Weekend
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Q: When is the Cortlandt Street station set to reopen on the no. 1 train? It has been closed since September 11, 2001. Even the post office on Church Street has reopened.
A: When the work is finished at the World Trade Center site. The Cortlandt Street station is right in ground zero. Builders can’t do any work until plans for the Freedom Tower are complete and construction is under way. Right now, all they have is an empty box for where the station will be. We could be waiting another 10 years.
Q: When I take the no. 2 or 5 train into Brooklyn and get to Franklin Street, we always have to wait for the 3 train to cross in front, which makes sense. But then we keep waiting forever, long after the 3 is gone. Why does the red light take so long to come green?
A: Generally speaking, trains must wait for longer than you would expect for the track to clear in front of them. The yellow and green signal lights operate in 600-yard blocks, and a train cannot move forward unless the two signal blocks in front of it are clear.
Stations where the tracks divide, such as Franklin Street, have some particular issues.
One problem is shared tracks. At some switching stations, the express and the local each have their own set of tracks, which were created specifically to keep express trains moving through the station. But the switch at Franklin Street, along with others like the 145th Street A, B, C, and D station in Manhattan, is so old that the express and the local trains share a track. The subway schedulers know that there are more express than local trains, so people taking locals, like the nos. 2 or 3 at Franklin Street, must wait even longer. I doubt it’s any consolation to know the eternity you feel like you spend waiting on the train is all scheduled in.
Don’t expect the situation to change any time soon, either. New York City Transit told me the subject of old switches like yours comes up in all the meetings about the capital budget, but no money is ever allotted for fixes. Changing the switch would be expensive and take a long time, and the streets above would have to be ripped up.
