Photo by EmperorOfNYC, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
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About MTA New York Transit Museum
Founded in 1976, the New York Transit Museum is dedicated to preserving and sharing the stories of New York’s mass transportation.
History
The museum occupies the decommissioned Court Street subway station in Downtown Brooklyn, built as a terminus for local trains on the IND Fulton Street Line and opened on April 9, 1936; the station never drew much traffic and was abandoned on June 1, 1946. Thirty years later, on July 4, 1976, the New York City Transit Exhibit opened in the disused station as part of the United States Bicentennial celebration, charging one subway token for admission. Planned to close that September 7, the exhibit proved so popular that it stayed open and became a permanent museum. In the mid-1990s the Metropolitan Transportation Authority assumed control from the New York City Transit Authority and broadened the museum's scope to the wider MTA region, taking in commuter rail — Metro-North, the Long Island Rail Road, the Staten Island Railway — along with the authority's roads, bridges, and tunnels. Today it operates as a self-supporting division of the MTA, and its Gallery Annex and Store at Grand Central Terminal, opened on September 14, 1993, hosts the museum's annual Holiday Train Show.
The Trains
On the platform level, two fully powered subway tracks hold historic subway and elevated cars from the city's predecessor systems — the BMT, IRT, and IND — and most of the fleet remains operable, running the museum's ticketed Nostalgia Train excursions out on the live system. Displays range from 1904 BRT gate cars and a 1915 BRT AB Standard to Lo-V 4902 of 1916, car No. 100 of 1931 — the first of the R1-9 fleet — a 1925 BMT D-type Triplex, and a 1992 Bombardier-built R110B; the oldest locomotive in the museum fleet is SBK steeplecab No. 5 of 1910. One platform carries hinged yellow gap-filler boards so the narrower IRT cars can be boarded safely, and the station also preserves its working signal-tower control room, which once monitored the IND Fulton Street and Crosstown lines, plus a turnstile collection spanning the subway's 1904 opening through 2003 — including the double-fare turnstiles built for the 1939 World's Fair. A sizable vintage bus fleet, among it No. 3100 of 1956, the first bus in any American transportation system to be air-conditioned, is stored at depots around the city and comes out for the museum's annual Bus Festival.
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