New Yorkers' 98-year wait for train over as new £3.6bn subway launches

Long wait: The subway launched to the public on New Year's Day
AFP/Getty Images
Daniel Bates3 January 2017

You would have thought New Yorkers would be grateful for the Second Avenue Subway - after a 98-year wait and a bill for £3.6 billion.

But within minutes of its opening, passengers took to social media to moan about litter and delays caused by signal problems.

Among the first riders was Matt Flegenheimer, who tweeted: “First spin on the 2nd Ave subway. Announcement: train traffic in front of us. ‘It’s official,’ woman says, ‘now it’s a subway.’”

Another, Ted Berg, tweeted a picture of a fast food container left on a seat with a used spoon, plastic bag and tissue on the floor.

He wrote: “The 2nd Ave subway has been running for literally 23 minutes and people have already strewn garbage about.”

Not everyone was so negative. Raphel Sicinski drove more than nine hours from Virginia for the 10-minute ride.

He said: “I’ve always had a love and passion for trains, and this is something I could not miss.”

The state governor, Andrew Cuomo, held a party for dignitaries on the inaugural train, which ran on New Year’s Eve.

Asked about why it had taken so long and was so expensive, he joked: “Digging a tunnel down a crowded road in Manhattan is not that easy.”

The general public had to wait until noon on New Year’s Day when they streamed cheering into the new stations. The line is a huge achievement for New York and the first major expansion of the subway system in 50 years.

It will serve 200,000 riders daily from its three new stations at 72nd, 86th and 96th Streets, which are an extension of the Q line.

Construction started 10 years ago with a 120ft-long drilling machine that bored through 50ft of bedrock daily.

Because of the location, the stations were built unusually deep at about 100ft. The opening is the first of three proposed phases and is two miles long, meaning that at £1.8 billion a mile it is the world’s most expensive underground line.

Officials say it will save riders an average of 10 minutes each a day and relieve the crammed Lexington Avenue 4, 5 and 6 lines, the busiest in the United States.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to extend the Q further from East Harlem down to 57th Street. A third phase, the T line, will run from East Harlem down to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan.

But with no confirmed budget for either section and no timetable, it could take another 100 years.

The Second Avenue Subway was first proposed in 1919, the year America gave women the vote and the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending the First World War.

Further attempts in the late Twenties were killed off by the Great Depression.

Another effort failed in the Fifties and it was only in 1972, when Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York state and John Lindsay was mayor of the city, that the ground was finally broken.

At the time, Mr Lindsay said: “We know that whatever is said about this project in the years to come, certainly no one can say that the city acted rashly or without due deliberation.”

He didn’t know the half of it - several stations were built but due to budget concerns the project stalled. In 2007, construction finally began.

Many of those who worked on the project over the years have died. But Felice Shea, who helped plan the line in the Sixties, said she was happy it was completed.

Now 93, she said: “We were young. We thought it was going to happen. It took a little longer than we thought.”

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