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Sunday, July 22, 2012

Newark City Subway Video from 1982

Newark City Subway in 1982 video.



     I came across this video from the "subchat " website.  While this video is not of the highest visual quality, it has great music and it shows the Newark City Subway operating with  second hand PCC cars.  I made my visit to the Newark City Subway a few years earlier. After streetcars stopped running in Brooklyn in 1956 and across the Queensborough bridge in 1957, and trolleybuses in Brooklyn on July 27, 1960, I thought no other place on earth has streetcars accept San Francisco and some places in Europe.  I was a very small kid then and when I went to my local Brooklyn Public Library, only one or two books covered rapid transit.  As I got older, I started to visit research libraries and then I discovered how wrong I was.  I could not believe in 1969 that a Newark City Subway existed and that it was a PATH train away in New Jersey!  And it was operated with PCC cars similar to ones that used to run on Church Avenue.  Even people that were interested in rapid transit in New York City did not know about the Newark City Subway.  As an aside, watching TV as a young child in the 1950's and 1960's, I never came across (this is not a scientific sample)  a trolley story or picture, except for the famous cable cars of San Francisco.  "Dragnet" from the the 1950's did show, during the opening scene, Los Angeles City Hall framed through trolley wires.  It seems that during the 1950's and 1960's, rapid transit and trolleys did not exist in popular culture and perhaps they were considered soon to be extinct animals, at least on New York based TV.  So to my pleasant surprise, trolleys were a subway ride away and I visited the Newark City Subway.  The video below captures the feel of those years when I made my first visit.  Since that time, the Newark City Subway has been extended at the Franklin Avenue end and a short subway section was reopened and refurbished to serve on a new outside light rail section to the Broad Street Railroad Station.  New cars are used on the line, but I have been told, that they are not as exciting to ride as the old non air conditioned PCC cars.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v2tt4FLNIO8


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