New subway gate rollout rigged with issues

Photo: AMNY

The NYC Subway's new fare gates- a pilot program which started being unveiled in December 2025 at a select couple of subway stations have recently been getting bad press after a 5 year old girls head got stuck in the fare gate at the Broadway-Lafeyette station. 

That wasn't the first time either that a situation similar to that happened with these new fare gates, as various kids had the gates closed on them, separating them from their caregivers and putting them in a potentially very scary situation for both the parent and child. 

Janno Lieber, in an interview conducted by PIX11 news, said that "the gates are being tested at select locations and that the officials are learning about them". He also said "the one thing I'm concerned about is making sure the parents know how to proceed safely through with a child", you got to have a child in front or close by to you; the system is designed to child, small person. What it’s not designed to do is if the child wanders behind, five feet behind you, then the doors close and that’s not great.”

The thing that bothers me about this whole situation is that it's 2026 and we are still having issues designing a fare gate, something that should be, in terms of the MTA's scale, relatively straightforward. While I understand it's not easy to test every little situation, like where a kid is a couple feet behind their parents, but in a world of modern technology, I can't imagine there isn't some sort of sensor they could implement that would be able to determine whether it's a young child behind their parents or person trying to get a free ride. 

I feel like this situation should represent a larger issue at the MTA- failing to perform adequate tests. The real problem lies in the timing for the gates; either you close them to early and it creates the potential for a situation where the gates would close on a child's face, but, if you keep them open for too long after the fare is paid, then it creates the potential for people to follow others behind and get a free ride. Similarly, I prefer the model of gates that isn't the tall one, as this will prevent the unlucky scenario where the gate would slam close right in your face-quite a good way to start your morning. However, this creates the potential for the more athletic crowd to simply turn into a hurdle and hop over it.

Photo: ABC7

 The fare gates are aimed to replace the current turnstyles at over 200 subway stations by 2029, in an attempt to crackdown on the cities fare evasion problem. Whether or not these new "fare gates" are going to make a difference is another question, one that can be debated given the fact that many say the MTA is making it "easier" for fare evasion by allowing people to potentially follow behind others through the gate. 

Whatever happened to DM30AC #503?

In a post earlier this week, I wrote about DM30AC #507, and while that was an interesting story, this is the more well known one and the LIRR got lucky with their already limited fleet for this to be the only of the DE/DM's to actually have been fully retired so far.

The LIRR's fleet have all stayed in service, and with the only other exception being #507 which as I wrote in Friday's post, got renumbered to #423 and is now a DE30AC, DM30AC #503 is the only of the LIRR's locomotives to be retired early. The story goes as told. On a normal October 22, 2003, Engine #503 was on a typical dual-mode run on train #658 (the old 4:19pm from Penn to Port Jeff) when the lead engine struck a hobo's shopping cart in Huntington. The cart left on the tracks caught the third rail and the metal engine shell causing a 750-volt short to ignite, igniting a fire underneath the engines, and as some railfans describe it "turned the cab into a thunderstorm." The engineer was able to get the train safely to the station and all passengers were evacuated before the FD came and put out the fire. 

The engine then sat in Morris Park for a while (um, actually 13 years), stripped of all useful parts, before the LIRR decided it was un-salvageable and then it was subsequently scrapped. It's unfortunate to see an engine that was only a couple months old meet it's end so quickly, and it's even more unfortunate that very few photos exist of this engine in it's original form. From what I know, it seams the engine is no longer in Morris Park, but if anyone knows for sure I'd love to know.

Taken in 2009.

#503 in 2011

503's cab after the incident.

Also taken in 2009.

In conclusion, #503's retirement from service brought the already struggling diesel fleet down one more locomotive, especially a much-needed dual-mode, thats literally the worst part of the disaster, however in the grand scheme of things, we've survived 22 years without it and I think we'll be able to survive another 10 more. I hope you enjoyed!

11th Anniversary of 12/1 Spuyten Duyvil Derailment

If you live in New York or even the United States, you probably remember the unfortunate incident that many people woke up to 11 years ago. On Sunday, December 1, 2013, Metro-North Hudson Line #8808, the 5:55am from Poughkeepsie that violently derailed just north of Spuyten Duyvil station. This train was a through-train that made all stops to Ossining, then Tarrytown, Harlem-125, and Grand Central Terminal.

              

Crazily, all seven cars and the locomotive of that maxi-bomb set derailed and some even came dangerously close to the water!

In the end, four passengers were killed and 60 were injured, making this the worst MNR incident in history.

From the beginning, the press hounded the scene. As usual, they weren't accurate one bit to the point where they said that there were cars in the water, but there's no shortage of breathtaking photos of the equipment sprawled across the right-of-way.

It's story time and let's start at the beginning. It all started at 5:55am when train 8808 left Poughkeepsie and made the traditional (i.e not Breakneck Ridge nor Manitou) for Croton-Harmon, then stopped at Ossining, and Tarrytown. After Tarrytown, the next scheduled stop was Harlem-125th St, except it never got there. The train was traveling south on The Hudson Line, on track 2, and as it approached the curve just north of Spuyten Duyvil, it toppled off the tracks and began barreling toward the Harlem River.

It's important to note that the curve has been there since the days of New York Central, and the tracks run along the river in most cases, so there are quite a few decent curves in fact some are much worse.

The speed limit in this section of track, CP 10, is 30 mph, but reports from the trains event recorders report the train was going 82 mph when it flicked off the tracks.

According to the NTSB, the throttle was set to idle six seconds before the locomotive derailed, and the train dumped (i.e "dumped the air" or began emergency braking) five seconds before the locomotive derailed.

So, I think it's relatively obvious what's involved with the physics. The train was going way above the speed limit, therefore, it derailed, like physics dictates.

So, why was the train going 82 mph? Well, we got to talk about the engineer, William Rockefeller, a 15-year old Metro-North veteran. So, he had recently begun doing morning shifts after doing afternoon shifts, a change he later told investigators he had made reluctantly. This required him to leave his home in Germantown, approx. 27 miles north of Poughkeepsie, at 3:30am for work! To make sure that he had adequate rest for his shift the following day, he had gone to bed at 8:30pm the following night. On the day of the crash, he had arrived at work on time, after which he bought a cup of coffee and a hard roll, he then filled out the paperwork and attended a standard safety briefing. The main conductor, Michael Hermann, who in his limited time working with Rockefeller praised his "very smooth" handling of the equipment. 

Now, like I had said earlier, everything went fine until about 1.5 miles north of Riverdale station, when Rockefeller should have begun to slow down for the curve, but he later said this: 

"I don't know how to explain it... it was sort of like I was dazed, you know, looking straight ahead, almost like mesmerized. And I don't know if anybody's ever experienced like driving a long period of time in a car and staring at the headlights in front of them, and you get almost like a hypnotic feeling of staring straight ahead ... I was just staring straight head" 

Rockefeller, largely unhurt, got out and began aiding passengers. Linda Smith, who had boarded in Beacon with her sister to go see a choral performance in Lincoln Center, was one of those 61 injured souls, as in the incident she had become trapped under seat cushions and unable to move.

The New York City Fire Department sent over 125 firefighters to the scene to assist in rescue

but EMS workers were delayed as they waited for the third rail to be de-energized. As a result of the incident, all service on The Hudson Line was suspended, but Amtrak trains picked up service by 3pm. All the cars were righted back onto the rail and were towed to Highbridge and Croton-Harmon yards for further inspection by the NTSB.

On Wednesday, December 4, limited service was restored on The Hudson Line, using combined trains in order to make this possible.

Here are some photos from the wreck from a variety of sources:

I think these photos really shed light on this disaster, and while I don't have the time to analyze it any further, you can definitely read up on it on Wikipedia.