New York
An Inside Look at the NYC Subway’s Archaic Signal System
Deep inside a subway station in Brooklyn, in a cramped, industrial room, Dyanesha Pryor pushes in a metal lever on a hulking machine that was installed nearly a century ago. A few hundred feet away, a signal light flashes red and a train that had been rumbling down the local tracks slides to a stop.
Ms. Pryor, a transit worker, pulls another lever and a section of rail shifts into place, allowing the local train to merge onto a shared track in front of a waiting express train. She then restores the signal to green and the local rolls into the station.
Ms. Pryor repeats this sequence — punctuated by the clank, clank, clank of the levers slamming into place — dozens of times over the course of the day in the hidden control room at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station.
Thousands of subway riders a day depend on Ms. Pryor for a smooth commute. But if she has to unexpectedly step away, even for a bathroom break, all express service is rerouted to the local tracks until she returns. “Everybody has to go local because there’s nobody here to move the levers,” said Ms. Pryor, 35.
About 85 percent of New York City’s subway system still operates with this analog signal system. The outdated equipment is no longer manufactured and has to be manually operated, around the clock.
It’s no surprise then that the system is a leading cause of delays. Over the past 15 months, it has led to average of nearly 4,000 train delays a month, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the city’s transit system.
The subway has long depended on “fixed block” signaling, a method of maintaining safe distances between trains that uses track circuits to detect the location of trains, wayside signals similar to traffic lights and mechanical trips to stop trains that pass a red light.
The authority is replacing the system with a modern upgrade known as communications-based train control, or C.B.T.C., which is becoming the standard for transit systems worldwide, including those in London and Paris. It relies on computers and wireless technology — instead of people — to automatically control train movements.
But the system upgrade is at risk. The Trump administration is attempting to kill congestion pricing, a tolling program in Manhattan that would raise billions of dollars for the work. The M.T.A.’s next capital budget could also be in jeopardy, if Washington follows through on its threats to defund transit projects in New York State.
Ancient Signals
New York’s subway is vastly more complicated to run than other major subway systems because it never closes and its trains crisscross tracks. The city’s subway has more than 200 crossing points known as “interlockings.”
Much of the old signal system is run from a network of underground control towers that sit beside the tracks. Inside each tower are operators like Ms. Pryor who change signals and switches.
About 300 operators like Ms. Pryor are stationed at interlocking machines, but their ranks are thinning as the subway has gradually moved to centralized controls. The work pays around $40 an hour on average, according to a Transport Workers Union wage sheet.
While the signaling system still works most of the time, it has become more fragile and unreliable with every passing year. Equipment and parts break or wear out. In January, a relay failure at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station took about an hour to fix and delayed 25 trains.
“If you had a car from the 1930s and drove it every day you’d be lucky if it was still working like this, right?” said Salvatore Ambrosino, the M.T.A.’s chief officer for signals.
Fixed block signaling divides the tracks into blocks, or sections of roughly 1,000 feet on average, that carry an electrical current. When a train occupies a block, it cuts off the current, letting the system know its general position.
The system cannot pinpoint exactly where a train is, so a buffer of two or more blocks is maintained between every train to keep them at safe distances. But that limits how many trains can run at the same time. As subway ridership has grown, it has resulted in overcrowded cars and longer waits.
Modern Signals
The old signals are gradually being replaced with C.B.T.C., which keeps trains in constant contact with a centralized computer system that controls their every movement. This technology allows trains to run closer together, which means more trains on the tracks and faster service.
“Think of it like moving from a Walkman with all the moving parts to an iPhone that’s solid state,” said Jamie Torres-Springer, president of M.T.A. Construction & Development, which is overseeing the signal projects. “There’s no moving mechanical equipment — it’s all digital.”
In 2006, the L line became the first route to convert to the more modern system. The 7 line followed in 2018. Those routes now consistently have the best on-time performance.
C.B.T.C. has also been installed on sections of the E, F, M and R lines in Queens and the F line in Brooklyn.
The advantage of the new system is that computerized equipment is installed on every train to monitor its exact location and speed. The computers digitally manage signals and switches while routing the trains.
Mission Control
The home of C.B.T.C. is the M.T.A.’s Operations Control Center in Midtown Manhattan. Security is extremely tight and photos are rarely permitted.
Entering the control center is like walking onto the bridge of a spaceship. The nearly 21,000-square-foot room is almost half an acre in size with soaring 30-foot high ceilings. An entire wall is covered by a digital map showing trains moving in real time in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens.
Between 75 and 90 M.T.A. workers are on the floor, day or night, surrounded by 432 computer screens. They keep an eye on train movements, stepping in only to troubleshoot. Each time another route is converted to C.B.T.C., more workers join them.
The next round of projects will bring modern signals to 66 miles of track in Brooklyn and Manhattan. These tracks are shared by six different routes — the A, C, B, D, F and M lines — and carry about 1.6 million daily riders.
C.B.T.C. will eventually be expanded to subway routes across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
But modernizing the signals, which have been called the subway’s central nervous system, is enormously expensive. While the transit authority has brought down costs significantly as the scale of work has increased, installing C.B.T.C. costs about $25 million per mile. The work also includes overhauling tracks and infrastructure and retrofitting trains.
M.T.A. officials are counting on $3 billion from New York’s congestion pricing program to pay for the new signaling system. But that funding is in question now that President Trump has vowed to kill the program.
The authority is also pushing for $5.4 billion to install C.B.T.C. on another 75 miles of subway lines in a $68 billion capital plan being considered by the State Legislature in Albany.
If the money does not come through, riders will notice it during their commutes, said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group, which supports the signal upgrades.
“Modern signals mean faster, more reliable commutes,” he said. “Failure to update our antiquated signals means slower trains, more delays and explaining to your boss why you are late, again.”
The grandson of an infamous mob boss was sentenced to prison on Monday after pleading guilty to defrauding the federal government out of more than $1 million in Covid relief funds, some of which he invested in cryptocurrency.
Carmine G. Agnello Jr., the grandson of John J. Gotti, the former leader of the Gambino crime family, was sentenced to 15 months in prison by Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y. She also ordered Mr. Agnello to pay $1.3 million in restitution to the Small Business Administration.
Mr. Agnello, 39, fidgeted in court on Monday. Some of his family members were in attendance, including mob figures previously convicted of federal crimes: his father Carmine (the Bull) Agnello and his uncle John A. Gotti.
Wearing a gray, checkered suit, Mr. Agnello read a brief statement in court calling his crime “wrong, selfish and criminal.” He added that he never wanted to “find myself in prison” like so many of his relatives.
“I regret not only what I did, but the disappointment I caused my family,” he said.
Starting in April 2020, Mr. Agnello applied for at least three loans for his Queens-based company, Crown Auto Parts & Recycling L.L.C., through a program meant to support small businesses hurt by the pandemic.
He applied for the loans under false pretenses, claiming he did not have a criminal record when he in fact did have one, prosecutors said. He then used more than $400,000 of the borrowed money to invest in a crypto business.
Mr. Agnello pleaded guilty in September 2024 to a single count of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of New York had sought a sentence of around three years, as well as $1.3 million in restitution.
He “shamefully lined his own pockets with government and taxpayers’ dollars,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
As a child, Mr. Agnello starred on the reality television show “Growing Up Gotti” alongside his mother, Victoria Gotti, and two brothers, Frank and John. The show, which ran on A&E for three seasons and was canceled in 2005, depicted a Long Island household in the milieu of “The Sopranos.”
At the time, Mr. Agnello’s father was in prison and had been divorced from Ms. Gotti, a former columnist for The New York Post, leaving her to raise three rowdy sons. The intense media focus on the Gottis gave the grandson “a distorted sense of reality,” wrote John A. Gotti, Mr. Agnello’s uncle and the leader of the crime family in the 1990s, in a letter to Judge Choudhury before the sentencing.
“Being part of the Gotti family meant growing up with too much attention, expectations and society’s judgment that most kids never have to deal with,” Mr. Gotti wrote. He added that his nephew faced pressure “to live up to the Gotti name.”
Mr. Agnello found his way into the family business, in a way. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to running an unregistered scrap business. That case echoed his father’s racketeering conviction after he firebombed a rival scrap company in Queens that was run by undercover police officers.
Mr. Agnello’s grandfather exercised power with unrelenting brutality and delighted in the spotlight. He seized control of the family by organizing the 1985 assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, before running enterprises that investigators estimated earned about $500 million a year from ventures that included extorting unions, illegal gambling, loan-sharking and stock fraud.
After numerous acquittals in state and federal trials, aided by juries that had been tampered with, Mr. Gotti earned the nickname “Teflon Don” from New York City’s tabloids. He was ultimately convicted in 1992 on 13 criminal counts and died of cancer in 2002 at age 61 in a federal prison hospital.
Jeffrey Lichtman, a lawyer for Mr. Agnello, told Judge Choudhury that Mr. Agnello had grown up with no male role models in his life, as 15 of his family members had gone to prison, including his grandfather when he was 5 and his father when he was 14.
Mr. Lichtman, who also represented Mr. Agnello’s uncle, called his client’s crime “horrific behavior” but added that his conduct was inevitable.
Charles P. Kelly, a federal prosecutor, said in court on Monday that Mr. Agnello’s family history was no excuse for his fraud.
“This case is not about John Gotti; it’s about Carmine Agnello,” Mr. Kelly said.
This year, Steven Metcalf, another lawyer for Mr. Agnello, asked Judge Choudhury for a sentence with no prison time so that Mr. Agnello could donate a kidney to his mother, who has renal disease and also appeared in court on Monday. Without the transplant, Ms. Gotti could die during her son’s prison term, Mr. Metcalf said.
But in April, Mr. Agnello hired Mr. Lichtman, who apologized to the judge for Mr. Metcalf’s “voluminous argument” in support of Mr. Agnello, which stretched hundreds of pages.
As Judge Choudhury announced the sentence, Mr. Agnello kept his gaze forward and nodded. Judge Choudhury pushed back on the notion that his upbringing drove him to commit wire fraud.
“You were raised with access to opportunities. These are opportunities that many people in our society do not have,” she said.
After the sentence on Monday, Mr. Agnello embraced his family members in a hallway of the courthouse, one by one, kissing his uncle and his father on the cheek. He must surrender to the authorities to begin serving his prison term by July 20.
Outside the courthouse, his uncle John A. Gotti addressed a group of reporters.
“We had 15 members of our family who went to prison,” he said. “I think that’s enough. I think we did our time.”
It was one of the worst commutes in years. A power outage stranded more than 3,500 New York City subway riders in stuffy, crowded train cars for more than two hours on Dec. 11, 2024, during the evening rush.
Firefighters evacuated riders from the disabled trains, but not before some passengers were forced to relieve themselves between cars, according to people who were present. The ensuing delays, which affected the A, C, F and G lines in Brooklyn, stretched well into the morning, snarling the commute for thousands more riders.
But the foul-up didn’t start on the tracks — it began about 40 feet beneath the sidewalk, in a concrete bunker called a substation, like this one.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the New York City subway, operates 225 of these substations. They provide the electricity that keeps trains moving.
Some are deep underground, while others are in fortresslike buildings close to train tracks. Dozens of the facilities are nearing 100 years old, and some components have gone decades without substantial upgrades.
The electrical outage in 2024 started after a critical failure in a Downtown Brooklyn substation that dates to the 1930s. Heavy rainfall most likely seeped into equipment and caused an explosion so forceful that it knocked a door off its hinges, according to the M.T.A.
Without adequate electricity, trains that were closest to the damaged substation could not move, and their ventilation systems shut down.
Such major failures are rare, but are responsible for some of the subway’s worst logjams, said Jamie Torres-Springer, the head of the authority’s construction and development division.
“That’s what causes the most difficult, painful disruptions in the system that drive people out of their minds,” he said.
In hopes of preventing the next nightmare commute, the M.T.A. is making the biggest investment in power in its history. Transit officials plan to spend $4 billion on new power systems by 2029, including upgrades to 75 subway substations. That’s three times as many as were renovated during the last major round of repairs, which ended in 2024.
They have their work cut out for them.
Hidden beneath a steel-trap door on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 36 steps below the surface, is one of the system’s oldest remaining substations.
“This is a blast from the past,” said David Jacobs, the M.T.A.’s acting general superintendent for power stations, who donned a hard hat and safety glasses on a recent weekday before disappearing into the underground space.
The substation, near 73rd Street and Central Park West, was built in the 1930s, and is expected to be renovated during the current blitz.
A dirty tarp hung in one corner of the cavernous room, to catch water that seeped through worn concrete. Rows of machines hummed with the constant surge of power feeding the electrified third rail on nearby tracks.
It takes about 2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to run the subway system annually. That’s enough power to light 128,000 homes for a year.
The substations’ main function is to convert raw, high-voltage electricity from the electrical grid into lower-voltage power that can be delivered to the third rail.
But the aging equipment has become progressively less efficient and reliable, and harder to maintain.
The substations are spaced out across the city, to help keep electricity flowing to trains even if one of them malfunctions. But the equipment has sometimes failed when asked to carry an extra load, leading to cascading problems.
Last year, there were 758 “major incidents” on the subway, ones in which 50 or more trains were delayed. Substations cause a small but disruptive share of the problems, according to M.T.A. data.
“Power is everything,” said John Ross, a recently retired transit worker who was dispatched to help after several service disruptions in the subway, including the outage in 2024. “When it breaks, it breaks good.”
M.T.A. officials assessed the condition of every substation in recent years, and found that 36 percent of the equipment was in poor condition or in need of replacement.
While the main purpose of the upgrades is to reduce train delays, the changes have other benefits. The M.T.A. is installing a new signal system that relies on wireless technology to automatically control train movement.
The system, known as Communications-Based Train Control, or C.B.T.C., will allow trains to operate more reliably. It will also enable transit workers to monitor train traffic more closely from a dedicated room in Midtown Manhattan, known as the operations control center.
But switching to that signal system requires upgrading the rest of the subway’s archaic equipment. “In order to run more trains, we need more power,” Mr. Torres-Springer said.
For Mr. Jacobs, 36, who joined the M.T.A. nearly two decades ago as an electrical apprentice, working with machines younger than him would be a welcome change.
Today he runs a department of almost 400 people, and much of the work remains hands-on: diagnosing problems in the machinery by reading small flags with numbered codes, searching for replacement parts that are no longer manufactured, and generally eking out more life from obsolete machines.
“I do love this equipment,” he said with a smile.
But he’s ready for an upgrade to something built in this century.
“It’s like a B.M.W. versus a 1940 Cadillac.”
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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