Former revenue cars on work trains.

Most of us know that some old subway cars are put into work train status after retirement from revenue service. That's been done with single cars and pairs of cars. Does anyone havwe an idea how this will be done when all of the remaining passenger cars will be in permanent groups of 4 or 5?

railfan365 wrote:Most of us know that some old subway cars are put into work train status after retirement from revenue service. That's been done with single cars and pairs of cars. Does anyone havwe an idea how this will be done when all of the remaining passenger cars will be in permanent groups of 4 or 5?

Custom order work cars, like the R127/R134.

There's still a large fleet of older cars still in the work car fleet that seem to holding their own out there.
Figure on a couple(or more) 4 car sets to become the new PUMP trains sometime in the future.
Remember the work cars have useable across the entire system(IRT,BMT,and IND lines)

Can the cab cars (A) be run together without the (B) cars?

Crabman1130 wrote:Can the cab cars (A) be run together without the (B) cars?

Typically, no. Equipment is shared across the pair.

The bulk of the work equipment fleet consists of R33s in both Main Line and World's Fair (single unit) variants. The former (around 40 cars) can found as rider (crew) cars in the RD400 series, with the single units (around 30 or so) assigned to various yards as work motors or trash duty. Since there are still some single unit R62As, it might make sense to simply add an option for about 70-80 cars to the R188 series, which would allow the single unit R62As to be removed for work duty, replacing the 50+ (dating to 1963) year old R33s.

As for the pump train, the R110As are being converted. These were 5-car sets built to IRT loading gauge.