NY Transit Museum

As should be completely obvious from the name of this site, I am in fact a geek. Specifically, I am a geek about about all things science and engineering. I visited the New York Transit Museum on my most recent trip to New York City, and I loved it. I can see how if you are not a geek or into mass transit, you might not enjoy it. The museum is housed, quite fittingly, in an abandoned subway station in Brooklyn.

The museum starts with exhibits on how the subway tunnels were built. It does a really good job of portraying the amazing work and hardships the workers endured and how they had to fight for the pay they deserved. We now have modern tools, tunnel boring machines, and much stricter safety standards. They for the most part had picks, wood, concrete, and brute strength. It has some exhibits of the tools used including surveying tools. I took surveying in college, so I went into geek mode when I saw the below exhibit. I used a transit in surveying, but it was a more modern one. [Modern surveying is done with a theodolite, but you have to learn the basics first with a chain, transit, and plumb.] Next to the transit in the photo is a linked chain. It is labeled as a surveying chain. Personally, I think they should label it more properly and specifically as Gunter’s chain, which by the way is 66 feet long, and the tool by which much of United States and other countries were originally surveyed. I had never actually seen a Gunter’s chain before, so I enjoyed seeing one. In surveying I learn to throw a chain and survey with a “modern” chain, which is a steel tape type chain.

It has exhibits on how the subways are powered, including information on electricity generation and transmission.

It has a history of mass transit in New York City, including the various forms of mass transit starting with horses. It also has exhibits on buses, and when I was there, it had a special exhibit on the past Miss Subways, which I had no idea had been a thing. They used to have a beauty pageant for everything I guess. As it is housed in an old subway station, on the old station platform, they have several old subway trains from the first models up to modern ones. You can walk through them, which is kind of neat.

Also within the subway platform is, what I think they called, a subway switching tower. It was the control area to watch and regulate where the trains were.

Finally upstairs, they have some exhibits that I am fairly sure you just have to be a geek to love. They have an exhibit of old turnstiles.

Perhaps my favorite, is an exhibit of various subway coin slugs that people have used to try to avoid paying the fare. Some were quite inventive. Some were just hilarious.

That was my visit to the New York Transit Museum. If you love mass transit, or you are a geek, go check it out when in New York.