The Veins of the City

Last weekend, I went to the NYC Transit Museum. It showcases New York City’s transportation history with vintage subway cars, buses, artifacts, and interactive exhibits in an underground setting. It’s housed in a decommissioned subway station in Brooklyn.

As someone who takes the subway daily, it’s a marvel to hear the herculean effort it took to plan, burrow, build, and electrify this huge network. Some interesting things that stood out:

• It’s one of the world’s oldest systems at 121 years, opening in 1904, yet it still runs 24/7.

• Around 4M people ride the subway daily, hitting a billion trips since inception.

• Trains travel a combined 365+ million miles per year—far enough to reach the sun and back.

• Dynamite was essential in carving out early subway tunnels through Manhattan’s tough bedrock. Blasting happened so frequently that locals called it “the Manhattan thunder.”

• There’s a ton of underground streams; engineers had to redirect or drain before tunnels could be dug.

Still wild to me that NYC has not only a soaring skyline, but also a massive underground. Impressive engineering, to say the least.

A quote that I liked: Riding the subway is New York City in microcosm: everyone rides for the same price, regardless of age, ethnicity, religion (or any of the other things that make humans human), and can go anywhere the system goes.