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| Pop-Pop? Why … (1499899) | |||
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Pop-Pop? Why … |
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Posted by JAFO on Sun Jan 13 22:09:21 2019 It was a fun xmas / new years with the gkids, who loved telling of their adventures and discoveries in the city since the summer while living there while their mom is doing her masters at Columbia. Especially exciting for the older 5 year old is any trip involving the noisy smelly subway, and they always were eager to tell of various subway trips, even though the younger brother was scared sometimes of the crowds.Smartie – the older one – has figured out that each line only runs under certain streets and stops at particular stations (unless its an express train that runs through some stations at high speed – that’s AWSOME!), but wondered why some stations like Times Square have trains stopping at different platforms, and you need to make long walks if you need to change trains – especially between lettered and numbered lines. I explained that all these lines were built many years ago by 2 different companies and the city, who competed against each other for passengers. The competition also made the companies’ trains incompatible with each other so they needed their own station platforms. Eventually the city took ownership of the other lines when the other companies went bankrupt. He thought that made some sense and wandered off A while later, I heard “Pop-Pop? Why …” which is always a fun way to start a brain teaser. Why didn’t the city fix the stations so any train stopping there could use the same platform? I explained that numbered trains were narrower than lettered trains, so a platform ‘just right’ for a numbered train wouldn’t fit a larger lettered train. He thought about it, it made sense too, so he wandered off again. This got me wondering if there were any subway stations that were designed to allow different sized trains to share a platform, with the narrower trains using one side of the platform, and the wider trains using the other side. Thinking of cities that only have 2 sizes of cars, the first one that came to mind was the Market St subway in S.F. That has the BART and Muni trains running on separate levels, so you can transfer between the two by using the common mezzanine – just not across the platform. Which lead to my next thought. When the MTA is building future subway lines, will it be possible to build a station using a ‘common platform’ so that A-Div’n lines use one side of the platform, and B-Div’n trains use the other? Obviously not where lines cross over/under each other, but it might be possible where a new line runs parallel to an existing line on the same street for a few blocks. |
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