I did Canal Street Yesterday....quite loud on the 4/5/6 side..
I don't like that the express stop isn't under Broadway. It's actually under Canal between Centre and just past Lafayette, whereas the local R train stop is under Broadway between Walker and Howard. It confuses the heck out of tourists but my problem with it is it makes it a hassle to transfer and it's a hike to get out to Broadway & Canal
I rarely use the N/Q/R line , so when i got off the R train i was confused on where the N/Q trains were. I thought it was all one station , but the N/Q trains are a different station , also if your heading from the Downtown R Train and not paying attention you'll walk right onto the Uptown Express platform which is what happened there.Originally Posted by GordonGecko
The Video that started my love for the subway , ever since then I try to film the subway once a week...
It's the same station, but it is a completely different platform. The N/Q trains cross the Manhattan bridge and dive under canal. The turn at Broadway and ramp up to join the R line is too far up to platform at the R stop. The engineers should instead have made the Manhattan bridge tracks fork off under Walker and then below the Broadway tracks so that they could at least platform at the same place like the E train below the A at 50th street
What are the Center tracks on the R Train @ Canal street used for?
The center tracks run to, and terminate at, the lower level of the City Hall station. Since it's not in passenger service, that stretch of track is just used for train storage.
hmm fascinating, I never knew that and was also wondering about the express tracks. Where is access to that lower platform, I assume it's sealed off?
Surprisingly it's pretty obvious. Go to the City Hall station and look for a simple staircase down and you will see the second platform.
Fun fact: The platform was originally built to allow local trains to terminate at City Hall while express trains would continue to Brooklyn (as the IRT Lexington Ave subway is set up with the 6 train terminating at Brooklyn Bridge). While planning the BMT Broadway subway the city started building the Manhattan Bridge which would allow express trains to bypass downtown entirely so the plans were changed... but not really since most of the construction was already completed. The BMT built the second platform with no intention to use it for passenger service, rather it would act as storage.
Would have been nice knowing nothing operating on those tracks , I stood there for 15 mins waiting for something to come.
well you had to know, at the North end of the platform there's a giant wall on the express track
Well I didn't see any wall , I just saw that the tracks went straight up...
I tried my new camera at 2 stations on the Lex line...
If you do Brooklyn Bridge, make sure to stay on the southbound 6 so you can film the decommissioned city hall station
Inside the City's Ghost Subway System
Lines and Stations That Time Forgot
Tuesday, January 03, 2012 - 12:00 AM
WNYC
By Jim O'Grady : WNYC
The New York City subway system has 842 miles of track, making it the largest in North America. And there's even more to it than riders see: dozens of tunnels and platforms that were either abandoned or were built but never used. They form a kind of ghost system that reveals how the city's transit ambitions have been both realized and thwarted.
Historian Joe Cunningham knows as much as anyone about the subway and how it's evolved since it opened in 1904. He stood before a map of it on a wall in Penn Station and considered its extent. The system is vast, reaching like an octopus from Manhattan to almost every neighborhood outside Staten Island. Cunnningham said that's because its planners have always thought big.
"Oh yeah, it was a bold undertaking and little by little it just grew over a period of about 45 years," he said. He also pointed out the gaps in service: southeast Brooklyn, central and eastern Queens, straight up the middle of the Bronx.
Almost all of those neighborhoods were set to get their own subways. Most of those lines died on the drafting table, but some were begun and then abandoned when the city ran out of money or pursued other priorities.
"After World War II, prices had gone up substantially and it became obvious that it was not going to be possible to build all of the lines they would've like to have built," he explained.
Urban Explorers Head Underground
You can see their beginnings, if you go underground. That's where urban explorers like Moses Gates (left) likes to go. (Gates is working on a book, which is to be published by an imprint of Penguin Books and has the working title, "The Other Side of the Sign: About Urban Exploration Around the World.") He took me down to a tunnel under Nevins Street in Brooklyn, where a line was begun that would've run from Downtown Brooklyn in two directions: east into Bedford-Stuvesant and west under Flatbush Avenue in Fort Greene and then over the Manhattan Bridge to Canal Street.
It sits beneath tracks for the 4 and 5 trains run, which rumbled overhead as we stood on a fully tiled platform never opened to the public. To get there, we hopped down on some tracks that were closed for repairs and made our way to a tunnel begun for the abandoned line. Shadowed and cavernous, it was swampy in places and layered with grit in others. All of it sits beneath the city, unused.
Back above ground, Gates said the system is honeycombed with spots like this: stations, platforms and tunnels prepared for an expansive future that never came to be.
"There's these cool little remnants of foresight that didn't pan out," he said.
For example, a Brooklyn-bound branch of the F train was supposed to keep going under Houston Street, beneath the East River and across Central Brooklyn before turning down to Flatlands near Jamaica Bay. That area still doesn't have a subway.
A large station for that never-built line was constructed under South Williamsburg. Two summers ago, graffiti artists from around the world snuck in and covered its concrete walls with giant works of art.
"We built the subway into farmland on the assumption that people would live there and use them to get to work," Gates said, including tunnels and stations readied to accommodate future lines. "We built a humongous shell station on the G line, or right off the G line, because there was gonna to be two other lines and two new tunnels under the East River that were going to converge there."
One of them would've been that F train branch, another would've been an extension of the Eight Avenue line (A/C) that cut across Lower Manhattan and into Brooklyn.
"This goes on in the '20s and '30s," Gates said. "Then with the Depression in the '30s, the city runs out of money and none of this gets built."
As Gates described it, these unbuilt lines make up an impressive second system that sits invisibly on the actual subway map: lines that would've directly connected Forest Hills to JFK Airport, South Brooklyn to Staten Island and the Second Avenue Subway to Throgs Neck in the Bronx.
"Ever since, you've had all these cool nooks and crannies all around the subway system that were kind of foresight that never panned out," he said.
A Look at One Forgotten Station
The MTA doesn't want people exploring the abandoned or lost station stops. But for those that want a first hand glimpse, there is one option. MTA worker Dan Brucker gives tours of Grand Central Terminal that feature a visit to a secret station far below ground.
"That secret train station out there was built for one customer only," he boomed to a tour group late last year under the vaulted constellation of the terminal's main hall. "It was built for Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
He said Roosevelt's custom-built train would pull in and open its doors. A limousine with the president in it would be driven from inside the train, down a ramp and into an elevator next to the platform.
"He and his limousine and his staff would be lifted up and then backed out into the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria," he said, where the president would give a speech.
FDR's train car still sits on a stub of track beneath Grand Central, a peculiar piece of the city's lost transit system — like stations once opened and now closed.
Glimpses While Riding the Line
Take the 1, 2 or 3 train and you can see an abandoned station at West 91st Street. In the 1950s, the city increased the capacity of the system by lengthening the average train from eight to ten cars and expanding station platforms. More riders could move through a commute. But to increase the speed of the trains, more space was needed between stations along the old routes. The city shut down 16 stops.
The best known one in Brooklyn is at Myrtle Avenue on the Q line, which has been turned into a work of art called masstransitscope. In Manhattan, there are abandoned stations at Worth Street, East 18th Street and beneath City Hall.
Some of those lost stops hide in plain sight — graffiti-covered indentations lit by a few bare bulbs and glimpsed from a moving train. All you need is to know where to look.
Link
There is also this cool interactive map showing some of the unbuilt lines.
Staten Island to Brooklyn subway is about the stupidest proposal I've ever heard of. If you're going to go through that expense it has to go to Manhattan. There's already a bridge linking Brooklyn to SI, but nothing except a ferry to get to Manhattan which is where most people on SI want to go anyways
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