Transit workers explain their day-to-day.
Vital City asked four people who do tough jobs in the subway system to explain what they do every day. These are their brief personal stories.
Orasarie Howard, Power Cable Maintainer
America’s largest transit system has a huge underground infrastructure that includes hundreds of miles of electrified third rail, fiber-optic and communications cables, and signal systems that safely route trains from point to point.
My job takes me into the manholes and underground rooms where cables carry the information and energy that makes the system work.
This is one of the subway system’s grittiest jobs — tracing cable outages in manholes and tunnels so the state of good repair can be maintained. My responsibility is to see why and how cables fail and to replace them when they do, climbing down into manholes from street level or accessing rooms where cables connect in subway tunnels.
My coworkers and I also give system access to the many contractors who work for the Metropolitan Transit Authority while maintaining system security protocols.
My tools include testing devices like time-domain reflectometers, which are used to indicate failure points in cables.
Let’s say a cable isn’t transmitting enough data. That might be because of a fault in the cable, or a loose connection, or a bad splice. Maybe it’s corrosion due to weathering, years of being exposed to the elements in a manhole. Our job is to find out where the fault is — to track it down to the exact point of failure, whether in a tunnel or a manhole.
We use our instruments to measure where the fault is. We may have slack on the cable so we’re able to cut back the damaged piece and remake the splice. It could be a cable that runs for 500 or 1,000 feet between manholes and communications rooms carrying optical data or radio communications.
While I deal with communications, data and radio cables, other workers handle the third-rail power cables which take power from Con Edison at 32,000 volts and step it down to 600 volts.
-Orasarie Howard
Matthew McMillan, Car Inspector
I’ve worked for New York City Transit for 15 years — and I see lots of things the average rider would miss. That’s my job.
We have 6,500 subway cars running on 850 miles of track; that makes for a big challenge when it comes to maintaining the equipment in a state of good repair. Some of the older cars rely more on mechanical systems which must be repaired and reconditioned, while newer cars have more replaceable electronic components. As any subway rider can attest, they all have to stand up to a terrific amount of abuse and wear on a daily basis.
Every time I walk through a car, the first thing I’m looking at is how the doors open and close. Door issues are the biggest reason for trains being put out of service.
So I’m looking at the nose rubber, which is the black piece in between the doors. The width of the gap can make the difference between a train being placed out of service and regular operation.
Sometimes the source of the problem is high school kids sticking things in the door pockets. That forces the door to work harder, which puts wear on the micro switches that control door operations. When someone puts their foot in the door and stops it from closing, that’s forcing the door operator — which is like a long pole that the door hangs on — to bounce back and forth. That forces the microswitch to switch positions very quickly.
On the older trains, these produce more mechanical problems. On the newer ones, it creates more of an electronic malfunction, forcing the computer to overwork. At the shop where we overhaul and maintain the cars, we’ll open the panels which are over the doors. We’ll take a flashlight and look inside. If there’s anything obvious — like trash left in the door pocket, or a broken microswitch, or not enough oil on the door operator, we’ll fix it. If it’s a more complex issue, we’ll plug in a laptop and run diagnostic tests and see what the computer says.
Each car equipment shop has a door team, and most door teams are made up of three or four car inspectors. For a door problem, figuring out what the problem is can take 10 or 15 minutes.
We inspect each car every two months. We do overhaul work, which can include welding the HVAC system that provides air conditioning and heating, and making sure the trucks — the wheel assemblies of the cars — are functioning correctly. Just like on a car, brake pads need to be changed sometimes, and compressors may be leaking oil, which will cause the compressor to seize up. Then you won’t have air flowing through the car properly.
We also look at the current collectors — that’s also known as the contact shoe — which take electricity from the third rail to power the car. If it has a hole in it, or it’s worn down too thin, we have to change it out and put a brand new one on.
Every time a train is taken out of service, a train trouble report is generated. Our shops are running 24/7, so when a train is brought into the yard for servicing, we can get right on it. And then they send it right back out.
-Matthew McMillan
Alex Kochatau, Electronic Equipment Maintainer
I’ve been doing this job for New York City Transit for eight years now.
I ride my bicycle to work, and my shift starts with a hearty “Good evening, everyone!” as I enter the shop. (Yes, I work the night shift.) After changing my clothes, my colleagues and I head downstairs for our assignments. We often have some time to discuss the challenges from the previous night, troubleshooting complicated issues.
I usually work with my boss and some newbies as a video surveillance troubleshooting crew, but I also handle radio and video retrieval work orders quite often. We discuss our assignments with junior guys, covering whatever equipment and tools are necessary. It’s a great opportunity for the new generation of maintainers to learn by reading drawings, finding equipment and performing troubleshooting. It can be challenging at times, but people learn quickly.
Quite often, passengers ask us for directions as we work on the platform replacing faulty cameras or monitors. We’re happy to help, especially since my boss speaks fluent Mandarin and Cantonese, and I speak Russian and Spanish.
We never know what to expect when we arrive. Whenever someone says, “It’s going to be easy,” it turns out to be a wild night — but quite often it’s the other way around. Sometimes, it takes almost the entire night to troubleshoot an intermittent issue, only to find that a network connector has become loose over time.
Not only do passengers suffer from the heat, but electronics do too. Summer is a busy season for cameras, transmitters, power plant batteries and cabinet ACs. It’s not easy to spend a few hours troubleshooting our equipment in a burning-hot communications room, especially since many of them still don’t have AC and are much hotter than subway stations.
Our shop is responsible for some of the most quickly evolving advanced equipment in New York City Transit, and it’s often quite hard for management to keep up with finding spare parts, as they can become obsolete within just a few years. So we often need to find a way to mount a different model, sometimes even from another manufacturer, instead of the defective one. Quite often, my supervisor and I research together to find good substitutes for equipment we don’t have spares for.
Our maintainers are proud of this job because it’s very important for the safety of passengers and employees.
-Alex Kochatau
Jesse Argueta, Tower Operator
If you saw “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” you might think that train crews communicate only with the centralized Rail Control Center in Manhattan, but that’s not how it works. There’s another layer of responsibility, which is where tower operators like me come in.
I’m 34, and I’ve been doing this job for four years, mainly working in downtown Brooklyn at what’s called the Jay Street Tower. It controls the signals and switches for the A, C and F trains in that area. There aren’t a lot of us in this role — only about 300 out of a transit workforce of 41,000. But we have a critical part to play.
We’re the ones who set the switches that route the trains. We have intimate familiarity with every signal and switch in the areas we oversee. The signals give the trains permission to go in a particular direction. We monitor every train, along with the signals and switches that operate within our designated area of control. That can be upwards of 20 switches and 40 signals in areas where many lines converge.
We’re there to make sure trains are on schedule, and that if a change needs to happen, that we can route service to bypass a problem. We can see if there’s power on the tracks, and if anything — like a flood, or a person on tracks — has cut power.
We’re the main point of contact for train crews, because radio communications in the transit system are more reliable at short distances. Typically, if there’s a problem, the train crew contacts the local tower, and the tower passes the information on and sometimes can give them permission to proceed.
The biggest stress of the job? When trains are delayed, it’s trying to determine what’s going on. If a train stops and can’t move — often called “brakes in emergency” — we’re among those working hardest to resolve the situation.
Any of many signals or switches could be a failure point. You have to monitor each train’s timeliness, and if a train is late, you’re jotting down why that happened, documenting any unusual circumstances that crews tell you about.
From someone falling onto the tracks, to a shooting on a train or to a routine problem with a switch or signal, we handle it all.
- Jesse Argueta