On a sweltering July day last summer, straphangers trying to get home on the J train had to sweat it out on the platform.
A 60-year-old power transformer at the subway system’s Delancey-Suffolk substation — which MTA officials said had been in operation for twice as many years as it should have — finally gave up the ghost, cutting power to parts of the third rail line in the lower parts of the subway were disabled. Manhattan. Trains, unable to run, were out of service from 6pm on July 16 until just before 4.30am the next day, when replacement transformers were brought online.
“This is because the infrastructure is so damn old,” MTA Chairman Janno Lieber told reporters later in the morning of July 17.[The transformer] is an important device that [was] 30 years beyond its useful life.”
“It’s not sexy,” he said of the massive block of oil-bathed copper coils that power the third rail and, with it, the sixteen electric motors that move a particular eight-car J train. “It’s not a shiny new car, it’s not a brand new station, it’s not a new line – but we all depend on it every time we go on the subway.”
According to the MTA’s $68 billion 2025-2029 capital budget — which is currently under review by the state — the agency hopes to spend $4 billion over the next five years to repair and upgrade its energy infrastructure.
The bulk of that, nearly $3 billion, is for the metro system’s traction energy network – the collection of substations and transmission lines spread across the five boroughs to draw tens of thousands of volts of alternating current from Con Ed and convert it into electricity. the 650 volts direct current that the trains need to run.
MTA officials say this is no small task, considering the age and complexity of a system that was originally built to serve the separate individual lines that eventually became the New York City subway system.
“[Of the] 224 substations [in the subway system,] For 77 of them, we determined that most components were in poor or marginal condition,” Jamie Torres-Springer, MTA chief construction and development officer, told the Daily News during a recent visit to some of the system’s power plants. “They are in a state of disrepair.”
The subway stations have one job: convert the power generated by Con Ed into something usable for subway trains. Electricity generated in power stations has a so-called alternating current: the direction changes 60 times per second. This alternating current can travel long distances along a wire without losing much voltage, but it is useless for subway cars designed to run on direct current or direct current.
Transformers – solid copper coils, immersed in oil to discourage electrical arcing and cooled by air or water – reduce the tens of thousands of volts to the hundreds. The current then goes to a device called a ‘rectifier’ which converts alternating current into direct current.
Forty feet below East New York at the Atlantic Substation, Joe Daidone, the 46-year-old superintendent of NYC Transit’s energy department, spoke to The News about the buzz of high-voltage electrical power.
“This is from the late 1930s or early 1940s,” he said, pointing to the large gray transformer that dominated the underground space. “It’s original to the substation.”
One of the many pipes leading from a nearby water tank to the water-cooled transformer was made of bright brass — a recent replacement for a corroded coolant line, Diadone said.
“That’s no problem, we can close the station and replace the pipe,” he said. “The problem is, if this deteriorates, what happens inside?”
“Most likely everything is corroded inside,” he said of the 80-year-old transformer. “We’re just buying time.”
Substations are set up throughout the system so that if one fails, others nearby can take over. However, doing so will increase pressure on adjacent substations, causing their components to wear out more quickly.
The Atlantic Substation, which powers part of the Fulton Line’s A and C trains, has already been decommissioned once, in 2000, when its rectifier—a Depression-era mercury arc system—was deemed too old to operate safely. can function.
However, five years later, Diadone’s team found a way to put the Atlantic Substation back into service.
“That rectifier was borrowed from the Long Island Rail Road dumpsters,” Diadone said, pointing to a huge red-and-silver collection of diodes, fuses and heat sinks behind the transformer. “I started using that fifteen years ago.”
The rectifier – state-of-the-art in the 1960s and long since discarded by NYC Transit’s sister railroad – is the most modern part of the Atlantic Substation.
MTA’s sought-after $4 billion energy investment — $3 billion for subway, $1 billion for commuter rail — won’t be enough to modernize the entire system. The MTA capital plan estimates that the money will allow work to be done on 60 of the 224 substations, with only “some” undergoing a complete overhaul.
Across the river in Manhattan, the Central Substation on 53rd St. offers a glimpse of what that might look like.
The above-ground facility is cavernous and brightly lit and houses three separate transformers that power the nearby A, C, E, D and F trains.
Two of the three are modern, air-cooled units, with computerized controls and a back catalog of replacement parts offered by the manufacturers. A tight row of computer-controlled circuit breakers encloses cabinets of replacement units, ready to be replaced at a moment’s notice.
Officials say the “cleaner” power — more consistent rectification and a more constant DC voltage — that such systems can produce will be even more important as the MTA begins converting more lines to communications-based train control.
CBTC, an automated signaling system, will allow the MTA to run trains closer together, increasing the number of trains and therefore the amount of power needed on a given stretch of track.
It remains to be seen whether the MTA will be able to fully fund the proposed capital program. Taking into account expected contributions from the state and city, the MTA is still trying to close a $33 billion funding gap. Asked about the proposed budget shortly after its approval by the MTA board in September, Governor Hochul said the $68 billion figure was not yet “final” and could still be reversed.
But Lieber has repeatedly emphasized the importance of work in “good repair” in the coming years.
MTA officials said they expect the Atlantic Substation — which serves a portion of the line that the MTA hopes to convert to modern signals — will be among the substations prioritized for a complete overhaul in the budget: a new transformer , a new rectifier and maybe even new circuit breakers.
Back at the Atlantic Substation where Diadone surveyed the row of antique mechanical breakers as desirable spares, he lamented, “There are only three substations I know of that have this breaker,” pointing to a particularly complicated-looking device at the far end of the wall. .
“If we rehabilitate this place, that goes with me,” he continued. ‘I will save [another] substation and make sure it comes back online because if it does.
