Wrapped subway cars, the world’s best present. (Photos by NGC/ Hoff Productions)

Tonight at 8 p.m. the National Geographic channel will go behind the scenes of the subway car manufacturing process. The latest installment in the Ultimate Factories series, tonight’s show will follow the manufacturing process for one of the new R160 cars as it goes from France to Brazil to upstate New York before arriving in our subway system.

Neil Genzling, TV critic for The Times has already seen the show, and he praises it for the clips of the reefing process.

For regular users of the subway what’s likely to get the heart really racing comes near the end, when the program takes a brief detour to show what happens to retired subway cars. That’s when we see the gray monstrosities being deep-sixed 20 miles off the Maryland coast to create an artificial reef for marine life.

Watching those cars going under feels like revenge, or vindication, or something, for all those appointments missed because the R and the N — the Rarely and the Never — didn’t show up, or because an indecipherable intercom failed to convey that the E train was going to skip the next 20 stops, or insert your own subway nightmare here.

For those further interested in the companies that make the trains, Infrastructurist’s Yonah Freemark has published a series of posts about train manufacturing companies. He started with Alstom, moved on to Bomardier, then examined Talgo and looked at the Japanese newcomers. Good stuff.

After the jump, a four-minute video preview of tonight’s show. Read More→

In January 1968, the gleaming new R40 car made its New York City debut along the F line. These cars designed by Raymond Loewy became rail fan favorites. With their familiar front slants and large windows, the R40s provided straphangers with a clear view out the front or back of the trains. Today, though, the era of the R40s is over. Already, most of them have been replaced by R160s, and according to Rail Fan Window via a Subchat poster, the last R40 will roll off the line at around 8 p.m. tonight. The Transit Museum will receive a pair of cars, rumored to be 4280 and 4281, but for one final ride, catch it on the A.

Photo by Doug Grotjahn/NYCSubway.org.

In a tantalizing glimpse of what could be, New York City transit unrolled an 11-car train along the F line last week. With the F not set to receive communications-based train control for a few years, the Long Train is but one way to alleviate overcrowding along one of the most densely-populated subway lines, but don’t expect to see those trains on a regular basis anytime soon. It’s just too costly.

Pete Donohue reported on this train last week. He writes:

NYC Transit Wednesday added an 11th subway car to a regular 10-car train to test how it navigates the series of signals and stations along the F line. Transit managers – who see a potential to increase the number of riders ferried during peak rush hours – were scheduled to launch the “Long Train” test before midnight Wednesday night at the Church Ave. station in Brooklyn…

The test train wasn’t going to pick up passengers – and for good reason. In some stations, the train wasn’t expected to fit completely. Eleven-car express trains ran along the E and F lines for approximately seven years in the 1950s.

Along one stretch in Brooklyn, the last car was closed off because the stations platforms were 600 feet long while the trains were 660 feet in length.

Alas. It is not to be though. “We obviously neither have the capital nor operating funding to implement anything like this in the foreseeable future,” NYC Transit President Howard Roberts said to Donohue.

Meanwhile, SubChat is alive with buzz about this test. Some commentators called this something of an April Fools’ joke perpetrated by MTA officials. They knew this 11-car train wasn’t a viable option, but they test-ran it anyway.

Others noted that the BMT used to run 34 trains an hour over the F tracks and that Transit should look to increase line capacity that way. The MTA, however, maintains that the antiquated signal system cannot safely handle that many trains per hour anymore.

Overcrowding remains a real problem with the subway system. Commuters tell stories of letting multiple peak-hour trains go by before one with a modicum of room arrives. With service cuts on the horizon, it will only get worse.

New subway cars are popping up all over the place these days. While they’re similar to the cars that have been running down the IRT lines for a few years, the new R160 cars sure do carry a novelty factor.

First, some history: In 2002, the MTA signed a $2.3 billion deal with Kawasaki Heavy Industries of Japan and Alstom of France to build the new cars. The estimated target date for the roll-out of the first 660 cars of new rolling stock was mid-2006; the order had an option for another 400 cars.

In 2005, the project turned from gold into lead as disaster struck. The 10-car test train, on the way from Alstom’s factories in Brazil to New York City, were heavily damaged. The project was delayed for months due to shoddy construction work. Finally, in the fall, the MTA completed a test run of the cars on the N, Q and A lines, paving the way for the current roll-out of the new cars.

So how do these new cars rate? Well, as Chris pointed out yesterday, they certainly have that new train smell. The one I took in June had that faintly rubbery smell of nothingness that you certainly can’t find on an unairconditioned R42 car during rush hour. Even the crowded train I took on Monday had a faintly non-descript and not-unpleasant odor about it.

As for the amenities, well, let’s just say the kinks need some working out. Take a look at my less-than-ideal Blackberry camera pictures of the ride.

Here, we’ve got the nifty “next stop” banner. Unlike the moronic maps on the IRT’s R142 cars, half of which point the wrong way, the route maps on the R160s update as the train goes along. Or at least, they’re supposed to update as the train rolls along.

I got on a Brooklyn-bound N train making local stops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The map had the right set of stops but the order was completely off and backwards. For the entire ride, the train map kept telling me that the next stop was 86th St. followed by Ave. U. That’s useful if you’re at Coney Island and less so if you’re leaving Prince St. heading south. The pre-recorded station announcements were correct though.

I love this “future stops” function here. It allows the riders to relax knowing their stops are well into the future. It does help if they’re set properly though. This train wasn’t even programmed to display the local stops while running on the local tracks due to a service change.

Finally, after we left City Hall and started the slow crawl toward Cortlandt St., the train’s destination signs and pre-recording stop announcements told me that the next stop was Cortlandt St. Well, as I well know, Cortlandt St. is closed (and has remained closed well past the intended completion date for the renovations).

The conductor came on to correct the announcement, but as we rolled past Cortlandt St., the pre-recording voice again told us all we were stopping. Oops.

Anyway, I always love riding new rolling stock. What subway blogger wouldn’t? But even though these trains are supposedly through their testing periods, it seems to me that the kinks still need to be ironed out. Otherwise, the MTA may find itself with a bunch of very confused straphangers on their hands.