Author Archives: Oren

Rail Photo of the Month: March 2024

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M9 9010

Location: Grand Central Terminal, New York, NY
Operator of Vehicle: Long Island Railroad
Date of Photo: February 26, 2024

About a year ago and after about 60 years of planning and construction, the Long Island Railroad finally arrived at Grand Central Terminal on Manhattan’s east side.  Since 1910, the LIRR’s sole Manhattan terminal had been Penn Station on the west side but there had been a longstanding desire to make it convenient for LIRR passengers to reach the east side and avoid congestion at Penn Station.  The first proposal to bring the LIRR to Manhattan’s east side was formally made in 1963.  In 1968, the MTA proposed the construction of the 63rd Street Line, a two level tunnel under the East River and Roosevelt Island that would have subway trains running on its upper level and LIRR trains on its lower level.  Groundbreaking for the 63rd Street Line took place on November 24, 1969 and the upper level subway tunnels would open for service on October 29, 1989, initially as a stub line to 21st Street-Queensbridge before being connected to the Queens Boulevard Line at the end of 2001.  However, the LIRR tunnels remained unused and unconnected to any other tracks.

In the 1990s after a study showed that more LIRR riders worked closer to Grand Central than to Penn Station, the MTA began to make plans to make use of the lower level tunnel meant for LIRR trains.  Construction on the tunnels to the east (in Queens) and west (in Manhattan) of the initial tunnel, as well as the LIRR platforms at Grand Central itself, began in 2008.  On January 25, 2023, the new station, referred to officially as “Grand Central Madison”, opened for service.  For about a month, trains shuttled between Grand Central and the LIRR’s hub at Jamaica.  On February 27, “full service” at Grand Central Madison began.  In conjunction with the construction of a third track on the LIRR main line east of Jamaica, a significant increase in the number of trains that the LIRR could operate into Manhattan at peak periods was facilitated with this service change.

Grand Central Madison features eight tracks served by four platforms about 140 feet beneath street level.  The escalators that serve the station’s mezzanine are the longest in all of New York City.  One of the most remarkable things I found while exploring the station earlier this week is that despite this section of Grand Central being brand new, it was designed to feel as if it was a part of Grand Central “proper” with its curved roofs and using the same style of font and positioning for wayfinding as the older parts of Grand Central.  With the exception of the escalator that created the “transition” between the Metro-North section and LIRR section of the station which didn’t mesh nearly as well as the rest, the aesthetics really made for a unified station experience.  The artwork above each escalator from the concourse to the mezzanine featuring elements of the New York State seal was a nice touch as well.

Have you been to Grand Central Madison yet?

For more photos of the Long Island Railroad, please click here.  

Oren’s Reading List: First Stop Last Stop

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R160B 9093 at Coney Island, September 1, 2019

There is something alluring about the last stop on a train line.  Perhaps you take a train regularly and wonder what exactly is at a place such as Wonderland (end of the MBTA Blue Line) or Cockfosters (end of the London Piccadilly Line).  Since 2013, New York based artist and photographer Rita Nannini has been on a quest to photograph the first and last stations on each of New York’s 26 subway lines (she counts each of the three shuttles separately, the Z as its own line, and also included the Staten Island Railway).  It is interesting to see what she has selected for each station, since I myself have also been to each terminal station (as well as all the other intermediate stations along the way), and remarkable given the breadth of New York’s subway system the many different places you will be deposited should you ride a train to the end of its route.  One only has to take the A train to the Rockaways to understand.

You can see Rita Nannini’s work on her website.  

Oren’s Reading List is an occasional feature on The Travelogue in which I share articles that I’ve read that might also be of interest to the readers of this website.

Bus Photo of the Month: February 2024

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New Flyer XDE40 3303

Location: Broad Street at Fitzwater Street, Philadelphia, PA
Operator of Vehicle: Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA)
Date of Photo: July 8, 2021

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, better known as SEPTA, is coming up on a milestone anniversary this month.  The first organizational meeting for the agency that ultimately became SEPTA was held on February 18, 1964, exactly 60 years ago this month.  SEPTA was actually created by an act of the Pennsylvania legislature on August 17, 1963 and did not begin direct operation of any services until November 1, 1965, but the agency considers the February 18, 1964 date to be its anniversary for these purposes. 

That being said, there was public transit in Philadelphia prior to this date.  Trolleys began operating in the 1890s, the Market-Frankford Line began operating in 1907, trackless trolleys began operation in 1923, and the Broad Street Line first opened in 1928.  As was the case in other cities, these were all privately operated services initially, but as these companies encountered financial difficulties, governments stepped in to ensure that services continued for the public good.  

Since 2023, SEPTA is the only transit agency in the United States to operate all five major transit vehicle types:  commuter trains, rapid transit trains, light rail trolleys, trolleybuses (trackless trolleys), and buses.  This distinction was shared with Boston until 2023 when the MBTA’s remaining trolleybuses were withdrawn from service. 

For more photos of SEPTA, please click here.  

Rail Photo of the Month: February 2024

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IC3 DMU 7203

Location: Jerusalem-Malha Station, Jerusalem, Israel
Operator of Vehicle: Israel Railways
Date of Photo: May 18, 2012

Israel Railways, the only operator of the IC3 DMU trainsets outside of Scandinavia, retired the rolling stock type in the past month.  The IC3 was introduced to Israel in 1992.  At the time, it was the first new rolling stock purchased by Israel Railways in over 20 years and the trains quickly became popular with staff and passengers alike due to their spacious interior layout and other modern (for the time) features.  

The most notable feature on the exterior of these trains is the rubber diaphragm at the end of each three car set.  When two sets were coupled together, the entire cab would be folded back allowing for seamless movement between the individual trainsets.  This setup also meant that a train could be easily split or recoupled almost “on the fly” so to speak, for example, to separate to provide service to a branch line.  Each trainset consisted of three cars and up to five trainsets could be coupled together to create a 15 car train.  

In 1997, two Israel Railways trainsets were demoed by Amtrak in the United States and VIA Rail in Canada.  Called the “Flexliner” for North American marketing purposes, Amtrak trialed the train on the Hiawatha, Kansas City Mule, St. Louis Mule, San Diegan, and Cascades services, while VIA used it in the Windsor-Quebec corridor.  The trains were certainly a novelty and garnered some attention during their time in North America, but neither operator purchased them.

In Israel, the IC3 was the only rolling stock to operate on the old Jerusalem-Tel Aviv route, as this was the only equipment that had the power to go up the steep grades on this line (any other train would have had to be “doubleheaded” due to the gradients).  They were also mainstays on the Be’er Sheva-Dimona line and, since its 2019 opening, the Jezreel Valley line to Beit She’an.  However, their age combined with the closure of the old Jerusalem-Tel Aviv route during the Covid-19 pandemic means that Israel Railways can replace them with newer equipment, especially as the project to electrify the entire network proceeds.  

I rode them a number of times on the old Jerusalem-Tel Aviv line.  They certainly are unique trains and while the new high speed line between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv is a game changer for getting between the two cities, the retirement of the IC3 will make the Israel Railways fleet more homogenous and less diverse.  

Did you ever ride the IC3 in Israel?  What about Denmark, Sweden, or on its North American tour in 1997?  Post a comment either way!  You can still find the IC3 in revenue service in Scandinavia, and one Israel Railways set has already been preserved at the Israel Railways Museum in Haifa.  

For more photos of Israel Railways’ IC3 “Flexliner” DMUs, please click here.  And to learn more about these trains, you can read this article from Walla News (Hebrew only).  

Bus Photo of the Month: January 2024

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1956 GMC TDH-5106 Old Look 3100

Location: West 42nd Street & 9th Avenue, New York, NY
Operator of Vehicle: MTA New York City Transit
Date of Photo: December 12, 2012

In addition to running the vintage train during the holiday season as I wrote about yesterday, for some number of years, the MTA also ran vintage buses in service during the December holiday period.  Most years, the service was limited to Manhattan, but there were other years the buses ventured out into other parts of the city, including the other four boroughs.  I don’t believe the vintage buses have run since 2018.  It was often hard to catch one since even the slightest bit of precipitation would result in them being pulled off the road for safety reasons, plus they were subject to traffic delays and the like.  However, I did get to ride some of them in 2012.  

Would you want the MTA to try bringing back the vintage buses in a future year?

For more photos of MTA New York City Transit’s GMC Old Look Buses, please click here.  

Rail Photo of the Month: January 2024

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R1 100

Location: Broadway-Lafayette Station, New York, NY
Operator of Vehicle: MTA New York City Transit
Date of Photo: December 27, 2015

For the past five Saturdays, New York City Transit ran the “Arnine” vintage train during the winter holiday season for the first time since the pandemic.  This tradition began nearly 20 years ago, typically with the train operating each Saturday or Sunday from Thanksgiving through Christmas or New Years Day along the 6th Avenue Line and then to Queens Plaza via the 53rd Street Tunnel (most years) or to Harlem via Central Park West (other years).  However, no vintage train was operated in 2020.  In 2021, a series of events to mark the retirement of the R32s was held instead.  In 2022, the “Train of Many Colors” was used for the holiday train, running along the 7th Avenue-Broadway Line.

Some transit fans complain that the MTA just does the same thing each year and never changes up the route or equipment all that much.  I’ve always enjoyed getting to run into friends in the transit fan community on the vintage train in the years I have been able to ride it, and Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page and our son have enjoyed riding it as well.  My attitude is be thankful the MTA runs anything at all, since they could always opt to run nothing.

I didn’t make it to New York to ride this year, but did you ride the vintage train this year?  

For more photos of MTA New York City Transit’s “Arnine” cars, please click here.  

Looking Back at ’23, Looking Forward to ’24

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Siemens Desiro HC EMU at Jerusalem-Navon Station, Jerusalem, Israel, June 7, 2022

Devout fans of this website might have noticed no new content has been added for nearly 11 months.  I had expected to make headway on a photo backlog that includes most of the photos I took in 2022 and if you had asked me 12 months ago, I would have predicted that most if not all of those photos would be online by now.  Needless to say, that hasn’t happened yet.

After a 2022 that had enough travel for me to earn status with United Airlines for the first time, I’m not surprised that I traveled much less in 2023.  However, life was busy in other ways.  I had the opportunity to do the Five Boro Bike Tour in New York City in May, which was a wonderful way to experience the city very differently than how I experience it when traveling by subway or bus.  Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page and I bought a house about 4 miles from where we were previously living, so the home buying process followed by moving took up much of the late summer and fall.  

MPM-10 train at Lionel-Groulx Station, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 30, 2023

In terms of transit related highlights, I had the opportunity to tour the DC Streetcar Barn in April.  In May, I visited the new Potomac Yard Metrorail station on its opening day.  The biggest trip of the year brought me to Montreal for the first time in over 20 years.  I look forward to sharing the photos from that trip at some point, hopefully before the calendar turns to 2025.  In the fall, work travel brought me to Orlando for the first time in nearly 20 years.  A second work trip allowed me to ride Amtrak’s Empire Service from New York City to Albany during the peak fall foliage period, which was a pretty trip to say the least.  It was this level of “busy-ness” that led me to pausing the photos of the month for the past three months, there wasn’t even time for those posts!  Photos from some of these trips as well as many of my travels around the Washington, DC area aren’t even in the Uncaptioned & Unsorted Photos gallery yet, but I hope to get them there soon.

Alstom Citadis 305 in Athens, Greece, September 3, 2022

I tend to approach the photo queue in chronological order, so many photos from Israel as well as photos from a work trip to Greece that I took in 2022 are likely to appear online before the 2023 photos are captioned and sorted into their proper pages.  I hope the wait is ultimately worth it.

As of now, I’m not expecting 2024 to be a heavy travel year, but since when do prognostications in late December and early January turn out to be entirely accurate?  Perhaps it will give me the opportunity to catch up on the seemingly never empty photo queue.  I’m also giving thought to sharing some of the material that I would potentially share in Oren’s Reading List posts directly to Facebook instead of waiting to draft a post here.  Would that be considered to be an improvement?  Let me know by leaving a comment below.  And as always, thanks for dropping in and checking out my work.  I really appreciate it.

 

Happy Anniversary BART!

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Station: Civic Center
Today, September 11, marks the 51st anniversary of the opening of BART in the San Francisco Bay Area.  As of 2023, the system serves 50 stations along 131.4 miles (211.5 kilometers) of track.  Needless to say, this is significantly more than the 12 stations and 28 miles (45 kilometers) that were opened on this date in 1972.

To mark its 50th anniversary last year, BART posted a variety of material about the agency’s history on its website and also held multiple events last September and October to celebrate the occasion.  Missed out on the festivities?  You can read all about how BART celebrated its golden anniversary on their website!  Make sure to check out the many historical stories posted on the website, including one about how BART could have been built as a monorail and another explaining why BART does not use standard gauge.

Bus Photo of the Month: September 2023

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Gillig Phantom 5418

Location: River Road at Landy Lane, Bethesda, MD
Operator of Vehicle: Ride On Montgomery County Transit
Date of Photo: March 24, 2001

This weekend, Mrs. Oren’s Transit Page and I are celebrating our 6th wedding anniversary!  Mrs. OTP is very supportive of my hobby and this website, and this has been demonstrated in various ways over the course of our relationship.  One of the ways is that as a bit of a gag on our wedding website, I included instructions for how to get to our wedding venue by public transit.  We weren’t sure if anyone would actually attempt to do this, but it turns out several of our guests did in fact take a combination of Metrorail and Ride On to come celebrate us on our special day.  

To mark this occasion, I chose a photo of a bus operating on the route our guests were instructed to take to reach our venue.  Although it is technically a Metrobus route, it is operated by Ride On on weekends and most holidays.  Since our wedding took place on a Sunday, it seemed appropriate to share a photo of a Ride On bus serving the route.  

Have you ever used public transit to travel to a wedding?

For more photos of Ride On’s Gillig Phantoms, please click here.  

Rail Photo of the Month: September 2023

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A Car 1243

Location: West Oakland Station, Oakland, CA
Operator of Vehicle: BART
Date of Photo: January 11, 2006

Late last month, BART announced that its legacy fleet will no longer be used in regularly scheduled service as of September 11, 2023.  Incidentally, this is also the 51st anniversary of the opening of the first BART of segment between MacArthur and Fremont.  The legacy BART fleet consists of three car types, two of which currently remain in service.  The A and B cars were manufactured by Rohr (same company that manufactured the 1000 Series cars for WMATA) and remain in service.  The A cars are cab cars noted for their sleek slanted fronts, though this design created a number of operational constraints that led to some cars being converted into B cars, which do not have an operators cab and could only operate in the middle of trains (though they do have a hostler control for use in yards and other emergency situations).  BART rectified this by ordering what became known as the C cars from Alstom and Morrison-Knudsen.  These cars had operator cabs but could also be placed in the middle of a train consist.  Unlike the A and B cars, the C cars were never refurbished and all of them have been removed from service.  

In 2012, BART announced that it was procuring a “Fleet of the Future” to replace the legacy fleet.  The Fleet of the Future began revenue service in 2018.  As a result of the changed ridership patterns during the recovery from the pandemic, BART has determined it no longer needs the Legacy Fleet to maintain the schedule that takes effect today.  However, some Legacy Fleet cars remain available for use in the event of any rolling stock shortages or to provide excess capacity during special events.

Most of the legacy BART cars are being scrapped and recycled, but eight proposals for preserving the cars have been accepted by the agency.  You can read about those proposals here.  

For more photos of BART’s Legacy Fleet, please click here.