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| Re: The Bleecker Street/B'way Lafayette Transfer - Opened! (1178364) | |||
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Re: The Bleecker Street/B'way Lafayette Transfer - Opened! |
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Posted by italianstallion on Tue Sep 25 16:27:55 2012, in response to The Bleecker Street/B'way Lafayette Transfer - Opened!, posted by William A. Padron on Tue Sep 25 16:08:07 2012. Some interesting stuff at the "Great Asymmetry" link:Why was Bleecker Street the way it was? The answer doesn’t seem to be documented, but some of our New York City Transit employees have developed a number of theories. A Narrow, Curving Street Joseph Raskin, assistant director, NYCT Government and Community Relations Because Lafayette station is built on a curve along a fairly narrow street (Lafayette Street now; Elm Street back then), the configuration did not allow for the platforms to be built parallel to each other – the other lower Lexington local stations are like that, as is the Union Square express station. There wasn’t enough room to build it wider without acquiring a lot of property, which would have increased costs significantly. It’s probably the same reason why the Lex is built as a two level line between Grand Central and above the 96th Street Station. Lengthening the Platforms Glenn Lunden, senior director, NYCT Operations Planning The original IRT design of 1904 was based on local trains being shorter than express trains – local platforms were sized for 5-car trains, while express platforms were sized for 8-car trains. When the station opened, there was no significant offset – the two 5-car-long platforms roughly faced each other. However, the IRT quickly discovered that 5-car trains were too short for service, and at some point in the next few years, the local platforms were lengthened to 8 cars. In the 1950’s, they were lengthened again to 10 cars long; The Broadway-Lafayette (southbound)/Bleecker St- transfer came about as part of that lengthening project. It was when the platforms were lengthened for the first time the stations were offset. (In fact, the same sort of asymmetry occurred at three adjacent stations – from north to south, Astor Place, Bleecker St, and Spring St. In all three cases, the original IRT local station had 5-car platforms facing each other roughly symmetrically, but the platform extensions occurred asymmetrically, with the northbound platforms extended north and the southbound platforms extended south. Now, why would all three be asymmetrical in the same way? Moving further into the theory, the IRT extended all three in the same way to maintain even spacing between local stations and to make door operations on curves easiest in terms of conductors’ sightlines. Cost was probably a consideration as well, but looking at the station drawings and signal prints makes it pretty clear that engineering and operational issues must have come into play when the platforms were lengthened to 8 cars. Addendum Joseph Raskin, assistant director, NYCT Government and Community Relations This is also why in the 1950s, when stations were lengthened to 10 cars, several IRT stations were closed (Worth Street and 17th Street on the Lexington Avenue line and; 91st Street on Broadway-7th Avenue line). Had they been lengthened, they would have run right into other stations to the north or south. Now, about the money Tom Jablonski, deputy chief, strategic capital project planning, Capital Planning & Budget Division, New York City Transit I was in-charge of planning this project back in the early to mid-1990s. I found the old study drawings and updated these to show more detailed information which would allow us to get some good preliminary construction cost estimates. During these years when the Bleecker Transfer was being planned, I always wanted to learn what was the thinking behind the offset in the platform extensions so as to lose out on the tranfer connection oportunity in the uptown direction. Two things I learned. First, back in the late 1940s, the Board of Transportation (predecessor agency to NYCT) did not place any real priority on creating inter-divisional station transfer connections, except perhaps at the major station complexes like Times Square, 34th Street-Herald Square, Union Square, etc. The primary reason for this was the fact that there was very limited capital funding back then. Given that, I always suspected that the reason the offset occurred was to save some amount of capital money in building the platform extensions. But one day I ran into Robert Schumacher, who in the 1990s was somewhat of a transit advocate gadfly who I had met at various public meetings. I mentioned to him that I was doing some planning work on the transfer connection at Bleecker Street and was trying to figure out exactly why the Board of Transportation at the time didn't extend the station's uptown platform south instead of north. Schumacher said right away that he knew the answer! Early in his career, in the mid- to late 1950s, he had worked for a short while at NYCT as an assistant civil engineer. He said that he had wondered himself at the time about this odd configuration of platform extension work and went about asking why. He told me that he found out from the signal engineers who had actually worked on the design that it all came down to the number of “IJs” (insulated joints) that are part of the signal system's circuit design, a relatively inexpensive component when compared to building a platform. I clearly remember Mr Schumacher saying, “Can you believe that it was all just to save a little bit of money on IJs?” |
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