Subway cars have a tough life. Moving people through a city efficiently underground every day and night takes a toll on the hardware. To keep things running efficiently, NYC rebuilds its cars every six years.
The enormous job of refurbing a subway car back to factory spec happens in one of two yards, either in Brooklyn or Manhattan. The cars are pulled off their 16,000 lb trucks, and treated to an overhaul of their “doors, windows, signage, seats, floor tiles and HVAC.” The trucks are inspected and wheels can be reground to true at the six year mark; they get all new wheels every 12.
Once everything is repaired, the shiny and like-new components are inspected and reassembled to go back out on the line. While it’s no small job, the overhaul shops can process over 1,000 cars in a year to keep things running smoothly. Before the overhaul program was introduced in the 1980s, NYC subway cars typically experienced failures every 16,000 miles, but between the scheduled maintenance and other advances that number has soared to an average failure rate every 140,000 miles.
For a somewhat less official use of underground spaces, how about this Parisian secret society? If you really want to bring the subway home, how about making an old subway seat into a chair? If you need something more light-hearted, you should really checkout this 90s subway safety video from LA.
Wow, 6 years seems a little soon to rebuilt subway cars.
The Washington DC Metro had its subway cars overhauled when they get 20 years old to give them another 20 years. They retire the railcars when they reach 40 years old.
Seems like while it would be possible to wait 20 years for stuff to break, then fix it, I’m happy that things like “doors, windows, signage, seats, HVAC…” are always in good working shape and subject to preventative maintenance instead of just repairing broken stuff. In my 10+ yrs in NYC i never saw a busted seat, sign, etc. And I’m also happy I was not stuck in a train car with a 19yr old AC system with a bajillion of my closest friends during rush hour on a hot summer day.
When were you living there? I remember NYC cars being both extremely beat-up and extremely well-maintained depending on the decade
2005-2017
Glad I didn’t get a subway car that hadn’t been in the shop since 1986.
NYC has many more miles of track and much more frequent service than the DC Metro. The time between rebuilds is determined by the number of miles traveled.
The maintenance interval depends on how hard equipment is used, and parts get renewed or replaced ideally before they break and they replace when a part won’t make the next interval, one bushing on a machine I worked on was good for about 1.5 seasons so we replaced annually so the machine did not go down in he middle of the season. I would expect some items would be replace based on appearance so the cars would not look run down. If I lived in NYC I would be over joyed that they have an aggressive maintenance program.