MTA To Train Enthusiasts: Sit Down!

The “Rail-fan Window” is slowly being phased out by the MTA:

Rachael Lambert, a 24-year-old office worker and part-time student from Howard Beach, Queens, took a practiced stance on Tuesday at the head of a J train that was clattering eastward across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Peering out the scratched window at the front of the train, she offered in her slight Midwestern twang a running commentary on the view.

“You see the green-yellow?” she said, pointing to a pair of signal lights beside the elevated tracks. “We’re going, but we’re being diverted to the middle track.”

A few minutes later, the train reached one of Ms. Lambert’s favorite spots, near the Myrtle Avenue station, where the M line veers northward across the J line, and in doing so crosses a spaghetti-like tangle of rails.

“It’s great in winter,” she said. “When they’re afraid the switches are going to freeze, there are little pilot lights on them, and they light them, and it looks like the tracks are on fire.”

But Ms. Lambert’s is a dying pastime. Over the last few decades, and with increasing speed, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been phasing out cars with publicly accessible windows in front, a feature that is often called the rail-fan window because of its appeal to subway buffs. In 2000, nearly half of all cars had such windows, according to Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit. This year, they appear in only about one-fifth of the fleet’s roughly 6,200 cars.

And over the next decade, rail-fan windows will probably disappear entirely. A new model of car that lacks the rail-fan window is currently being tested on the A and N lines; the city has ordered 660 of the cars, set to arrive in 2008, and has an option to buy an additional 900 or so.