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Start saying goodbye to the New York City subway’s iconic orange and yellow seating and two-person individual rows — and maybe, hopefully, to major delays and signal malfunctions.
A $10.9 billion plan to phase out R46 subway trains from the 1970s and R86 cars from the 1980s, known for their warm-colored seating, is tucked in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) 119-page 2025–2029 Capital Plan. Over a period of four years, the MTA will order 1,500 new subway cars to replace nearly 22% of New York City’s subway fleet, the report says.
While MTA approved and published these plans in September, some locals have only now sharpened their focus on the replacement of the beloved subway interiors as the news circulated online. Social media users mourned the loss, writing that sitting in the two-by-two benches with someone you love “is one of the top experiences New York has to offer” and posting scenes from Marriage Story (2019) and the TV series Girls (2012) showing the seats in the background.
Though initial reports said MTA would get rid of the cars entirely in 2025, an MTA spokesperson told Hyperallergic that the most recent order of 435 R211 trains won’t arrive until 2027. After that, the trains will undergo testing before they can run on the subway lines. These changes won’t happen suddenly in 2025, the spokesperson said, and only some orange-seated cars are being upgraded in this round.
These older trains break down six times more frequently than their newer counterparts and have reached the end of their “useful life.” Previous subway overhauls have occurred about every 40 years or so, according to the MTA.
In drastic opposition to their vintage counterparts, the new R211 trains have shiny blue seating, cool lighting, and blue floors. Some of the new trains will have open “gangways” for passengers to easily pass from car to car. This specific new model of the train is only configured to run on lettered subway lines, including the B, D, N, and W routes, the MTA representative said.
“One of the things that is interesting about the orange and yellow seating is that it was a departure for our system,” Jodi Shapiro, the curator of the New York Transit Museum, told Hyperallergic. “Most of the post-war seat and interior colors tended to the cool end of the spectrum.”
According to the museum’s wall text for a 1975 advertisement for R-46 trains, the advent of new subway cars has always caused a buzz among New Yorkers. The vibrant blue poster reads, “We hope you’ll be proud,” and describes the new cars as “the finest in the world.”
Shapiro said the shift to warmer tones for the interior of subway cars reflected changes in society during the 1960s and ’70s.
“The turmoil of the 1960s started to temper into environmentalism and a return to nature,” Shapiro said. “It’s quite a neat psychology to introduce into a transportation system.”
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