More modern trains are hitting the city’s subway tracks, MTA officials announced Thursday.
Since March, just one train made up of the agency’s newest subway cars — called R211s — has operated on the A line. The MTA said a second new train has hit the tracks, making it easier for straphangers to take a ride in one of the modern cars.
And starting in August, the MTA said it will deploy at least two new modern trains into service each month.
In addition to a new train smell, the R211 cars feature wider doors, new digital displays — as well as features riders might not see, like security cameras and electronic signal equipment that helps speed up subway service.
The cars are most easily identifiable by their unique floors, which look like a blue and yellow composition book. The new trains also have some seats that flip up or down.
“So, faster, cleaner, safer is what we’ve said time and time again are our goals, at New York City Transit, and we’re delivering it with the new R211s, clearly,” Demetrius Crichlow, the senior vice president for subways at NYCT, said at a news conference in Brooklyn on Thursday.
Crichlow said the MTA hopes to roll out an “open gangway” train — one without doors between its cars — by the end of the year.
The MTA has since 2018 ordered 1,175 of the R211 cars to run on the subway and Staten Island Railway at a cost of $3.2 billion — or about $2.7 million per car.
The car order has been fraught with delays from Kawasaki, the company contracted to build the cars. MTA officials last year reported the delivery of the cars was running more than a year behind schedule.
“Kawasaki has made us a really competent car, a great car,” Crichlow said Thursday.
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