Panic, Passengers, but the Driver's a Novice July 2, 2002 By RANDY KENNEDY As the train stopped at the station yesterday morning, the conductor's voice sounded troubled over the intercom inside the motorman's cab. "Train operator," he said. "I'm off my board. Can I open up?" The operator had no idea what this question meant. "Um, what?" he replied. "I'm off my board," the conductor repeated. "Can I open up?" The operator thought hard about this. "Um, no, I don't think so," he said. It was a lucky decision, for several reasons. One was that the train operator, also known as the motorman, was not a motorman at all. He was a reporter for a large metropolitan daily newspaper (this one), who had never driven a subway train in his life, nor anything much bigger than a panel van. Nor much wanted to. The other reason was that the train this reporter was driving had, because of his ineptitude, overshot the station, leaving part of the first car beyond the platform. Thus, if the passengers had stepped from the doors of that car, they probably would have plunged through the elevated tracks and ended up on 20th Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in various stages of painful pre- litigiousness. "That would be considered bad," explained a former motorman, Rocco V. Cortese. So, by far the luckiest part of the whole morning, both for the reporter and the general riding public, was that the train the non-motorman was driving was not a real train. It sounded like a train, with rattling of rails and ding-dong of doors. From inside, it even felt like a train, with dank tunnel walls whizzing past its front window and suspicious-looking people visible on the platforms ahead. But the door from the motorman's cab did not open into a Manhattan-bound W train. It opened into an air-conditioned office in Downtown Brooklyn, in which Mr. Cortese and another former motorman, Charles J. DeForte, stood yesterday, trying not to crack smiles at how poorly this reporter was faring in his attempt to operate New York City Transit's subway simulator. Airlines and the military have used simulators for decades, and the transit agency began using one for the city's subways three years ago for essentially the same reasons. Just as you cannot crash a real fighter jet to teach a lesson, you cannot light a real track fire just to see whether a train operator will panic. You also cannot summon up a blizzard in the Bronx in July - which happened yesterday, digitally, inside the simulator. And you certainly cannot let someone who has never operated a 600-foot, 420-ton subway train before take one out for a test run during rush hour with a "student driver" sign in the window. Mr. Cortese, the senior director of subway operations training, said that some of the people who become train operators have, in fact, never even driven a car before. "Legally, you are not required to know how to drive a car before you can drive a subway," he said. "Yes. It's true." For those who can drive a car reasonably well, like this reporter, there are several very important, and humbling, things that you learn almost immediately at the controls of the subway simulator. First, subways do not go in reverse. (Mechanically, they can. But the reverse gear is used only in train yards, to couple trains.) So if you have hummed into Bay 50th Street in Brooklyn going far too fast and then tried to apply the brake far too late, there is little you can do except be ashamed and, again, tell the conductor not to open the doors and let the passengers plummet. (The conductor, in this situation, usually opens the doors in the back half of the train and the passengers in front file through the cars to get out.) You learn that in the subway, brakes are relative, taking longer to stop the train when it is packed or when it is on an incline or when wet fall leaves are greasing the rails beneath it. You learn, consequently, that it is sometimes very difficult to pull an aging train accurately into a station without doing the thing that standing straphangers loathe: the stop-and-start, like a club-footed cab driver, tossing passengers back and forth. "We try to make sure that doesn't happen," said Mr. DeForte, a training superintendent. "We tell people: think about your mother being back there. Do you want to throw your mother down to the floor of the subway? But sometimes it still happens." Among the things you do not learn about, and probably would not want to, is what it would feel like to run over someone who fell or jumped or was pushed onto the tracks. "The law department," Mr. Cortese explained, clutching his unlit cigar. "They really didn't want us to do jumpers." Thankfully, you also do not have to learn what is always the hardest lesson for any new train operator: the schedule. "They always say, `Whaddya mean, midnight?' " Mr. Cortese said. " `I'm asleep at midnight.' " "And I always say, `Yeah, well, sorry. We run at midnight." Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
