Thank you. I designed those cars. Well, parts of them. Mostly the stuff you get to see, but completely ignore, such as the heater runs. Wasted many years of my life in the shithole that is Hornell, NY.

I also did the driver cab layouts that you probably never get to see.

 

Wow, that's pretty cool.

Since you were in Hornell, I assume you were working with Alstom, yes?

I have to admit, the R160 is probably the nicest subway car I have ever ridden, in any city.


Well, you can see them if you're in the front of the lead car.

 

It was Morrison-Knudsen back then. Alstom took over just after I left.

Most of the work I did was on the refurbs for the old R-44 cars, but I had started the concept drawings for the new design before I got out. My name is on the vast majority of the drawings for the R-44 cars, because I was the checker for the later part of the project. The saying in the shop was, "hammer to fit, paint to match".

 

Haha! So you got to work on the best of the IND cars AND the worst.

 

R-44 were a nightmare. They are so named, because the car is for light rail and is 44 feet long. The original shell was built by the Budd company, who I believe is long gone.

The kicker was (and hence the saying above), that the cars varried in length by up to 1.5 feet. Made the interior design difficult, and puting in all the equipment a huge pain. Where some cars would fit the modules fine, others didn't have enough space between the purlines (ribs of the structure). Still others had the spacing so far apart that the mounting brackets had to be extended.

Starting from a clean sheet of paper is always much easier.

 

Sounds like a shitty deal to be in NYC... however, I have one quirk about the gay-ban.

It prohibits sports cars or cars that are 2 seated, right? But it is encouraging uglier, older, blan, and cheap cars, right?

I get the carpool thing in high congested areas, but there are a ton of cars that fall under the "boring" list that are old, unreliable, and fall apart very easily; now they are coming out of hurricane, storm and flood damage. So wouldn't the break downs cause MORE congestion?