[M II A II R II K]

One Day, Maybe, Artisanal Train Cars


Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/ny...-new-york.html

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All employment is good employment, obviously — 5,800 people work at the Navy Yard today — but the transition carries a powerful symbolism. Before the decommissioning of the yard in 1966 by Robert McNamara, then the secretary of defense, it employed 9,000 workers and stood as the oldest continually active industrial plant in the state. In 1938, an even greater number, 10,000, were employed on its grounds, a third of them through the Works Progress Administration. Poignantly, the spirit of the W.P.A. hovered over a conference that took place at the Navy Yard a few weeks ago, one that sought to capitalize on the resonance of its location’s history and offer a vision of something new. It was called Building the Future and sponsored by a coalition of union interests, policy organizations and sustainable-living advocates. The participants called for a large-scale initiative to expand transit manufacturing in the state and city. Why couldn’t our brake parts and headlights and signal equipment, even our rail cars and buses, be made here?

- The argument forged was at once dreamy and entirely persuasive: From 2000 to 2009, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was responsible for nearly a third of all buses, subway cars and commuter trains bought in the United States. Its current $23 billion capital program involves the acquisition of more than $7 billion worth of train cars, buses and signaling and communications equipment. These are not indulgent expenses: The signal system at the West Fourth Street subway station, for example, has not been replaced since 1932. About a third of the city’s buses are at least 12 years old — their official life span — while others, as Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, told me, “are not in the greatest shape — they’ve stayed too long at the fair.” Economists say a healthy capacity for increased transit manufacturing exists across the state and in the city, including at repair facilities in Coney Island and at the 207th Street Yard in Manhattan (where subway cars were still being made in the early ’90s) and potentially amid the vast industrial shells at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. New York City Transit recently awarded a $115 million contract to New Flyer, a bus manufacturing company in Minnesota, for a series of compressed-natural-gas buses; only 13.8 percent of the materials used to produce them will have been made in New York State.

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