Inside the Massive Repair Shops Where Subway Cars Go for a Makeover

The average New York City subway car travels roughly 53,000 miles per year across some of the oldest transit infrastructure in the world. Rumbling through a web of grungy tunnels and weather-beaten elevated tracks, the cars are subjected to overcrowding, underfunding, vandalism, garbage and routine wear and tear.

Sometimes it’s a marvel the system functions at all.

Breakdowns do occur, but the number might be a lot higher if not for a diverse legion of technical specialists who keep the moving parts doing just that — moving.

Every single wheel, motor, brake, axle, wire and door on every subway car gets completely refurbished every six to 12 years at the Coney Island Overhaul Shop in Brooklyn or its sister facility at 207th Street in Manhattan. The work is part of a scheduled maintenance program, introduced in 1989 and designed to prevent breakdowns before they occur.

The system works much like a scheduled tuneup on an automobile. Trains roll into the facilities, where they are disassembled, reconditioned to near-factory specifications, and then sent back out into a railroad that functions as New York’s vascular system, pumping more than a billion riders across 345 million miles each year, 24 hours a day, every day.

On a recent afternoon, at her individual workbench in the cavernous 207th Street facility, Gay Burdick, an electronic equipment maintainer, unfurled a crisp new roll of train signage. It is her job to ensure that the small motors that change the rolling fabric signs from A to Q and 1 to 6, for example, work to perfection.

“If it’s a clean sign,” she said with obvious pride, “I restored it.”

The subway has lately come in for criticism. There have been some notable failures in the system over the last several months, including a number of derailments owing to various causes — human error, faulty tracks, vandalism and perhaps, in one case, loose bolts. The entire system is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, but the overhaul teams proudly note the success of the scheduled maintenance.

Before the overhaul program was introduced, the average distance between failures of a car’s key elements was just 16,000 miles in the 1970s and less than 12,000 in the 1980s, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But after establishment of the program, it rose to almost 60,000 miles between failures in the 1990s. Now, with the system more or less humming — and the advent of more technologically advanced train fleets that were introduced this century — most cars travel more than 140,000 miles between failures.

“The magic,” said Julio Bernard, the superintendent of production planning at the Coney Island shop, “happens in the overhaul.”

New York City has some of the oldest subway cars in the world — some have been in service since the 1980s. Typically, a battered train will arrive at the shop bearing the scars and corrosion earned through thousands of hard miles across the busy, 119-year-old system. The exterior is smudged, the wheels brown, the components smeared with years of soot. But after a few weeks in one of the overhaul shops, it emerges as if off the factory floor.

This scale of this magnificent transformation from grime to gleam is what inspired the photographer Christopher Payne to spend hundreds of hours shuttling between Coney Island and Upper Manhattan since January 2020, to vividly capture the breadth of the work.

The Coney Island Complex, completed in 1929, is the largest rapid transit yard in North America. Spread over 75 industrial acres just north of Coney Island Creek, the facility includes 28 acres of buildings resembling an unusually clean, quiet factory.

There is the electric motor repair shop, the pneumatic shop for brakes and air-conditioning, the car repair shop and the wheel and axle shop. At any given time, the facility is handling between 40 and 45 cars.

Nearly 1,000 employees, most of them members of the Transport Workers Union Local 100, toil in concert in three daily round-the-clock shifts to overhaul as many as 1,100 cars per year.

A job on the repair crew is highly coveted; many employees have worked there for years, and they generally take immense pride in their success. John Simino, an air-brake mechanic, started at the Coney Island yard in 1982.

“It’s a very good place to work,” he said, while watching colleagues shim a part into place underneath an R160 class passenger car (known in the M.T.A. as a “revenue car”). “You meet a lot of good people.”

One of them is Keith Washington, a car inspector with 15 years’ service time. Every time he rides the subway, he is aware that he is partly responsible for things running smoothly: the motors whirring at a high speed, wheels spinning true, gear cases free of contaminated oil, doors that always open and close.

“I’ve worked on all parts of the train, done it all,” Mr. Washington said. “There’s times I will be on a train, you know, away from work, and look at something like the windows and think, ‘I probably replaced that one right there.’”

These days, Mr. Washington removes the heavy bolts that clamp down the motor mounts on the trucks, which are massive, 16,000-pound assemblies containing wheels, axles, motors and brakes.

They are self-contained locomotion units resembling gigantic rolling insects, each one capable of moving and braking at the train operator’s command. Every car has two sets of trucks, with four wheels each. The trucks make the train go. The car is simply along for the ride.

The wheels, each weighing 750 pounds, are inspected for cracks, dents and abnormal wear. If a wheel is deformed, another machine in the shop can grind it true. But for the scheduled 12-year maintenance, every wheel is exchanged for a shiny new one.

While the trucks are getting their makeover, each of the more than 6,000 passenger cars gets renovated, too. Doors, windows, signage, seats, floor tiles and HVAC are all overhauled. After the cars are placed back on top of the trucks, they roll onto rails astride a long trench about three feet deep, allowing mechanics access to the undercarriage of the fully assembled trains for final inspection.

Karen Guillory-Edwards is a car inspector. She has held myriad jobs in the subway system, including operator on both the N line and the Franklin Avenue Shuttle. She has also been a conductor, a work car operator and a dispatcher.

“I get bored doing the same thing over and over,” she said.

She has seen almost everything there is to see in the subway, including the tunnel dwellers who live underground.

“Some of the people down there have bedsheets that are cleaner than yours,” she marveled.

Ms. Guillory-Edwards has also been in the pit beneath one of the reassembled trains, a view very few humans ever see. The overhauled undercarriages are so free of dust and grime, they shine. Attached to one component underneath that car — out of sight to virtually everyone but the rats, once the train resumes service — there was a round, black-and-white sticker. It featured a smiling cartoon face resembling Thomas the Tank Engine, and it proudly bore the words “Coney Island Overhaul Pneumatic Shop.”

Christopher Payne is a photographer who specializes in architecture and American industry. His new book, “Made In America,” was published by Abrams in fall 2023.