The MTA’s new $1.5 billion order of subway cars will mean shorter trains on the C line, the Daily News has learned.
The new train car, dubbed the R268, is expected to look and function much like New York City Transit’s most recent acquisition, the R211, which currently is in service on the A, C, G and B lines. Both cars are manufactured by Kawasaki, and equipped with systems that can communicate with modern computerized signals.
Both cars have been sold as replacements for the aging R46 and R68 trains — the oldest rolling stock on the subway system’s lettered lines.
But the MTA’s recent order of 378 R268 cars includes 11 eight-car trains that, the Daily News has learned, will be sent to the C line to replace the still-new, 10-car R211 sets that have been operating on the local line for less than two years.
“The plan is to restore the C fleet to uniform eight-car trains (at 484 feet long),” MTA spokesperson Laura Cala-Rauch confirmed in a statement Friday. “Eight-car trains are, and will continue to be, sufficient to serve ridership on the line.”
The C line currently has a nearly even split between longer and shorter trains, with 10 600-foot, 10-car trains and nine 484-foot, eight-car trains made up of older R179 cars.
It was unclear if the MTA was planning on running trains more frequently to offset the change in capacity.
Lengthening the trains serving the C line was among the improvements promised to straphangers in 2017 as part of the MTA’s Subway Action Plan — a goal that was first accomplished by replacing eight-car trains of 60-foot R32 cars with eight-car trains of 75-foot R46s.
An eight-car train of 75-foot cars is roughly the same length as a 10-car train of modern, 60-foot R211s — 600 feet
But subway ridership has been relatively slow to bounce back following the COVID lockdown of 2020, and MTA data indicated that ridership trends are changing, with less emphasis on a rush-hour peak.
“If you’re going to reduce capacity, they should give people more seats,” said Danny Pearlstein, spokesman for Riders Alliance.
The R211 — and, ostensibly, the R268 — forego seating at the ends of the car and use wider doors to facilitate faster boarding. Pearlstein waxed poetic about the “conversational” orange seating of the outgoing R46s and R68s.
“Obviously, New Yorkers love it and, increasingly, miss it,” he said of the L-shaped seating arrangement.
The C train runs through several growing Brooklyn neighborhoods, a fact that was behind the 2017 push to lengthen the trains.
“We may well need [more] capacity,” Pearlstein said. “[But] if we don’t need the capacity that we needed in 2017, then we should get back the comfort.”
