An electric current is constantly running in a loop through each section. So you put signals along the track that tell drivers to slow down or stop when the track ahead of them is occupied.Īll track on the New York subway (and on most American rail) is broken into sections, here about 1,000 feet long. The basic idea is that you don’t want trains to run into each other. Habersham is using it to explain how they work. It basically is a toy, except that it’s hooked up to real signals. It looks like a toy next to the full-sized track. I’m watching Wynton Habersham, the vice president and chief officer of Service Delivery, play with a model train. I’m there one morning in early October, one stop on the road to answer what I thought would be a simple question: Why don’t we know where all the trains are? This is where the MTA teaches its staff to operate the subway’s switches and signals, which look like simple traffic lights but turn out to be key components of one of the earliest and most complex manmade information-processing systems in existence. There is a whole world down there: a warren of rooms and equipment, including a working section of track about 20 yards long, that comprise the subway system’s Signal School. But going inside is like stumbling into the Keebler tree. It looks like the door to a small office or break room. There is a locked door just below the southwest entrance to the 14th Street A/C/E station. How could it cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take nearly a decade just to figure out where they are and report that information to the public? Really: How?
Trains are huge objects that move in one dimension. But we live in a world with cars that can drive themselves. It is easy to take for granted that governments move slowly, particularly on large infrastructure projects, particularly when those projects involve software. (The A division already has them.) That would make them about nine years overdue. The best estimates today are that countdown clocks that tell you when the next train is coming will arrive on the so-called B division of the New York subway system in 2020. It’s hard to say what, exactly, but something important seems to have gone wrong when the tracking apparatus for subway cars is worse than it is for pizzas. This is both infuriating to riders who want to be able to plan their commutes-spend those extra ten minutes at home, or forego the subway altogether if there’s a long delay-and a symbol of a broader failure. Today, for the F train-along with the G, the A, B, C, D, E, J, M, N, Q, R, and Z-the best the system can say is that the train will get there when it gets there. The signal-tower operators don’t know there’s no one in the Rail Control Center who could tell you, because the F isn’t hooked up to the Rail Control Center. They wait for as long as it takes, for as long as their patience will allow, because in 2015 there is no app, no screen, not even a scratchy voice over a PA system that can tell them when the train is actually going to arrive.īut here’s the truly crazy thing: The only people who know exactly where that train is are on the train itself.
When you spot the F rolling down the bridge, you have just enough time to run inside to catch it. Carroll Street is one of the rare New York subway stations whose trains are boarded underground but where you can stand outside to see them coming. They are, as it turns out, waiting for the F train. But you look in the general direction they’re all looking and there’s nothing there. They stand still in ones and twos, clearly strangers to one another, mostly quiet, as though they’d stopped on their way to work to take note of some spectacular disaster in the sky. There are people who stand every morning outside the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn staring dead-eyed into the middle distance.
0 kommentar(er)
