And who has not thought: “What if someone else fell? Would I jump to the rescue?”

Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker and Navy veteran, faced both those questions in a flashing instant yesterday, and got his answers almost as quickly.

Mr. Autrey was waiting for the downtown local at 137th Street and Broadway in Manhattan around 12:45 p.m. He was taking his two daughters, Syshe, 4, and Shuqui, 6, home before work.

Nearby, a man collapsed, his body convulsing. Mr. Autrey and two women rushed to help, he said. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, managed to get up, but then stumbled to the platform edge and fell to the tracks, between the two rails.

The headlights of the No. 1 train appeared. “I had to make a split decision,” Mr. Autrey said.

So he made one, and leapt.

Mr. Autrey lay on Mr. Hollopeter, his heart pounding, pressing him down in a space roughly a foot deep. The train’s brakes screeched, but it could not stop in time.

“It’s really hard to describe what it’s like to plan something for so long, and then not only to achieve it, but to break the record by such a solid margin,” gushed Bill Amarosa, 28, after his team swept through the station at 4:37 p.m.

The group of friends managed to stop at all of the system’s 468 stations in a time of 24 hours, 54 minutes and 3 seconds — beating the mark set in 1989 by nearly an hour and a half.

In August, two students blazed through the length of the subway system in slightly more than 24 hours, but their feat was not counted by Guinness because they failed to stop at every station.

. . .

Their journey began just after 3:30 p.m. Thursday.

Along the way, the six men were sustained by energy bars, McDonald’s hamburgers delivered to them by devoted friends and the unwavering support of MTA workers and fellow straphangers.

But Joseph DeGaetano and Robert Sibrizzi say putting up thousands of Christmas lights on their neighboring Bayside homes — and scores of other decorations in the front and back yards, garages and driveways — is well worth the time and money.

“When you just see the little kids coming around and the smiles on their faces, it gives you a nice, warm feeling,” said Sibrizzi, who lives with his partner, DeGaetano in a house next door to DeGaetano’s parents.

Sibrizzi is epileptic, but the condition hardly dampens his holiday spirit.

The 42-year-old loved decorating his parents’ Bronx house when he was growing up, and continued the tradition when he moved to 205th St. in Bayside about a decade ago.

The bitter and sometimes bizarre labor dispute went to arbitration earlier this year, after the transit workers first voted to reject the post-strike settlement, then voted to approve it, only to have the transportation authority repudiate the deal altogether.

Seeking to restore some amity and peace between the feuding parties, the arbitration panel wrote that the best way to resolve the impasse was to award a contract that was as close to identical as possible to what the two sides agreed to last December, just days after the first transit strike since 1980.

The arbitration ruling came the same day that Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union and the man who led last December’s strike, was declared the winner in a hotly contested election, giving him a third three-year term. With some votes still uncounted, union officials said that Mr. Toussaint would win with slightly less than 50 percent of the vote. His failure to secure a majority indicated the level of dissatisfaction among union members over the strike and its muddled aftermath. He had faced a tough challenge from Barry Roberts, a union vice president, and three other opponents.

The three-person arbitration panel called for a raise averaging 3.5 percent a year for three years. It also called for the reimbursement of $130 million to some 20,000 transit workers who had paid too much into the pension fund. That last provision in the original deal drew strong criticism from Gov. George E. Pataki.

The arbitration ruling, like the original deal, will also require the transit workers to pay 1.5 percent of their wages as premiums for health insurance. That was the provision that most angered the union’s members, causing them to vote down the settlement at first. It also helped fuel broader opposition in the union to Mr. Toussaint.

“It’s like it used to be, only better. There’s no bloodshed,” said elated passenger Felix Novelli, who served on the Intrepid crew during World War II. “I’m 18 again. And I have my beautiful broad right here, my ship Intrepid.”

. . .

The trip began with considerable effort as the historic aircraft carrier-turned-museum inched haltingly away from its anchorage. Finally, it began moving at about 3 to 4 knots, its pier growing more and more distant.

“Move baby, move baby!” the crew and passengers yelled. Then, “We did it, we did it!”

“When she started to move, she got hung up. Several of the blades of the propeller dug in,” said tugboat Capt. Patrick Kinnier, who helped plan the mission and was a passenger on the Intrepid.