M-1 Railfanning curtain continues to fall

I saw 7421, and 7422 on an 10 car M7 set at Huntington on Sunday 5-15. Yep, M1's are going fast!

The M1s don't hold anything special for me. They're in bad shape, they don't ride well. It's better if they retire them ASAP.

And here's a big pat on the back for our pal Frank.
But in all seriousness, going by your quote, what then is the point of railroad historial preservation? I guess we should have never preserved those old ping pongs rite? Theyre old, yucky, and bouncy! And for the record i'll take a Budd car over a cramped M7 anyday.

Ill miss the Budd's as there one of a kind. and have moor seating and more room then the BombMUs

Oh well thats the wave of the future...

The M7s are fine cars. They're quicker, smoother, and more reliable than the worn-out M1s. Some of the M1s are in deplorable shape with ripped seats, dirty windows, laminated wood upolstery peeling off, broken lights, and bad A/C. All I can say is: "Bring on the M7s"!

Frank wrote:The M7s are fine cars. They're quicker, smoother, and more reliable than the worn-out M1s. Some of the M1s are in deplorable shape with ripped seats, dirty windows, laminated wood upolstery peeling off, broken lights, and bad A/C. All I can say is: "Bring on the M7s"!

The conditions listed above here are nothing more than a result of gross
neglect. "Ripped seats, dirty windows, laminated wood upolstery etc are
nothing that proper maintenance would not take care of.
I last rode the LIRR in 2003 and I could not believe how bad the cars
were at the time, a far cry from the same cars on Metro-North.
I am not saying that the M-1 was/is a great car, only that it is not the fault
of the cars themselves that they got to be the way that is described
above.
If they do not take care of the M-7's, it will not take too long for them to
look and ride the same way.
Noel Weaver

Noel Weaver wrote:

Frank wrote:The M7s are fine cars. They're quicker, smoother, and more reliable than the worn-out M1s. Some of the M1s are in deplorable shape with ripped seats, dirty windows, laminated wood upolstery peeling off, broken lights, and bad A/C. All I can say is: "Bring on the M7s"!

The conditions listed above here are nothing more than a result of gross
neglect. "Ripped seats, dirty windows, laminated wood upolstery etc are
nothing that proper maintenance would not take care of.
I last rode the LIRR in 2003 and I could not believe how bad the cars
were at the time, a far cry from the same cars on Metro-North.
I am not saying that the M-1 was/is a great car, only that it is not the fault
of the cars themselves that they got to be the way that is described
above.
If they do not take care of the M-7's, it will not take too long for them to
look and ride the same way.
Noel Weaver

Well I still wouldn't like them even if they were maintained well. LIRR's MUs especially th M1/3s don't see to be maintained very well as of now.

It seems like the M-1's biggest fans (like myself) are those who were there when they came into service. Fresh out of school, working my first job in the big city, I commuted daily through that transitional period. If you'd been there then, like Richard Glueck said above, you would still think of the M-1's as the "new trains". You had to be there (in 1970) to appreciate stepping off a hot, clattering MP-54 at Jamaica and onto a shiny new air-conditioned M-1. The difference was like flying in a World-War I bi-plane VS. the SpaceShuttle! So those of us who lived that period will always think of the M-1 as a great commuter car. Their present decrepit state really doesn't do them justice........

Interestingly, in the 1960's my parents thought of the 1930's era R-1 thru R-9 subway cars as the "new cars" from their young years, while I thought they were ancient rattletraps. So it all depends what was new when you were young. In about 30 years you young guys will be telling this same story about the M-7s.........

And although I can appreciate the engineer above who felt cramped in that phone-booth sized cab, we passenger/rail-buffs really enjoyed that big front window, for the last 35 years. I hope you like your new M-7 cabs..........

Head-end View wrote:It seems like the M-1's biggest fans (like myself) are those who were there when they came into service. Fresh out of school, working my first job in the big city, I commuted daily through that transitional period. If you'd been there then, like Richard Glueck said above, you would still think of the M-1's as the "new trains". You had to be there (in 1970) to appreciate stepping off a hot, clattering MP-54 at Jamaica and onto a shiny new air-conditioned M-1. The difference was like flying in a World-War I bi-plane VS. the SpaceShuttle! So those of us who lived that period will always think of the M-1 as a great commuter car. Their present decrepit state really doesn't do them justice........

Interestingly, in the 1960's my parents thought of the 1930's era R-1 thru R-9 subway cars as the "new cars" from their young years, while I thought they were ancient rattletraps. So it all depends what was new when you were young. In about 30 years you young guys will be telling this same story about the M-7s.........

And although I can appreciate the engineer above who felt cramped in that phone-booth sized cab, we passenger/rail-buffs really enjoyed that big front window, for the last 35 years. I hope you like your new M-7 cabs..........

Yeah, the M1s seemed to be very good trains when they came out (and innovative). But they are old rattletraps by now and are in bad shape.

I can see Head End's point.
The M-1 would have been a quantum leap in technology. They also even looked much cooler than the old buckets of bolts.
The M-7, in relation to the M-1/M-3, is kind of ho-hum, so what?
As far as the commuter is concerned, it's basically the same damn thing, with some computers and redundancies (learned from the mistakes of the M-1/M-3) built in... And a whole bunch of extraneous, annoying noises added in.

The funniest thing is, with the lag time from design to cars rolling off the line, the computers in these trains tend to be dinosaurs. (We all know our home computers are grossly outmoded in a couple of years these days. Trains are no exception.)
The M-7 TOD and CDP uses a P-166 processor. The M-1 CCM system uses an 8086 or 286 processor. They are slow, slow, slow.
Now you know where your traded in old beat up computer goes....the LIRR!

Tom

N340SG wrote:I can see Head End's point.
The M-1 would have been a quantum leap in technology. They also even looked much cooler than the old buckets of bolts.
The M-7, in relation to the M-1/M-3, is kind of ho-hum, so what?
As far as the commuter is concerned, it's basically the same damn thing, with some computers and redundancies (learned from the mistakes of the M-1/M-3) built in... And a whole bunch of extraneous, annoying noises added in.

The funniest thing is, with the lag time from design to cars rolling off the line, the computers in these trains tend to be dinosaurs. (We all know our home computers are grossly outmoded in a couple of years these days. Trains are no exception.)
The M-7 TOD and CDP uses a P-166 processor. The M-1 CCM system uses an 8086 or 286 processor. They are slow, slow, slow.
Now you know where your traded in old beat up computer goes....the LIRR!

Tom

Actually despite the slightly more narrow seating, the M7 is alot more pleasant to ride in than an M1/3 train. They are more reliable, more faster, and have a better ride.

Well that curtain fell another couple of inches this morning. I saw M-7's # 7441-7442 in-service on the east end of train # 1635. The only 2 clean looking cars on an otherwise very dirty train...

How many M1's are left in service as of now?

The annoying auto announcements that play over 10,000X's combined with the extremely cramped seating and bright interior makes the M7 unpleasant IMHO. (Plus they look fugly).
Long live the legacy cars!

Tom - well, you actually don't need much in the way of computing power, once you strip away all the Microsoft crap. CCM run by an 8086? I can believe it - heck, even a Z-80 or 6502 would have no problem keeping up - if it's well programmed. At a few mhz, the execution rate floats at around 1 mips, and if the code's written in assembly? Man, that's forever. And, years ago, embedded crap was written in assembly because C compilers sucked (some still do). And it's just read a few inputs, make a decision, write back, maybe squirt a text string into a logfile...

Remember, they put a man on the moon with less computing power than your average pocket calculator of today has...

KFRG wrote:The annoying auto announcements that play over 10,000X's combined with the extremely cramped seating and bright interior makes the M7 unpleasant IMHO. (Plus they look fugly).
Long live the legacy cars!

Actually the interiors are more pleasant than the M1/3s.