TRAIN SPOTTING

NEW EXHIBIT CAPTURES HOW SUBWAY CARS BECAME ARTIFICIAL REEFS

Retired New York City Subway cars repurposed as structure for reefs are the focus of a new exhibit.

Whether you realize it or not, if you regularly set waypoints between New Jersey and Georgia, then you’ve probably been cruising right over the history of the New York City Subway system.

An exhibit of photographs called “Sea Train” that recently opened at the New York Transit Museum’s Grand Central Gallery documents a project that the city’s transit authority undertook between August 2001 and April 2010. In a nutshell, the city gave a bunch of old Subway cars to a half-dozen states so the cars could be dropped into the Atlantic Ocean, all throughout the waters where boaters typically cruise.

More than 2,500 of the “Redbird” cars, which were built in the 1950s and early ’60s, and “Brightliner” cars, which made their debut on New York City Subway platforms in 1964, were stripped of valuable metals and degradable plastics, cleared of toxic grease and then loaded onto barges. Cranes then shoved the cars overboard, creating fantastic splashes along with an artificial reef system atop what had historically been areas of barren, sandy bottom.

And boy, did the idea work. In places like New Jersey’s Cape May Reef, dozens of the Brightliner cars—each measuring 60 feet long, 10 feet wide and 11 feet high, and weighing 18 tons—joined already- sunken Redbird cars, army tanks and other repurposed machines to form artificial habitats. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection did a study that showed each Subway car, after two years in the drink accumulating coral and other growth, had a mean number of 323 fish hanging around for food and shelter. Extrapolating across the 600 cars that were sunk