The brand new practice automotive, dubbed the R268, is predicted to look and performance very similar to New York Metropolis Transit’s most up-to-date acquisition, the R211, which at the moment is in service on the A, C, G and B strains. Each vehicles are manufactured by Kawasaki, and outfitted with methods that may talk with fashionable computerized alerts.
Each vehicles have been offered as replacements for the getting old R46 and R68 trains — the oldest rolling inventory on the subway system’s lettered strains.
“The plan is to restore the C fleet to uniform eight-car trains (at 484 feet long),” MTA spokesperson Laura Cala-Rauch confirmed in an announcement Friday. “Eight-car trains are, and will continue to be, sufficient to serve ridership on the line.”
The C line at the moment has an almost even break up between longer and shorter trains, with 10 600-foot, 10-car trains and 9 484-foot, eight-car trains made up of older R179 vehicles.
It was unclear if the MTA was planning on working trains extra continuously to offset the change in capability.
Lengthening the trains serving the C line was among the many enhancements promised to straphangers in 2017 as a part of the MTA’s Subway Motion Plan — a aim that was first achieved by changing eight-car trains of 60-foot R32 vehicles with eight-car trains of 75-foot R46s.
An eight-car practice of 75-foot vehicles is roughly the identical size as a 10-car practice of recent, 60-foot R211s — 600 toes
However subway ridership has been comparatively sluggish to bounce again following the COVID lockdown of 2020, and MTA knowledge indicated that ridership tendencies are altering, with much less emphasis on a rush-hour peak.
“If you’re going to reduce capacity, they should give people more seats,” mentioned Danny Pearlstein, spokesman for Riders Alliance.
The R211 — and, ostensibly, the R268 — forego seating on the ends of the automotive and use wider doorways to facilitate quicker boarding. Pearlstein waxed poetic concerning the “conversational” orange seating of the outgoing R46s and R68s.
“Obviously, New Yorkers love it and, increasingly, miss it,” he mentioned of the L-shaped seating association.
The C practice runs by a number of rising Brooklyn neighborhoods, a indisputable fact that was behind the 2017 push to elongate the trains.
“We may well need [more] capacity,” Pearlstein mentioned. “[But] if we don’t need the capacity that we needed in 2017, then we should get back the comfort.”
