model is very well made. Flatly laid out, all components and pipes visible and labeled, numbered shut off values all over, gauges on everything. A multimeter sitting on the workbench.

Give me a few hours with that board playing around and Id develop quite an intuition for how the thing works with no prior experience.

https://archive.ph/1KtNB

Alt: https://web.archive.org/web/20240303150044/https://www.nytim...

Paywall loading at the scroll

Ugh yea. It at least shows the first few paragraphs and pictures for those of us on cloudfare who can't access archive.is

"on CloudFlare"? it's a two second change to switch back and forth, why are you letting this limit you?

Earlier today the archive.ph link had a cloudflare infinite reload issue. You'd complete the capachas and it'd just land you right back at the entry page. The web archive link, however, failed to capture the whole plage as well.

That's not a cloudflare issue. archive.today (archive.ph) does the infinite loop on purpose for cloudflare users because they do not agree on their handling of EDNS location data. They style it to look similar to the cloudflare captcha.

If you switch to a different DNS provider that won't be an issue.

Photographer's book "Made in America": https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Christopher-Payne/dp/1419747398/

Beautiful, poetic article and photos. In a parallel universe I would spend my life documenting the art in engineering, the pride and dedication to doing a great job. There isn't enough celebration of this.

I had a photo on my wall in college of the inside of a large safe, showing the locking mechanism. The parts resembled a Swiss watch, engraved, engineered to perfection. All this was normally hidden from view within the door's enclosure. This meant everything to me, doing a great job isn't reserved only for when your work is visible.

So what happens when there's a breakdown out in the field? Do they have some specialized unit that can drag a train on the fritz back to the sheds?

Most rail equipment, powered units included, can be pulled along by just about any other powered railcar.

I wonder if there might be a bit of switching choreography required, if a unit in the middle of a train dies. And what if an axle jumps the rails ? What does rerailing look like ?

I know these are all solved issues for railroads, but I wonder if tunnels and lack of lateral access by heavy equipment makes a difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R211_(New_York_City_Subway_car...

The R211's are finally in service. Thank god these workers don't have to deal with R44s and R46s

Wow, I never expected "an electric motor and some wheels" to be so complex.

Oh hey, I know that place. That's Alstrom in Hornell NY!

Unlikely. The NYT article says those are shops in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Alstom, the giant French railroad equipment company, has a large operation in Hornell NY making transit cars and such. But that's way out in western New York state. Hauling broken cars out there for maintenance would be too much trouble.

They are wearing MTA-branded hard hats and MTA badges, so I assume this is a facility owned by the MTA, not Alsom.

Beautiful photography!

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