Riding back in time on the Nostalgia Train

Stop! Before you read any further, it is absolutely necessary that you look through your music collection and find a recording of Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Go ahead; I’ll wait.

Found it? Okay, now press “play.”

It’s a fitting song for a recap of Sunday afternoon’s adventure aboard the MTA’s Nostalgia Train. I met up with a few friends at noon at the Queens Plaza station to take advantage of this holiday treat. And just look how festive!

This was just the thing to get me out of bed on a dark, rainy Sunday: a fully operational subway train, made up of the R1-9 cars that ran in passenger service from the 1930s through the 70s, with authentic period details including vintage subway ads and classic maps.

Each December the MTA runs the Nostalgia Train several times each Sunday on the V line from Queens Plaza to the 2nd Ave station in Manhattan. Most of the train’s cars were constructed during the early 1930s, and as a result of the various degrees to which each car’s interior was modified during its life as an active passenger car, each retains the appearance of a different year or a different decade.

Just to put these cars into some context, here’s a quick but fascinating bit of subway history. Prior to 1940, there were not one but three subway systems in New York City: the Interborough Rapid Transit system (the IRT, which opened in 1904 on routes that are known today as the 1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, and 6 lines), Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (the BMT, which operated on the elevated subway lines in Brooklyn, such as today’s B, Q, and N trains), and the Independent Subway, or IND. The city opened the IND in the 1920s, and when no private operator could be found for the system, it became the first city-run subway. The IND operated on the Eighth Avenue line (today’s A, C, and E trains), the Sixth Avenue line (today’s F and V, which now share their Manhattan route with former BMT trains B and D), and various lines in the outer boroughs, including some of the underground trains in Brooklyn, the Queens Boulevard lines, and what is known today as the G train.

In 1940, the city took over the bankrupt IRT and BMT systems and began what is known to subway historians as the “unification” process of merging three subway divisions into one system. Although the original names of the three divisions are now mostly defunct (though still visible in pre-unification signs and mosaics in some stations), the differences between them are still very much a part of the subway as we know it today. These differences explain why cars on the 4, 5, and 6 trains seem smaller than cars on the lettered lines. They are smaller — the older IRT tunnels can not accommodate the wide, spacious trains that run on the former BMT and IND lines. And I have bad news for the tourist from Chicago who I once encountered in a station on Canal Street, grouching loudly about having to walk up and down staircases and around endless corners to transfer from the 6 to the N, and blaming it on New York’s obvious inferiority to Chicago. It may disappoint him to find out that the Canal Street station and others like it were not designed in a needlessly complicated manner by boneheaded New Yorkers, but were in fact unified after 1940, as some rather ingenious New Yorkers made the best of what they had to work with in creating free transfer points between previously unconnected stations and lines.

Now you know why the Times Square station is so awful. But getting back to the reason why I brought up this brief history lesson in the first place: the cars in the Nostalgia Train are all pre-unification IND cars. Until unification, each division of the subway operated its own cars of various types, but over time the fleet of IND cars, consisting of models beginning with the letter R, became the standard for the whole system. In fact, the newest car in the subway fleet, the R160, that sleek and shiny model now running on certain lines with its (frequently incorrect) electronic route display, is a descendant of the earliest IND cars.

The Nostalgia Train actually includes the very first car produced in the R1 line. Car 100, built in 1930, still has wicker seats, ceiling fans, incandescent lighting, and a dark, army-green color scheme that, perhaps more than anything else, evokes the year of its construction — a year when Italian immigrants still lived in Lower East Side tenements, gangsters rode on the running boards of cars, alcohol was illegal, jazz bands played at glamorous parties held in Midtown hotels in spite of the Depression, Coney Island was still a beloved destination for middle-class New Yorkers, and cars like this one (maybe even Car 100 itself) carried Billy Strayhorn on the A line up to Duke Ellington’s house in Harlem.

R1 cars like this one, all constructed in the first few years of the 1930s, were so reliable that many of them remained in service until around 1969. A few even lasted until the mid-1970s. As a matter of fact, because air conditioning on subway trains was considered a practical impossibility until the 1950s, and did not become a regular feature of trains throughout the system until the mid-70s, the ceiling fans and wide-open windows on the R1 cars continued to serve their purpose over four decades after their installation.

More views of Car 100 and its nearly identical counterpart, Car 381:

A few R1 and R4 cars received an upgrade from wicker seats to red leather. But the leather was equally prone to vandalism, and by the 1950s plastic and fiberglass had become the choice materials for seats. In some cars on the Nostalgia Train, the leather has remained intact.

(I think this is my favorite picture of the bunch, simply because the people in the picture make it look as though I stepped back with my digital camera into 1932. On the left, a Bowery tough; on the right, a weary bachelor in a fedora, making his way home.)

Another unique car on the train this year is Car 484, an R4 car constructed around 1932. (Despite a gap in the numbering, the R4 was the immediate successor in the IND division to the R1.) In 1946, Car 484 received updated lighting fixtures and an early, experimental version of that most unreliable of subway features: the PA system.

A few photos of Car 484:

Finally, there is Car 1575, originally built as an R7 car in 1937 or ’38. Car 1575 got into an accident in 1946 and reentered passenger service one year later, after having its body and its interior reconstructed into a prototype of the R10 train. The R10 remained in service until the 1980s and developed a reputation during that decade for being rundown and covered in graffiti, but in the 1940s, this type of car was innovative. As you can see from the photos, even the ceiling fans had received a more modern upgrade.

I’ve saved for last my photos of one of the best parts of the Nostalgia Train: the advertisements! Every car on the train is decked out with classic ads selling everything from insurance to kosher meats to cigarettes (with filters that allegedly stop all nicotine and tar from reaching your throat and lungs!). Based on the fact that several of the ads encourage buying war bonds for victory, or observing Meatless Mondays, it seems that most of them date from the World War II era, with a few older and more recent ones thrown in. (A handful of ads for formerly alcoholic beverages even make reference to their compliance with the Volstead Act.)  There was some uncertainty among my group of friends about whether the ads were replicas or genuine advertisements, and based on some water damage that I discovered on one or two of the ads, I think that at least some of them are the real deal. They do repeat throughout the train, however, so clearly most of them are replicas.

This public service announcement about teaching children to safely cross the street is…shocking by today’s advertising standards, to say the least.

But it’s nothing compared to the Power of the Hat! This ad was unanimously voted our favorite. 84 out of 100 women prefer men who wear hats — and this lucky hat-wearing gentleman has snagged three of those women! Three fawning women who just can’t take their eyes off of him the hat.

If you live in New York and you’re interested in catching the Nostalgia Train yourself, go here for the details on where and when to catch it. (If you happen to work near 42nd Street — or to not work during the morning and afternoon — you can also try to catch one of the vintage buses on the M42 crosstown route on weekdays.) Finally, I don’t profess to be an expert on subway history by any means (not yet, anyway!), so do visit the wonderful nycsubway.org for more fun facts about the subway divisions, early trains, and everything else you could possibly want to know.

You must take the “A” train

To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem…

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