Well with a spectacularly clear blue day I decided that I should leave my parents house and see what the blizzard had done to the subway system that was supposedly operating normally in my neighborhood. I walked down the hill to 181 Street & St. Nick on the 1 where everything was fine although I still can’t believe that no improvements have been made to the station, the roof is still boarded up, the platforms narrow because they haven’t fixed the brickwork in the tube of the station’s tunnel that fell down in August 2009. I took an uptown 1 train to 215 Street–(Page Rebuilt with summery and 13 new photos) that even has the new Next Train displays on the uptown platform. Got some photos of the 207 Street yard with many trains still outside in the snow including the R110B’s there clearly visible (and have been in recent years) from the 215 Street uptown platform, they had a single 9 car train made up of 3 train sets of unique 67 Foot Long Cars (most IND stations had special R110B conductor boards long after the trains brief decade if not less of service had stopped), the trainset is split into two in the yard:
From there I walked up beneath the Broadway Bridge to get some Metro-North photos using diesel trains only-their third rails were almost completely buried-that had just recently resumed service, I had terrible timing for the four trains that came by, here’s many of the photos, I’m not uploading them to the page until I rebuild it (I’m planning a full Metro-North rebuild at least of those pages connected to implement station to station navigation along each train line.) Notice how the third track that doesn’t platform at Marble Hill is completely buried:
After that I went back to the uptown 225 Street platform and realized my camera’s battery had died and I’d forgotten to charge it (I always keep my charger on me and am known for going to sit and read in a Starbucks or other type of cafe on trips while it charges for an hour, but hadn’t brought a book since I was so close to home) since I had already swiped in I took the train up to 232 Street and crossed via Broadway (there isn’t a free crossover between Dyckman Street and 242 Street) after that I decided I wanted more of a walk and got off at Dyckman Street and walked up Fort George Hill a place I hadn’t gone in a long time and continued home that way. I have the last two-week unlimited ride MetroCard I’ll ever purchase (there being discontinued during the fare hike in two days on December 30th)
As I was downloading pictures off my camera I added 1 additional photo to Sutphin Blvd from my trip home from JFK (I decided to go Airtrain to Jamaica to 207 Street had an immensely frustrating and time consuming moment trying to add 35ยข to my MetroCard to get on the E train that I did have in exact change. Why can the MVMs just let you put money in and not make you ackwordly tell it how much money you want before it lets you put money on? BARTs are definitely more user friendly with this feature)