62 Street
62 Street is the station where the West End Line's elevated crosses over the Sea Beach Line's trench and a transfer is provided that has proven extremely useful to providing diverted riders shorter doubling backs when construction needs to be done on the Sea Beach or West End Lines. The West End Line here has three tracks and 62 Street is an elevated express stop with two island platforms for the 3 track line. The center track's main use seems to be when the Sea Beach Line is closed in one direction and N trains are diverted to this track. When this happens generally shuttle buses are not used but trains are diverted in one direction from either or both (both N and D trains run via one line in one direction to Coney Island and back via the other line) lines between Coney Island and 36 Street, closing off service for one direction and track. The diverted train to provide faster service will usually run express, stopping at this station as the only intermediate stop between Coney Island and 36 Street.
The station has two entrances and are canopied between these two entrances but not at the platform’s extreme ends. The southern entrance begins in the Sea Beach's Line's station house at ground level where a staircase leads up to some doors that lead outside to a small, covered passageway that has a full-scale fence. Once the passageway gets (its maybe twenty feet long) beneath the elevated it enters what feels like a station house with wooden walls separating the area from the street although only a low fence keeps passengers out of jumping directly on the traffic in the roadway below. The passageway splits and shorter passageways lead to the staircases up to the two platforms.
As part of the restoration of the Sea Beach Line this exit and passageway was first closed from 2015 through 2019 with a MetroCard Out-of-system transfer provided. This required passengers needing to transfer to walk a quarter mile from the N train's secondary entrance at 15 Avenue to the D train's secondary entrance at 62 Street which were the only open entrances. In July 2019, the transfer reopened and the station became fully ADA accessible, this resulted in new elevators (and associated short elevated passageways on the elevated mezzanine level) from this mezzanine to both D train platforms, plus a new elevator from the mezzanine, with an intermediate landing at the ground-level station house, that continues to the Coney Island-bound N train platform. The staircase for transferring passengers was also completely rebuilt.
At the northern end of the station is a standard, unstaffed with just High Turnstile equipment, station house nestled beneath the tracks. A single staircase leads down to it from either platform. This station house leads to three streetstairs, two to the east side, one to the west side of New Utrect Avenue, and the angled intersection of 14 Avenue. The staircase to the west side is near the SW corner, just north of 60 Street. On the east side of the street both lead out to the SE corner. This entrance was closed in 2010 for a small rehabilitation instead of a full-scale rebuilding (Jay Walder, the MTA chairman at the time, introduced this new approach to only do more minor, cheaper scale restorations) when using ARRA Federal Recovery Act funds. This project only replaced the station's canopy roof and rebuilt the northern entrance beneath the elevated.
Photos 1: February 28, 2004; 2: December 9, 2005; 3-12: June 9, 2009; 13-23: May 28, 2010; 24-45: December 28, 2010; 46-57: September 26, 2012; 58-94: September 25, 2023
Station Subway Lines (2004-2010)
Station Subway Lines (2000-2004)
