MTA honchos announced Thursday they have started the procurement process for the newest generation of subway car, set to serve on New York City system’s numbered lines.
Dubbed the R262, the new model is intended to replace the oldest subway cars on the city’s numbered lines — the R62 fleet found on the Nos. 1, 3 and 6 lines — but will eventually make up the bulk of the fleet on the numbered lines, known internally as NYC Transit’s “A-division.”
“We’ve got cars in service today that are 40 or 50 years old,” MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said Thursday, speaking at the agency’s Rail Car Acceptance Facility in Sunset Park. “These cars are well past their useful lives, and by the time we’re able to replace them — they’re getting older and older.”
The MTA’s “request for proposals,” issued Thursday, seeks a firm able to deliver an initial order of 1,140 individual subway cars, with an option to purchase 1,250 more — enough, Lieber said, to eventually serve on nearly every numbered line.
Interested firms have also been instructed to provide an option for an open-gangway design, in which passengers could move freely between the train cars.
The 1980s-era R62 subway cars were once the hallmark of a renewed public transit system. Purchased through the agency’s first five-year capital plan, they were a stark contrast to graffiti-covered Redbirds and other older cars along the IRT. During their inaugural 1983 run, then-Mayor Ed Koch rode one of the new, stainless-steel-skinned trains, walking from car to car, beseeching straphangers to keep them clean.
But as the Daily News has previously reported, spare parts are sparse for the aging Kawasaki-built R62 and its Bombardier-built brethren, the R62A. Their air conditioning systems are finicky. And they are decades out from their last modernization in the 1990s.
“We all have a soft spot for the older cars,” Lieber said Thursday, while standing beside a shiny new Kawasaki R211, bound for the system’s lettered lines. “But it’s a fact that these old cars break down much more frequently than the new cars.”
According to MTA data, the R211 — the newest car in the NYC Transit fleet, in service on the on the A, C, G and B lines — travels an average of roughly 300,000 miles before it needs to be taken out of service for repairs. That’s about triple the distance the agency has come to expect out of the R62 and R62A.
But the numbered lines have narrower tunnels than their lettered counterparts — meaning cars like the R211 can’t be used.
But Jesse Lazarus — the MTA’s newly minted train-car czar — said Thursday that the agency isn’t just looking for a more svelte take on the R211.
Lazarus said the agency is looking for a lighter car with more modern technologies than even the R211 — like silicon-carbide inverters in the propulsion system to more efficiently power the motors and electronically controlled brakes to reduce maintenance costs.
“That generates long-term savings,” she said of electronically controlled brakes. “You strip out some of the old, clunky pneumatic systems, like valves and pipes, and the rubber that breaks down and deteriorates and must be replaced repeatedly.”
But the R62s — complete with their orange bucket seats and their vintage air conditioners — will still stick around for a while.
A contract to build the R262 is expected to be awarded in 2028 — and the new-model trains are unlikely to see passengers before the 2030s.