This blog wouldn't be complete without a post about the Subway. The New York Subway is really the city's soul, without which it would collapse immediately. With 2058 miles of tracks, 734 stations, and more than 4 million travelers every day, it is the way to move about the city we can't do without. Everybody in New York takes the subway, rich and poor, white and black. Even the mayor takes the subway to work.
The New York Subway has some features that make it different to the rest. For instance, it is so big, that it has local lines and express lines. The express lines only stop in every fourth or fifth station, and they are great when you have a long trip. Obviously, the local lines and the express lines can't go on the same tracks, but they do share the stations. This is possible because each line has four tracks, two in each direction. This is the most important feature of the New York Subway, in each direction you have two tracks, the local track and the express track. You can see the green line (4,5 and 6) in the picture, which is a detail of the subway map, of the 5th Avenue area. Lines 4 and 5 are express, and line 6 is local. On 59th and on 42nd Street, they all stop, but on 23rd, 28th or 33rd, only the 6 train stops. The same way, in the orange line, the B is local while the D is express. The only way the express trains can pass the local ones is if they go in separate tracks.
As everybody knows, the New York Subway never closes, it runs 24/7. Again, this is possible because of the four tracks in each direction. In every subway in the world, the tracks need maintenance, and to be able to do it, the tracks have to be empty for some time (usually at night). That's why the Barcelona subway stops from 12 to 5. I had a student once who worked in the subway maintenance and he told me that they run up and down all night repairing tracks.
In New York, thanks to the double track in each direction, they can fix one track while the trains in that direction can still run on the other track. This is crucial to be able to keep the train running at all times. But then, at night, or on the weekend, the local or express lines can change at any time, or run on a different track than they normally do. You can be riding a local train and suddenly they announce that it's running late and it becomes express. So you see some people getting off, because it doesn't stop at their station, and some others quite happy because now they arrive faster. Or you can find the train running on a different track than usual, which can be quite confusing.
Every weekend there's a long list of changes, due to maintenance, and which you can see in the weekend changes website. The employees post the changes signs in each station, which you must read if you are taking the subway at night or on the weekend, because your train may have changed.
As you can see, this coming weekend (October 6th-8th), the C train doesn't run. In small print you can read that you must take the A instead, which is the express in the same track. But if you were expecting the A to be express, now it's local. And so on.
The New York Subway has its own jazz song, Take the A train, by Duke Ellington. It's said in it that the A is the fastest way to get to Harlem.
A ticket is $2. If you use a MetroCard the ticket goes down to $1.66. And there's daily, weekly and monthly passes. I am currently using a monthly pass, which is $76.
Anyway. The New York Subway is expensive, dirty and chaotic. But it also is fast and reliable.
