Happy Birthday, Train!

The A train — 75 years young today:

On Sept. 10, 1932, one minute after midnight, a 7-year-old boy named Billy Reilly dropped a nickel into a turnstile and boarded an A train at 42nd Street. It was a southbound express, and it was Billy’s first ride on an A.

It was the city’s first ride, too — 171,267 passengers rode it that September day in 1932, its first day of operation. The line, then called the Eighth Avenue subway, spanned only 12 miles and 28 stations, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom.

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Today, on the A line’s 75th birthday, transit officials will celebrate with a ceremony at the start of the line at the Inwood/207th Street station. A special train made up of six prewar cars is scheduled to provide service along the line’s original route to the Chambers Street stop in Lower Manhattan.

. . .

The A train’s first registered complaint was apparently made just minutes after it began running, when a man at the Chambers Street station became upset because he had put two nickels into a malfunctioning turnstile.

Since then, the line has gotten mixed reviews from passengers and the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. In the group’s latest report card, which ranks the city’s 22 main subway lines from best to worst, the A train was tied for 12th place. The group found, among other things, that the line arrives with below-average regularity.

The A line has been crippled by fires (the January 2005 blaze at the Chambers Street station, for instance) and has seen its share of tragic and bizarre occurrences.

The limbs and torso of a 19-year-old Brooklyn man were found in a blue plastic bag in a tunnel in 2005. Pigeons have been known to step aboard trains at the outdoor Far Rockaway stop and casually step off at the next station. In May 1993, a man posing as a subway motorman took an A train with hundreds of passengers for a three-and-a-half-hour ride. He made 85 stops, and arrived on time at the Ozone Park/Lefferts Boulevard station.

On Saturday afternoon, the line that carried Billy Reilly on its inaugural run — he moved to the front of the crowd at the 42nd Street station when a transportation commissioner learned he was born the day of the new subway’s groundbreaking, March 14, 1925 — carried Dr. Morrow, who sat reading and listening to a Tom Waits song on his iPod.

It carried Ernest Rivera, 28, an unemployed father of three from Brooklyn. It carried Gunther, a Manhattan couple’s white puppy. It carried a middle-aged woman with a tattoo on her chest, a man holding a surfboard and another man who had remembered to wear his A train T-shirt.