Ketchup-Versus-Relish Between-Inning Fun For Subway Enthusiasts

The New York Sun puts forward a theory that there is a pro-number bias within the MTA:

While the city’s lettered subway lines, with the exception of the L, are running old trains well past their expiration dates, the numbered routes have received many new train cars over the past few years. Now the lettered lines are receiving a high-tech fleet of cars and taking the lead in an ongoing rivalry between the two divisions for better service and more modern technology.

The split between the lettered and numbered subway lines predates the creation of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Two private companies, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, ran the two divisions as separate subways until 1940, when the city purchased both and merged them into one system. But the same trains cannot run on both line divisions because the company that owned the lettered lines dug tunnels wider than those on the numbered lines.

The varied history of the two divisions still shows itself today in the competition for capital from the MTA, which modernizes only one division at a time. After two decades of using trains that break down more often than those on the numbered lines, the lettered lines may finally be gaining the technological edge.

. . .

The numbered lines have historically been the first to receive technical upgrades from the MTA. While the numbered lines received new cars about five years ago, the C and the E lines are still equipped with trains that date back to 1964, a Transit Authority spokesman, Charles Seaton, said. A subway car is built to last about 35 years, but Mr. Seaton said the MTA’s maintenance procedures have extended their natural shelf lives.

“There have been lines that have been favored and lines that have gotten screwed and ignored,” a coauthor of “The Subway and the City: Celebrating a Century,” Stan Fischler, said. “A lot of it is political.”