Departing Trains

When I was a child visiting New York City, the lights inside subway cars would sometimes flicker as the train crossed aging, uneven tracks. Once, the luminaires went dark for a few seconds. I closed my eyes. If the lights were still out when I opened them again, I told myself, using a ten-year-old’s logic, it would mean I could see the future. The setting that inspired this train of thought seemed to bear witness to hidden backstories accumulated over time. Leaning my head against the window and hearing a clang or thud, I’d think about all the unseen events happening within the murk of the tunnel walls. I still do. Crumbling infrastructure bespeaks tales of administrative neglect, but it also trembles with mystery. Train car lights flickering like a haunted house could signal either distressed electrical wiring or the presence of ghosts.

A few old remaining gremlins still lurking within the subway will soon be banished. A high-tech line of trains, designated R211 in the nomenclature of the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, began trials in March and promises modern standards of regulated efficiency. When the new trains pull into stations with their sleek, oversized, glazed front fasciae, they might appear to be the public transit equivalent of an old independent storefront being renovated into the polished gleam of a chain convenience store. Just as the interior of an urban 7-Eleven has wider aisles than those found in your local bodega, the R211s offer passengers more elbow room. The dimensions of entry and exit doors have been recalibrated (eight inches wider than in previous train cars). Inside the cars, a premium has been placed on passenger carrying capacity and flow dynamics, while less has been done to ameliorate the alienating effects of being packed into a metal can. The forward- and rear-facing “conversational” seat modules found in certain older cars are being retired in favor of bench seating and more standing room. Priority seats for riders with accessibility needs are worthy additions and correlate with the MTA’s recent lawsuit-induced move to make 95 percent of its subway stations fully accessible over the next thirty years. But travelers who belong on some continuum of access needs, or those simply hoping for a moment’s rest, will be out of luck during peak hours.

Local news coverage has tended to highlight one design feature in particular: the open gangways connecting individual R211 cars. Not only do these articulated junctions promise passengers greater internal freedom of movement, but they also obviate the danger to life and limb that one assumes when moving between older subway cars. Yet, of the 535 R211s in the MTA’s initial order, only twenty are of the open-ended type, minimizing their potential impact on the wider system. Similarly, the car layout seems optimized for shorter trips through more crowded areas of the city, i.e., for more users in Lower and Midtown Manhattan rather than less populated outer areas of the boroughs. It’s no surprise that in 2017 an early demonstration model was displayed at the 34th Street–Hudson Yards station (which opened that same year) and not in other parts of the city. Wayfinding cues will especially benefit tourists navigating the subway for the first time: green and red lights in the doorframes indicate when doors are about to open or close, prominent graphic arrows on the car floor beckon hesitant riders to step off the platform inside, and above-door displays cycle between station and line maps. Such signals attempt to literalize ineffable dynamics that organically occur in crowds; localized knowledge about, say, the familiar approach of your neighborhood station or how many seconds you can buy a friend by propping open a car door is imperfectly abstracted into blinking lights and pops of colors.

Prominent LCD screens set behind the train’s front windows display familiar color-coded and -lettered insignia denoting the species of train. These are a big improvement over more technically limited digital car displays pioneered in the 1990s, which were incapable of reproducing the simple but elegant design standards Massimo Vignelli developed for the MTA in the mid-1960s. Hurtling down a dark tunnel, an R211 might look to passengers waiting on the platform ahead like a giant iPhone on wheels. Meanwhile, the train’s LED headlights—slanted and scowling—echo of-the-moment trends in car design.

The navy-and-gold painted livery that the R211 adopts from the MTA’s branding palette feels, despite its prior spotty application, more classic: you might have seen similar colors on the tail of a jet smoothly transporting you across the ocean to Europe or on the uniform worn by the pilot flying it. Officially, the color combination is meant to reference the identity of the New York State government, and the recent adoption of a similar scheme by bus fleets finally brings the two branches of the city’s public transit under a common design language. But its conservative visual vocabulary might be too universal; variants on a similar essential blue-and-yellow concept happen to also be present on the seats and handrails of certain subway and commuter trains in Copenhagen and Tokyo. If you imagine that your subway car could hypothetically travel through a black hole and into a train station in those other parts of the world, at least one attribute of your commute would remain unchanged.

The current subway cars that the R211s are slated to replace aren’t without their admirers. These cars, coded by MTA as R44 and R46, will be remembered for their bright red, yellow, and orange plastic seats. (Remodeled R44s now only run on Staten Island. Two additional train car types with orange interiors, the R62 and R62A, will be replaced by a forthcoming R262 model that closely resembles the R211.) The punchy colors of those seats, paired with plastic wood trim outdated several times over, mark the outgoing trains as one of the more prominent physical artifacts of an idealized city: an appreciably crummier but ostensibly more authentic New York peopled by a mixture of loft-living artists and kooky small-time proprietors, whose seeming toleration for crime is totally alien from our own securitized present. Disrepair can have a kind of glamour. Whatever we call it—grime, grit—it’s what drew so many transplants and tourists to the city and onto its careening subways. Nowhere was grimier, or grittier, in those years than the subway. A psychological charge attached itself to the miles of platforms, walkways, and tunnels that unspooled underground, inspiring visions of a quasi-Piranesian shadow world. In a vague, wistful sense, retaining an abrasive dinosaur like the R46 keeps those visions alive.

At points in its history, the subway embodied an optimism for a collective future. In 1969, just four years after the MTA was formed as a public utility, Mayor John Lindsay gave a speech introducing the agency’s modern vision of the subway. Cars like the R44 were, he said, designed in the anticipation of new subway lines, down which they would travel at speeds of seventy miles per hour. (Today’s top speeds hover around fifty-five miles per hour, and the supposedly imminent lines only exist in incomplete form, half a century later.) Air-conditioning was a major innovation, but Lindsay also praised the model train’s “entirely new and colorful style of interior decoration,” suggesting that public design could keep pace with consumer trends and even take some risks along the way. After all, orange isn’t neutral. It jars, and it courts ugliness—just like New York. Perhaps for that reason, the plastic seats in the goofy colorway exert a hold on the public imagination as enduring as Grand Central’s starry, toothpaste-green ceiling or the 42nd Street library’s marble lions.

Vignelli’s 1972 subway map, as vivid and blocky as the interiors of the R44s and R46s, proved disorienting to riders. Its angular design abstracted away geographic features like rivers, redrawing the terrain of both city and subway as a semiotic system of colors, lines, and dots. To commuters and especially tourists, the map was a source of unease, precisely because it pointed to the inherent placelessness of the subway. But in proposing such a distinctive design, Vignelli aimed to reinforce a feeling of place down in the bowels of the metropolis. The fact was that the subway was a recent invention, having been cobbled together from rickety and often incompatible private rail lines. Vignelli and his collaborator Bob Noorda were tasked with devising a standards manual for the unified subway, meant to cut through the morass of existing signage across stations. The map, retired in 1979 but periodically revived by the MTA for low-stakes projects, was but one component of a larger system whose contours continue to change and grow. For a little while longer, today’s ten-year-olds can appreciate the experience of riding around in a little orange car “in” an orange line on a map.

The R211s will at least offer riders more signs of color than the clinical blue-and-white interiors of trains put in circulation in the early aughts. Bright yellow accents call out grab handles (left unpainted on the first public test train), door entrances, and accessibility symbols. The hue could be mistaken for a kind of bureaucratic brazenness, but only if one forgets the practical semiotic operations it’s meant to perform. If an armrest or a railing commands attention, it’s only because it has a built-in explanation for doing so. But though they strenuously announce their fealty to the contemporary, the R211’s interiors may yet grow more distinctive as the cars age and their digital accoutrements falter. As that process unfolds, our future subway could gradually come to feel like a unique place again.

In the meantime, subway cabins grow noticeably dimmer. The oldest R32 trains—the Brightliners, so named for the way sunlight gleamed on their stainless-steel shells—were retired in early 2022 after nearly sixty years of service. The Brightliners had large front- and rear-facing windows that offered passengers unobstructed views of the subway tracks. Train spotters across the city mourned their departure. Thanks to TikTok, interest in train design is at an all-time high; what was once the purview of mostly white, middle-aged railfans is now a diversifying subculture. As much as any official design offering, content created by a young generation of MTA enthusiasts is redrawing the edges of the map that exists in a rider’s imagination. Almost as soon as the test train was put into circulation, the “R211Location” subreddit appeared. Multiple YouTube videos of the train’s trial run racked up thousands of views from people yearning to see something fresh come out of the subway.

Whether we look inside the latest subway cars or outside their (shrinking) windows, we can’t avoid the obvious: New York is becoming less colorful by the day. Our visual horizons are narrowing along with our economic prospects, and the arrival of a shiny fleet of trains can only distract from underinvestment, spotty service, and other chronic problems that plague the MTA. Seen against the backdrop of a reliability crisis aggravated by the pandemic, not to mention recurring setbacks in the construction of new train lines, the R211s represent a high-tech distraction from the subway’s deeper woes. The trains look sleek, but there is nowhere new in the system for them to go. Even if we welcome the trains as a harbinger of much-needed system-wide improvements, we shouldn’t ignore the cultural loss they will effect. Once our aged subway trains go, some of the city’s treasured myths will go with them.