MTA Hopes to Provide One Last Run of 1960s-era Subway Cars, Before They are Put on Display at NY Transit Museum

By Yehudit Garmaise

The final runs of four vintage subway cars from the 1960s, called R32s or “Brightliners,” that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) was planning to give final runs on four consecutive, starting last Sunday, Dec. 19., sadly might have to be called off after a vandal kicked in one of the cars’ seats, which of course, are not irreplaceable. 

“If at any time, for any reason the train crew deems it necessary to take the train out of service, they will do so immediately and all future retirement runs of the R32s will be canceled,” New York Transit Museum director Concetta Bencivenga wrote in an email last week, according to the NYDaily News.

After the Brightliners’ final trips, they are headed to the New York Transit Museum, which is located at 99 Schermerhorn St. in Brooklyn, where they will be put on display.

While the Brightliners were the first large fleet of mass-produced stainless-steel cars the MTA purchased, the sleek, modern, and stylish vintage cars are the last ones to feature front windows through which passengers can look. 

The MTA started to take the Brightliners out of service in 2002, and a few years later, the MTA introduced its New Technology Trains, which originally all included in every car, although many are now missing: three quite helpful, light-emitting diode (LED) screens that are supposed to display each train’s route and the next ten stations at which it will stop.

Instead of relegating the majority of the old subway cars to sit in landfills: most of the old train cars were sunk in the Atlantic Ocean to provide man-made supports for the thousands of species of ocean plants and sea animals, such as barnacles, corals, sponges, clams, bryozoans, and hydroids require hard surfaces to cling to and to complete their life cycles. 

In bodies of water that have few naturally occurring reefs, old man-made structures, such as shipwrecks, decommissioned military vehicles, oil rigs, sculptures, and even old subway cars can ease the pressure on naturally-occuring reefs and become places on which corals and other sea creatures can build new homes.

As the invertebrate sea creatures thrive, they send energy and life up the food chain and provide biological growth that creates additional habitats and provides more sustenance for snappers, groupers, mackerels, sharks, and other fish species. 

When cities donate old large, man-made objects to Artificial Reefs, otherwise unused objects can be used underwater to revitalize parts of oceans into hotbeds of wildlife that send life to the water’s surfaces.

Photo by: Flickr