“It’s a natural thing.”ĭiane Vincent, a native Brooklynite who now lives in Queens, said she had grown accustomed to changes in the subway’s nomenclature. “It was the first train I ever took by myself.” Her companion, Chris Silver, shook his head. “It’s there when the N is not, and the N is never there,” Ms. “This is a party for them, but for people who actually need to commute, it is going to be a problem.”Įlsewhere on the train, Jessica Tun, 19, a student, looked crestfallen when informed about the imminent fate of the W. “Most of these kids haven’t even been around as long as the W,” she said. Alexander said she worried for New Yorkers dependent on the train. Reese strummed a few chords from Green Day, Ms. “The rare and the never,”Īs the revelers finished an obscenity-laden chant and Mr. Its replacement trains, the R and the N, do not impress her. Alexander, a stage manager who commutes most days from a theater at 59th Street, said she was sad to see the W go. Quietly observing this bacchanal was Renee Alexander, who stood in the far corner of the car and assumed the studied stare of a subway rider who finds herself inches away from chaos. When an N or Q train arrived on the other side of the The train’s caboose quickly morphed into a party car, as the young crowd stood on benches, drank beer and cheered upon entering every station on the route. (Novelty and boredom were the most cited reasons for showing up.) Much of the fuss arose from a traveling party organized by Bill Reese, 26, an editor at Playbill and a resident of Astoria who invited New Yorkers on Facebook to celebrate the end of a train he deemed “the bastardĭozens of mourners were on hand when the final southbound W eased out of the Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard station at 10:17 p.m. “I knew it was going to be a bit of a madhouse,” she said. Perhaps it was a joke, but given public attitudes toward the transportationĪuthority, it did not strike Ms. Guitars the hipster who screamed, “Murderer!” in her face as she made her way along the car during her last inspections. Carames, the conductor, took the troubles in stride: the twentysomethings who piled into the back car with piña coladas and acoustic The W’s valedictory journey took on the vibe of a New Orleans funeral. Inevitable, according to the transportation authority, or at least more confusion than usual.īut on Friday, hours before commuters had to face the consequences of the cuts, the city’s subway enthusiasts decided to send the doomed trains off in style. Dozens of bus routes will have vanished, and dozens more will be rerouted, truncated or otherwise intruded upon. The M train, instead of taking its usual path into Manhattan’s financial district, will curl northward up Avenue of the Americas and out to Forest Hills in On Monday morning, the W and V lines will be no more. The W was one of two subway lines (the other was the V) to be axed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which began major cuts to transit service this weekend to help close an $800 million financing gap. None of its stops were its own the line duplicated much of the older, more recognizable The W has operated since 2001 between Astoria, Queens, and points south, most recently to Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan. “It was perfect for what we needed out here.” “This is a real blue-collar train,” she said, as the final W pulled away for storage in the Queens yards. Carames commemorated her fourth anniversary as a conductor by presiding over the death of a subway line on which she had captained a train every weekday for a year. Family legend has it that her great-grandmother sold tokens.
Her mother still works at a station booth in Queens her father retiredĪs a car inspector after 35 years. The conductor of the last W train, which took its final voyage on Friday evening, was a second-generation subway worker named Helen Carames, 32.
Dozens of people boarded all along the line, some joining a party in the last car, singing songs and celebrating the last of the W line. Robert Stolarik for The New York Times After almost a decade in service the W train made its last trip from Astoria, Queens, to Kings Highway in Brooklyn.
0 kommentar(er)
