New York Transit Museum…

Yesterday morning Darce and I spent a geeky time at the New York Transit Museum in glitzy Brooklyn. 

The museum tells the story of how New York gained so many underground trains and overground trolleybuses over the past 140 years.

Fascinating stuff; from the mechanical, to the social, to the dynamite cool.

My favourite fact was, when the subway system was accessed with tokens, desperate people would jam the machines and suck the tokens out of slots with their mouths. In order to combat this, the MTA would spray the slots with chili powder. 

There were loads of original train carriages down at the platform level and we walked through each and every one. Lots of funny adverts decked the carriages. I especially laughed at the gloriously dated “Miss Subways” competition one. 

They had brilliant maps too showing disused “ghost” stations. It showed how competing transit companies fought to produce bigger and better carriages and get their trains to go faster than the competition. 

We learnt that white workers got paid more than black workers when blasting the original tunnels because the white workers were allowed to join a union so could fight for better wages and the black workers weren’t allowed to unionise. 

When there was a tragic accident at the end of the 1800s a newspaper listed the 11 poor souls that lost their lives as full name, full name, full name, and “8 Italians”. 

Naturally we looked at everything in the gift shop too. And bought most of it. Haha.