THE STORY

The first underground subway system in the world went into service in London, England in 1863. Other early subway systems include those of Glasgow (1886), Budapest (1896), Boston (the first in the United States, 1898), Paris (1900), Berlin (1902), New York (1904), Madrid (1919), Tokyo (1927), Moscow (1935) and Chicago (1943). Toronto's subway, completed in 1954, was the first in Canada.

Some subways consist of only a single line, but most, such as the Mtropolitain in Paris, the New York Subway System, and the London Underground, are networks. By far the largest underground transportation system in the world is that of New York City, which includes 230 route miles of track and 465 stations. But development of the system did not occur quickly or easily.

As immigrants poured into New York in the early 1800s, the City grew so fast that street congestion soon became a major problem for pedestrians and drivers of horse-drawn wagons, omnibuses, and carriages. As a result, several mass-transit systems were proposed for New York City, with a subway suggested as early as 1864. However, it was an elevated railway that got the approval of both backers and politicians, and the first one, a cable-operated affair along Ninth Avenue, went into operation on February 14, 1870.

The cable frequently broke, disrupting service, so, on October 27, 1871, the line installed a steam locomotive to pull the cars. At the same time, a passing track was built in the center of the line, enabling trains to run in two directions. Running time over the entire route from Dey Street (near the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan) to 29th Street was 28 minutes. The success of this linemore than 5000 fares dailyconvinced a legion of skeptics that the "el" was the panacea for all of Manhattan's street-level traffic problems, and for the next 20 years the els spread like cucumber vines all over the City.

The disadvantages of the elevated railways were that they were noisy, smelly, dirty, and a detriment to the neighborhoods over which they rolled. An inventor, Frank J. Sprague, had a solution: electricity. Sprague had built an experimental electric car and won the attention of Jay Gould, the great New York railroad financier. Sprague persuaded Gould to take a ride in his experimental car. Anxious to show it off, Sprague enthusiastically yanked the controller to set the train in motion. But he pulled the controller too abruptly, and a fuse blew. The noise, which sounded like a bomb exploding, completely unnerved Gould, who instantly abandoned all interest in electric traction. Sprague was forced to look elsewhere for backing.

"Elsewhere" turned out to be Chicago, Illinois, Richmond, Indiana and St.Joseph, Missouri. Sprague's electrified, multiple-unit trains worked so well in these cities that in 1898 Brooklyn's steam-operated els began converting to electricity, and by 1903 all of New York's els were re-equipped with Sprague locomotives. More important, electric locomotives opened the possibility of building underground railways in Manhattan, an idea that had previously been dismissed because of the danger of smoke and steam in long underground runs.

Ground was broken in March 1900 for the first underground line in New York, a five-mile run from City Hall downtown up the East Side to Grand Central Terminal at 42nd Street. Rather than using the London and Glasgow method of boring an underground tunnel, New York's planners used the open-trench approach that had been employed successfully in Budapest. Using this approach, a huge, deep trench was cut; a roof was made of steel girders; and fill and paving were added above the roof. While this method was infinitely cheaper, easier, and faster than boring a tunnel, it was not popular with shopkeepers who wondered if the din and disruption would ever end. Eventually it did, and the first subway was put into service on October 27, 1904.

By this time, the promoters had vastly extended their plans, and the line, the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), extended from City Hall to 145th Street and Broadway in upper Manhattan. The length of the route was 13 1/2 miles, and the travel time was 26 minutes. Extensions and other lines were soon opened to meet increasing public demand for service. By 1912, a tunnel to Brooklyn was opened, and a few years later, one took trains under the Harlem River to the Bronx.

Meanwhile, the directors of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) Company, a holding company that owned several els in Brooklyn, were enviously watching the success of the IRT. To grab a piece of the subway pie, they proposed to the city an ambitious plan to build a new subway from lower Manhattan up Broadway to the Queensboro Bridge, connecting it with tunnels to both Brooklyn and Staten Island. The directors of the IRT and newly-formed Hudson-Manhattan Tubes Company weren't happy about this, particularly when the City announced a splitting of the routes in what became known as "the Dual (IRT-BRT) Contracts." The BRT (later the BMT) benefited the most, getting 87.8 route miles all over Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. The tunnel to Staten Island, incidentally, was never built.

The third big line to be built was the Independent Subway (IND), City-owned and operated right from the start. Although known for years as simply the Eighth Avenue Subway, that was a misnomer because the IND actually encompassed six basic routes: Washington Heights, Bronx-Grand Concourse, Coney Island, Queens-Manhattan, Sixth Avenue-Houston St., and Brooklyn-Queens crosstown. A seventh was added in 1939 to service the World's Fair at Flushing Meadow. Unlike the Victorian IRT with its mosaic-decorated stations or the BMT with its flamboyant rolling stock, the IND was a no-nonsense, modern line with bright, spacious stations, well-engineered cars, and speedy express runs.

In June 1940, New York City purchased the privately-owned Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit (BMT) and combined them with the City-built Independent Subway System (IND) under the jurisdiction of the New York Transit Authority (TA). Today more than 6100 cars, connected in trains of from 3 to 12 units, operate day and night over 27 routes and make nearly 6400 trips on an average weekday. The lines use 12 bridges and 11 underwater tunnels and carry approximately one billion passengers per year.

In 1978, the New York City Transit Authority (TA) became a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the nation's largest transportation system. MTA vehicles carry nearly two billion riders per year, 6.3 million on an average weekday, or 57% of the population in its operating area. This exceeds the combined ridership of the systems of Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphiathe second, third, and fourth largest people movers in the country. With nearly 8000 rail cars, the MTA has a train fleet larger than all of America's other rapid-transit and commuter railroads combined.

The New York TA is charged with the operation of the subway system and surface bus fleet. The subway system alone employs nearly 28,000 workers and operates its own police department. Although accidents, track fires, delays, and crime regularly make the nightly news, the TA steadfastly maintains that the subway is actually one of the fastest and safest ways to travel around the city.

Just ask Rebecca Morris. Hailing from Youngstown, Ohio, with degrees in library science and English literature, Rebecca is not the sort of a person you would expect to find in the record booksparticularly not for being the first woman to ride every inch of track from Brooklyn to the Bronx, from Queens to Manhattan, in one marathon odyssey. But, in the fall of 1973, she didon 67 trains in 26 hours and 36 minutes.

Herman Rinke was the first person to tour the entire system for a single 5-cent fare. In 1940, just days before the three lines were unified under TA control, he rode for 25 hours. Since that day, more than 70 other peoplerecorded in an unofficial file at the TA Public Relations Departmenthave ridden the entire system. The 1961 subway map notes that a Flushing youth rode all the routes for a single token in 25 hours and 36 minutes. On April Fool's Day of 1966, the MIT Rapid Transit Club used a computer to route their attempt but failed to beat the best time to date, 24 hours and 56 minutes, set by Geoffrey Arnold in 1963. But on August 3, 1967, James Law and six high school buddies rode the entire system in 22 hours, 11 minutes, a time still cited in the Guinness Book of World Records.

People are fanatic about many facets of the subway. Bob Leon takes pictures of every transit nook and cranny. Howard and Suzanne Samuelson run an antique store devoted exclusively to transit material. Don Howard is a walking encyclopedia of transit lore, as are Hugh Dunne and Stan Fischler. Most of them look nostalgically back on earlier daysdays of kerosene marker lanterns, days when people came to New York to ride the IRT, and days before graffiti.

In 1985, the TA set a goal of having 28% of the cars clean and graffiti-free. They succeeded, but just barely. Another goal for 1985 was to have working lights and loudspeakers, functioning climate control, accurate destination signs, and readable maps on 90% of the subway fleet. While these goalsparticularly with respect to mapswere not quite realized, the TA made notable strides in meeting most of them. In 1985, for example, 78 of the TA's 465 subway stations were repainted.

Of the subway fleet of 6125 cars, 760 have been in service since the 1940s. Although in the past, the TA had purchased 200 to 400 new cars per year, these purchases were severely curtailed during the City's fiscal crisis in the mid-seventies. However, a contract was recently negotiated to purchase 1375 new cars from Japan, with the older cars being phased out as the new Japanese-built R-62 cars are delivered. The first 260 cars were delivered under this contract in 1984, and they will continue to be delivered at the rate of roughly 250 per year through 1988.

When the subway first opened in 1904, the fare was a nickel, which was a relatively large amount at the turn of the century. However, the fare did not change for over 50 years, and by 1956 the 5-cent fare was a real bargain. In contrast, over the next 30 years the fare was raised eight times until it reached its current level of $1.

As the fare has increased, so has the number of people who try to beat it by putting slugs in the turnstiles. Indeed, as of the end of 1985, the TA was collecting more than 13,000 slugs per day, resulting in a financial loss of almost $3 million per year. In an attempt to thwart cheaters, the TA has changed the design of the token to one with a stainless-steel center that looks like a "bull's-eye," an apt name as they are targeted at slug users. In mid-1986, all 2600 turnstiles at 749 entry locations were changed to accept only the new token.

The next time you're in New York, ride the subway. There is no better or faster way to get aroundand after you master Subway Scavenger you'll really know how to do it.

