It looked like just another Sunday morning on the Q platform at 57th Street, until the foreign machine pulled in to the station. No gray steel, no familiar letters or numbers in colorful circles, no voice notifying passengers to stand clear of the closing doors.

As it rattled and whistled, folks on the platform gawked and stepped closer. They pulled out their cameras and camcorders to capture the strange sight: a vintage subway composed of three cars manufactured in 1938, all in the R1-9 series. Two of the cars were army green, the other gray with orange stripes.

Eventually half of a door slid open and about 150 passengers climbed aboard – and traveled back in time – on the New York Transit Museum’s first summer Nostalgia Ride. The destination, as the curtain at the front of the train heralded: Coney Island.

The next ride, on July 10, features the Lo-V model, riding to 242nd Street from Grand Central Terminal. The final nostalgia ride of the summer, on August 21, takes passengers to the Rockaways on R1-9 cars. The price is a bit steeper even than today’s subway fare – $30. Reservations can be made at 718-694-1867.

“It’s history. You read about all these things. This is a way to relive the past and contrast it with where we are today,” a passenger, Dave Johnson, said Sunday as he was about to board the train.

Much of the experience is the same: Passengers share seats, hold onto straps hanging from the car’s ceiling, and gaze at advertisements on the curved roof. Posted on the car walls are rules, service announcements, and, of course, maps.

Some of the key differences: The seats, which are made of wicker, and the cooling system, which consists of open windows, vents, and sturdy fans whirring on the cars’ ceilings.

The open windows prompted the conductor to issue a warning to passengers not to stick their heads out. The openness of the trains is thrilling to most riders for another reason entirely: It lets them experience the sound of the trains – so loud that a rider must yell to be heard – as well as the aroma.

“When the wheels get hot, there’s a certain smell,” a retired supervisor with the Metropolitan Transit Authority, Michael Hanna, said.

Enthusiasts relish the sounds. A 19-year-old from East New York, Daniel Alberty,even records them. On this trip, he placed the microphone outside the window by his seat before the train rolled out of the station.

“I put them on CDs,” Mr. Alberty said. Other recordings he’s made were on a trip on the old V on March 19 and 20, and on the farewell to the R22 trip on May 1.

Why does he like trains so much?

“I was born and raised with them. I remember my first train ride,” Mr. Alberty said. “It was 1989, on the J. I was 3 or 4, riding with my dad. We were on R27s and R30s that were all graffiti-ed up – some of the last like that,” he said.

His enthusiasm extends to collecting old subway and bus maps.

As for nostalgia rides, he’s found they’re not the best idea for a date.

“I tried bringing girls along but they wouldn’t go for it,” the teenager said.

He does, however, have grand ideas about bringing back the old trains.

“I’d like to see a whole nostalgic fleet,” Mr. Alberty said.

If Daniel Alberty is too young to have ridden on these trains when they were in service, through the 1970s, many other riders had authentic nostalgia.

“This brings back memories,” the train’s conductor, John Lockley, said.

One of the New York Transit Museum’s historians, Clyde Pritchett, lovingly referred to the trains as his contemporaries.

Mr. Pritchett, of Fresh Meadows, Queens, got to know the trains as a resident systems engineer for Honeywell. He pointed out the ingenuity of the whole system, from the number of doors in each car to the width of the turnstiles.

“Everything was designed with the goal of transporting 90,000 people an hour,” he said. “The doors were positioned so no passenger would be farther than six and a half feet from the door, for fast loading and unloading.”

He paused to listen to the hum of the train as it crossed over the Manhattan Bridge.

“This one has a trailer under it, you can hear that,” Mr. Pritchett said.

“It’s really a masterpiece,” he said. It is one of 1,702 R model cars manufactured between 1932 and 1946.

Mr. Hanna, the retired supervisor, gave some insight into how the cars stayed in such good shape.

“These cars used to be inspected every 1,600 miles, then every 3,000 miles, 5,000 miles … today, cars are inspected every 10,000 miles,” he said. “But when they were inspected every 1,600, everything was top-notch.”

Mr. Hanna is the man responsible for bringing old trains back to the tracks, working out of the Transit Authority shop on Coney Island. For the cars used Sunday, Mr. Hanna and 15 volunteers re-cemented the floors, cleaned and painted the walls, washed the seats, polished the brass, and removed, fixed, and reinstalled the fans and the car doors.

“Then we went underneath to work on the electrical equipment. The cars were dead – they weren’t taking power. So we had to liven them up,” he said.

Mr. Hanna started working on the New York subway system in 1950, shoveling coal in the boiler to power the subway. He recalled having to walk to the middle of the Manhattan Bridge, on rickety wood planks, to fix a subway that had stalled.

Some of the passengers on the nostalgia ride are working on building the subway of the future – people such as a Metropolitan Transportation Authority project manager, James Mattina, and a conductor, Jason Okrosy.

Did being on the old trains make them wonder about the new ones? “It was a different era, a different time.Today we have newer stuff and we love it, and it will keep getting better,” Mr. Mattina said.

Putting the experience into perspective was a passenger who came from Pittsburgh for the trip, Greg Olverson. An illustrator who boasted of riding subways in New York, Boston, and Paris, he has his own poetic way of describing the subways: “art on wheels.” When the Redbirds retired, he wrote a poem.

Mr. Olverson’s introduction to the New York City subways was 40 years ago, when his family came to New York to go to the 1965 World’s Fair. That’s why one of his favorite lines today is the no. 7 train, known as the international express.

His other favorite line is the A.

“I like the A because of the historical significance of it, especially the fact that Pittsburgh’s Billy Strayhorn wrote the music for it,” Mr. Olverson said, referring to the jazz classic “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

His affection for the A also has to do with where it goes.

“It takes you to Sugar Hill in Harlem and it’s also nice to go out to the Rockaways,” he said. “You get city life and being out on the ocean on one subway line.”