First Five Cars Only, by soopahgrover
The New York City Subway opened a new South Ferry Station. Gordon Werner sent along photos of the last day of service on the old station, and the first day of service at the new one. The old South Ferry Station was sort of infamous for its short platform that only allowed the first five cars’ doors to open.
The $530 million station opened last week after a two month delay caused by an engineeing mistake that caused the gap between trains and the platforms to be up to four inches. Even after opening, the station had a couple of glitches: a water main broke and there were signal problems.
I’m hoping Link’s opening goes better…
Nice station. I really like the artwork.
Here’s the NYTimes article about the art from a few months back:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/arts/design/15ferr.html?fta=y
I don’t know about a water main break. However, our testing is showing at this time that there shouldn’t be any platform gaps. Signaling will be a question however.
I heard a while back that during drilling for the new station they came across a colonial-era sea wall buried underground. I hope they preserved at least some of it…
And it’s good to know that South Ferry finally has a full platform…the old one, while it had “character”, was severely limited in functionality.
how $530million for one station… sometimes we look at places like Salt Lake City and think we’re paying way more for our rail, but it looks like costs to build new parts of the subway in Manhattan are insane.
Well it isn’t really fair to compare Link to light rail systems built mostly at grade and either in the street or on low-cost ROW.
Link is much closer to a metro system with the extensive underground and elevated sections and corresponding stations.
If you want crazy costs look at the 2nd Ave subway. I believe it is coming out at something like $1 billion per mile. The ARC project (2 new trans-Hudson tunnels, new NJT Penn station) is $8.7 billion. The eastside access project (new LIRR Grand Central station, tunnels to 63rd st) is $6.3 billion. Building heavy rail in a built up area like NYC isn’t cheap. Though considering the ridership these services will see they are likely pretty cost effective.
I got off at South Ferry a week ago! And yeah, at the station before it, we had to run up a few cars to make sure we could get off there.
Yes, they did save a big chunk of the wall they found – you can read some of the archaeological details here:
http://www.mta.info/capconstr/sft/archaeology.htm