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The sign on the scuffed-up door offered a warning: only New York City transit workers allowed.
Luckily, we were with a few.
They unlocked the door and escorted us through a maze of long, empty hallways and staircases at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station in Downtown Brooklyn. It was like being let backstage at a theater when there was no show, or into the kitchen of a closed restaurant. The only thing we could hear was the roar of trains.
About five minutes later, we reached the control tower, where we saw one of the oldest pieces of signal equipment in the New York subway system: a bulky machine from the Great Depression that looked as if it belonged in a museum.
We had written about New York’s signal system before, but this was the first time we were seeing how it worked. The system, which routes trains and controls and monitors their movements, is essential in a city where trains are constantly switching between tracks at more than 200 crossing points known as interlockings.
This unsung signal system even had its 15 minutes of fame in a 2009 movie about a hijacked subway car, “The Taking of Pelham 123,” a remake of a 1974 film. Denzel Washington played a dispatcher at a control center who watched the trains in real time.
Reality is more complicated than the movies, of course. Most of the subway system still uses ancient signal technology. The equipment has to be manually operated, around the clock, from a network of underground control towers.
Our reporting trip grew out of our coverage of congestion pricing. The tolling plan is expected to raise $15 billion for transit improvements, and about $3 billion of that will fund further installation of a modern signal system, which uses computers and wireless technology, on more miles of tracks. But the Trump administration wants to end congestion pricing, jeopardizing such upgrades.
We had pitched an article idea about the system to our editor, Zeke Minaya, who oversees transportation coverage for the Metro section at The New York Times. To better explain to readers the system’s technical aspects, we wanted the story to be interactive, with graphics, photos and video. So we enlisted the help of two colleagues, Eden Weingart, an editor on the Digital News Design team who specializes in visual stories, and Tony Cenicola, a veteran photographer.
On a chilly afternoon in late February, we boarded the A train at the Port Authority Bus Terminal station, which is across the street from The Times’s newsroom in Midtown Manhattan. We pulled into Hoyt-Schermerhorn station about 20 minutes later. The station, which opened in 1936, is a major transit hub for more than 50,000 passengers a day. (Michael Jackson fans will remember it as the station in his 1987 video for “Bad.”)
Near the turnstiles, we met signal experts from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway system. Then, we followed Jamie Torres-Springer, president of M.T.A. Construction & Development, which oversees the signal projects, deep into the station.
The control tower, as it turned out, was not a real tower. It looked like an old storage room, with dingy walls and exposed pipes, and sat beside the tracks, not above them. In the center of the room was an interlocking machine, with a paper sign taped to its front: “Do not put your feet on the interlocking machine or doors.”
There we met Dyanesha Pryor, one of the roughly 300 tower operators who control train traffic at interlocking machines. She was merging Manhattan-bound A express trains and C local trains onto a shared track, and splitting Brooklyn-bound trains onto separate express and local tracks.
A radio crackled. It was another operator, giving Ms. Pryor a heads-up: “Charlie coming to you next.” (The operators have their own language. “Charlie” is the C train. “Apple” is the A train.) Part of Ms. Pryor’s job involves looking through a small, partially covered window to verify which train is coming.
“OK, copy,” Ms. Pryor responded.
She went to work pushing and pulling levers from memory. The red-marked levers changed the signals to red, yellow or green, like traffic lights. Black levers moved switches, or sections of railing, allowing the trains to cross tracks.
The interlocking machine was connected to wires and relays, electromagnetic devices that send signals from the levers to the tracks. One cabinet was full of cylinder-shaped relays that made clicking sounds.
As this equipment becomes more fragile with age, it breaks down or wears out. In January, a relay failure took an hour to fix, delaying 25 trains.
We left the control tower with a better understanding of, and a new appreciation for, what it takes to keep the subway running. The old signal system, a marvel for its time, is still hanging on but is simply no match for modern trains and technology.
“When you work within the M.T.A., every time a train arrives at a station, it’s like a miracle,” Mr. Torres-Springer told us as we rode the subway back to Manhattan, thinking about all the levers being pushed and pulled so the train could run.
Winnie Hu is a Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
The post Deep in the Subway Station, Reporters Find a Century-Old System appeared first on New York Times.
