Holiday Season NYC Part 2 - Retro Subway Ride

Last weekend featured two particular highlights: Seeing the New York City Ballet perform The Nutcracker and taking a ride on very old subway cars from our neighborhood station. It was easier to take photos of the subway experience, so I'll start there. But The Nutcracker was also great fun. I'll post on that separately.

For the past several years, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority does something quite special during the holiday season. For a handful of Sundays leading up the the new year, they break out 8 cars from their museum and put them back out on the tracks. This year, in commemoration of the first year of the 2nd Avenue Subway Line, which has a stop just a block from our place, the vintage holiday trains were running very nearby. The route starts on the Q line all the way up at 96th Street and then transitions to the F Line at our neighborhood stop (63rd and Lex) and continues down to 2nd Ave and Houston (that's HOUSE-ton for the non-New Yorkers).

We figured the train would make it to our stop from its origin around 11:10, so we got there a bit early. There was a nice guy getting ready to take pictures who told us exactly where the front of the train would be and warned that the front car gets a little bit packed so better to start a few cars back. We noticed right away that the platform was much busier than a typical Sunday morning. And a few people were even dressed up in vintage clothing to enhance the atmosphere.

The trains were decorated for the holidays, and the signage was even correct for the route (this was actually at the end of the line, so the train was heading back up to 96th at this point):

When we got on the train, we found a guy who was very confused. He asked if this was normal, saying it seemed like a pretty old train and that it was pretty full. I can imagine it would be a little odd having this train pull up to your station unexpected. I guess it would be the New York equivalent of Midnight in Paris, with an old train pulling up to indicate that you're traveling back to the 1930s.

They even have period advertisements posted in the trains.

And there are lots of differences between these old trains and the modern ones. Obviously they look a lot different, painted dark green compared to the sleek silver cars of today. And the seats were in some cases covered in cane rather than being hard plastic like they are these days. Some of the interiors were from the period in which the cars were put into service. Some represented updates from the 1960s. But nothing more recent than that. And most of the cars were built in the 1930s.

They worked pretty efficiently. There were more personnel on board to make sure everything was functioning properly. The emergency brakes are literally little cords that you could pull. The doors are much less forgiving if you don't make it through before they close. And there are no intercoms for announcements. But we got where we were going. In style.

I loved seeing the old signs and the old subway maps. And one other difference between modern cars and these old ones is that they let you go between these cars. That's a no-no on today's subway. So at every stop we worked our way back one more car until the end. This was a lot more fun than I expected, and I thought it would be cool. To have a chance to ride on these old cars was a unique experience that I'm glad we did not miss.