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Reviews
| A Century of Subways: Celebrating 100 Years of New York's Underground Railways. By Brian J. Cudahy. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2003. xii+388 pp., illus., tables, appens., notes, bibl., index. $30 hb (ISBN 0-8232-2292-6).
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Brian J. Cudahy, a Brooklyn-born historian of transportation, has previously published Under the Sidewalks of New York, Around Manhattan Island, and Cash, Tokens and Transfers. In this book, he surveys the subway systems of New York (1904), Boston (1897), and London (1863). He devotes chapters to each of these but also includes the broader history of subway systems, including those of Budapest and Glasgow (1896) and Berlin (1902). In addition to the history of the city's underground railways, he provides a chapter on New York's electrified railroads, which includes an account of the transition from steam and diesel to electric on the suburban and regional lines that came into the city from Westchester, Long Island, and Connecticut.
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Cudahy sprinkles his historical narrative with references to events in the wider world to give context. Moreover, he enlivens the text with anecdotes, such as the mayor of New York putting his top hat on the ground to turn over the first shovelful of dirt at the groundbreaking (p. 10) and renaming the Garrison New York Central station as Yonkers for filming Hello Dolly! (p. 206). One learns, among other things, that the N.Y. harbor cruise company was named Circle Line because a founder was stationed in England during World War II (p. 131, in the chapter on the history of London's Underground). Because of Boston's street rail to underground transitions, a horse and wagon were apprehended on the tracks of the Boylston Street Subway as late as 1917 (p. 100). The author's intimate acquaintance with the system is clear from his personal recollections. He tells of boarding a train from Grand Central to Greenwich during the 1940s and being so excited that he did not notice until the arrival that the end vestibule was really an open platform (p. 224).
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Cudahy describes at length the technical details of power systems, design and livery of locomotives and cars, and tracks (with 3rd rails, AC or DC, and under or over the rail shoes). He also devotes attention to manufacturers, financing, engineers, and entrepreneurs. The shift from private to public financing and ownership is a complex story, well told. He covers the contributions of August Belmont, J. P. Morgan, and Charles Tyson Yerkes on both sides of the Atlantic as well as the engineers Frank Sprague, William J. Wilgus, and William Barclay Parsons. However, politics, sociology, and the system's impact on real estate values and patterns of growth are not the author's passion. (For this information see Clifton Hood, 722 Miles, The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, Centennial Edition, Baltimore, Md., The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
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A Century of Subways is extensively footnoted and contains 37 pages of black and white photos, all devoted to rolling stock, with the exception of a portrait of August Belmont (p. 65) and Charles Tyson Yerkes (p. 173) and pictures of President Richard Nixon and Pat riding the BART in San Francisco, and a photograph of President William Clinton greeting passengers on the St. Louis Metrolink when it was new (p. 301). The photos have no dates, no page or figure numbers, and are not in chronological or geographical order. Page references are lacking in the text, too, making it difficult to relate text to pictures. In addition, the volume contains two maps: one of the Contract 1 and Contract 2 subway and el lines of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (p. 17) and the other, a traditional passenger map for the IRT with no date (p. 39)
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Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book is the data presented in the appendix and in tables scattered in the text. The appendix provides the Equipment Roster for the New York subways in their successive incarnations, plus the New York Central; the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad; the Pennsylvania Railroad; New Jersey Transit; the Long Island Rail Road; and Metro North. The appendix tables list car numbers, numbers of cars, name or designation, builder, and date (pp. 305–319).
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| Among the more interesting tables in the text are those that are comparative, including a table comparing rolling stock statistics for the IRT, the London Tube, and the London surface stock; a table comparing the number of subway lines and total subway mileage of Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, Montreal, Mexico City, and Santiago de Chile; a table comparing subway statistics for 24 European cities; and a table with subway statistics for 16 U.S. cities. |
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