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Driving blind: NYC subways steered by 1930s tech, paper maps and a lot of hope
By
Stephen Nessen
Published Jan 14, 2025
Modified Jan 14, 2025
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Stephen Nessen
By
Stephen Nessen
Published Jan 14, 2025
Modified Jan 14, 2025
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The safe movement of subway trains on and off the Manhattan Bridge in downtown Brooklyn relies on what was once one of the most state-of-the-art, sophisticated systems in the world.
But that was the 1930s.
Nearly a century later, the technology that direct trains through the array of tracks known as the DeKalb interlocking looks like it belongs in a museum.
Each day, around 350,000 people ride the B, D, N, Q and R lines that pass through the interlocking. Regular commuters in Brooklyn are likely familiar with the area — it’s where trains frequently pause for seconds or minutes near the DeKalb Avenue station so others can pass. That delicate dance is managed by MTA staff behind a locked door, operating equipment invented when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the White House.
The MTA says it urgently needs to bring the transit system into the new millennium, and is asking Albany lawmakers to approve a $65 billion modernization plan to help. Fulfilling that plan would almost certainly require the imposition of new taxes. Some $5.4 billion of that money would go toward upgrading signals on sections of the A, N, Q, R, W, J, Z and Rockaway shuttle lines, which would make the room at DeKalb obsolete.
And once the lines have new signals, those long wait coming and going from the DeKalb station would also be a thing of the past.
Known by MTA workers as “the tower,” the subterranean signal room is one of dozens across the city that features a colorful “model board” that is reminiscent of a mid-century telephone operator terminal. MTA operators in office chairs face the board, pushing scores of buttons that represent signals along the five trains’ routes through Brooklyn.
Sandy Castillo, the MTA’s chief of subway signals, at the signal room at the DeKalb Avenue station.
Stephen Nessen
“This machine is from the late '50s, installed by General Railway Signaling, which no longer exists in that form anymore,” said Sandy Castillo, the MTA’s assistant chief of subway signals.
Essentially, the MTA workers are manually operating stoplights for subways. Whenever a train stops or starts in Brooklyn on those lines, it’s because an MTA operator in this room has pressed a button. If a B, D, N, Q or R train switches to an express route in Brooklyn, that’s because an operator in this room has pressed a button. And if a train needs to be held because of delays, an operator hits a button and activates a signal telling the train operator to put on the brakes.
“Each one of those buttons you see has to be pressed for the operators to route trains. And each one of those buttons has a wire that goes from here to the room next door and it picks up a mechanical relay,” Castillo said, pointing to thousands of wires.
The safety of hundreds of thousands of riders in Kings County is at the MTA operators’ fingertips. Unfortunately, the buttons they’re pushing are so old they regularly break. To make matters worse, the companies that manufactured the buttons are no longer in business. The MTA now makes them in-house.
“It is high-maintenance,” Castillo said. “These buttons are generally not manufactured anymore and our shop has to rebuild replacements. So that's one big impact also to the system – how quickly we can repair [buttons].”
Nearly half of the MTA’s trains still run on a signal system that hasn’t fundamentally changed since the creation of the subways.
At the tower, workers follow a train’s route on the model board by monitoring lights that glow each time a train passes a signal. Since several lines share the same track, the operators manually set routes by pushing a button that sends a message to a relay in the next room. That relay then sends a message to the tracks, which moves them into the correct position.
The relay room at the DeKalb station. Identifying information is written on tags on electrical cords.
Think of the process as similar to one in a model train set. When a train reaches a fork in the tracks, the train is sent to the left or right. The subway tracks, however, are controlled by a primitive computer system with fragile, old electro-magnetic parts in the relay room that are prone to break.
“Probably you get a failure of these every couple of months, system-wide,” Castillo said. “Because they do burn out. These are devices that are physically moving, so components break. They might get stuck, the coils might burn and that's an item that needs to be replaced.”
Only the 7 and L lines are fully modernized with electronic signals, which allow the MTA to run more trains per hour, closer together. The system, known as communications based train control, always knows the precise location of a train. Computers literally drive the trains. On those lines, train operators don't have their hand on a lever. They simply push a button over and over that tells the system they’re monitoring the tracks ahead.
Every other line in the subway system, meanwhile, is stuck in the last century.
The model board at DeKalb only shows trains that have passed a signal on the line. But there can be stretches of track as long as a half-mile without a signal, which presents an unsettling challenge: Tower operators have no way to know precisely where a train is located. When a problem arises, crews have to talk back and forth on radios to figure out where a train is located before they can fix the issue.
“ Inevitably, even if one train is just a few seconds off, it's going to cause a delay and that cascades throughout service across our whole system,” MTA construction chief Jamie Torres-Springer said.
Castillo has the unenviable task of troubleshooting problems in the signal room at the DeKalb station. When something goes wrong, he often looks through hundreds of moldering, brown, oversized papers hanging on hooks like a newspaper rack at a library. They feature a mess of triangles and squares showing how all the circuits and relays up and down the lines are connected.
In practical terms, that means when your train is stuck in a tunnel in Brooklyn due to signal trouble, there’s a decent chance someone like Castillo is hastily sifting through the old diagrams in the dingy room at the DeKalb Avenue station, figuring out how to resolve the latest problem with the ancient technology.
When electrical equipment breaks down at the signal room, Sandy Castillo, the MTA’s chief of subway signals, searches through diagrams of connections hanging on a wire rack.
Stephen Nessen
“This is my reference material,” Castillo said. He finds the right diagram, identifies the location of the electrical connection that failed and then heads to the relay room to repair or replace the equipment that’s broken down.
“This requires someone to go perform a physical activity in a room. And this room is here,” he said.
Modern signal systems don’t require the same “physical activity.” While the old system’s computer consists of thousands of wires stored on racks in the relay room, a modern signal system could fit in two small filing cabinets.
If the MTA gets its way, transit officials would be able to control the trains and signals running in Brooklyn from a central operation center in Midtown Manhattan.
“ I do think updating our signaling to [communications based train control] so you can run trains more frequently is really another very good thing,” NYU urban planning professor Eric Goldwyn said. “From a capacity point of view, you can really get more people in there if you can run the trains more frequently. And the thing with running service more frequently is that it attracts more riders because it's more useful.”
Chris Pangilinan, chief of operations planning at the MTA, said signal upgrades on the D, N, Q and R lines would boost service not only on those lines, but across the system.
“Any improvement here will cascade everywhere,” Pangilinan said.
NYC’s fragile subway system
This story is part of a series examining the state of New York City’s subways as the MTA lobbies for $65 billion in funding to upgrade the system. Gothamist interviewed riders, analyzed MTA data and gained access to infrastructure normally off limits to the public. Read our first story here. Read about the MTA’s aging electrical substations here.
- Trains going to and from the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn routinely pause for minutes due to a signal system dating back to the 1930s.
- MTA officials manage subway train movements in the area from a room at the DeKalb Avenue station.
- They use a “model board” from the 1950s to set trains’ routes.
- The buttons on the board frequently break and have to be manufactured by the MTA because the original manufacturers have long been out of business.
- Subway trains across the city are unable to run more efficiently because transit officials can’t know their exact locations.
- The MTA proposes spending $5.4 billion on upgrades to its signal system, which would speed up service on lines like the ones controlled in the room at DeKalb.
Tagged
State of Collapse
transportation
brooklyn
Stephen Nessen
Stephen Nessen covers transportation. Since 2008 he has reported on everything from Occupy Wall Street, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, Hurricane Sandy, to Trump’s campaign for president. His transportation reporting has taken him everywhere from the MTA’s secret Rail Control Center to the gleaming subways of Seoul. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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