The Potted History of the World

Welcome, welcome - a thousand welcomes - to the first of an infrequent series of posts about major historical events, major historical people, and major historical history stuff.

These won't be in chronological order because frankly, up until someone invented beer, history was boring as fuck. Instead I'll be choosing a random topic each time, as and when the mood takes me.

Chapter One - The New York Metro

Despite not being American, my grasp of that country's history is pretty impressive (even if I say so myself). So having visited the city several times recently to see Mrs RS, I decided to read up on the Metro - mainly to find out which century it was built in, as judging from most of the stations I went through I'd have estimated the 16th - and I was amazed by what I found.

The following is as true as I can make it.

*ahem*

Many years ago, like decades and stuff, America was divided between North and South. The South believed that everyone should drive pickups, whilst the North believed that everyone should drive pickups - except the poor, who should be provided with trains.

A vast and bloody war was fought, and for a long time it looked as though the South would win. Facing defeat (and the frequent bombings of its railroads), the North constructed a secret train system on the island of Manhattan. To avoid it being bombed, they placed it in a series of tunnels under the streets and this soon became known as the 'underground railroad' of the civil war.

To outwit its enemies and confuse would-be saboteurs, the operators of the underground railroad settled on an ingenious and fiendishly clever system. This is why some lines are named after numbers and some lines are named after letters. This is also why some lines are the same colour as other lines. See a yellow train? Ah, yes, - that's a N. Or a R. Or a Q. Or even a W. And a R doesn't run on a Sunday after 4pm, what are you buddy? Stoooooooopid?

It's not at all confusing.

Anyway, in the post-war years America was skint but was determined to expand the underground railroad. Digging tunnels was expensive, so the moment they dug under the East River and reached Long Island, they simply stopped putting roofs on the tunnels and left them as open culverts throughout the rest of the city. This cost-saving measure enabled the Metro owners to vastly expand the system in almost no time.

Sadly, as always, pedantry won out and the owners conceded that since the new tracks were not underground anymore, they couldn't call it the 'underground railroad.' In what was the first of its kind in the world, the Metro accepted corporate sponsorship from a sandwich company and changed its name to 'The New York Subway'.

*Fast forward a few years*

Everything was going swimmingly until the infamous New York Sanitation Workers strike of '73. With rubbish piling up in the streets, the forever resourceful inhabitants decided to combine two successful ideas into one - the landfill and the Subway - and simply threw their rubbish into the big hole in the ground that the trains ran through. In no time at all the tracks became nearly impassable.

This practice continues to this day, although New Yorkers prefer to refer to this act as 'recycling'. Here's a picture I took last time I was there:


The Subway operators needed a solution to get their trains through and a certain railway worker called Dwight T Gefluffenheim, inspired by the idea of 'recycling', came up with the remedy. This is why all New York Subway trains are fitted with Cow-catchers to this day. Here's another photo I took while I was there:


As New York got larger, so did the 'garbage' problem. The level was getting so high that the trains were carving their own tunnels through the rubbish. In 1989 one of the larger tunnels of this kind - the Brooklyn Used Nappy Central - collapsed, injuring several passengers. Eventually the Subway operators bowed to the inevitable and built all new lines on stilts, eg:


This is primarily because it's really hard to throw your rubbish up onto the track from street level.

And that's the true story of the New York Metro system - always innovative, always thinking and always going for that 'medieval dungeon' look.