Вагон метро R22: История и вынос из эксплуатации

Retired class of New York City Subway car

The R22 was a New York City Subway car built by the St. Louis Car Company from 1957 to 1958. The cars were a "follow up" or supplemental stock for the A Division's R21s and closely resemble them. A total of 450 cars were built, arranged as single units. Two versions were manufactured: Westinghouse (WH) powered cars and General Electric (GE) powered cars. The first R22s entered service on April 13, 1957. Several cars in the fleet were retrofitted as part of an automated signaling test on the 42nd Street Shuttle in 1962 and were destroyed in a 1964 fire. The R22s were replaced by the R62As in the 1980s, and the final train of R22s ran on December 30, 1987. Several R22 cars were preserved, though the majority were scrapped.

The R22s were numbered 7300–7749. They were the last single cars built prior to the R33S cars built in 1963. The fleet had two paned storm door windows that could be opened by dropping down the upper window, though cars 7515–7524 had single drop sash windows instead. Those cars also had Plextone painted interiors and pink molded fiberglass seats. In addition, the R22s were the first cars to have sealed beam headlights. There were two versions of the R22: Westinghouse Electric powered cars (7300–7524) and General Electric powered cars (7525–7749).

The R22s first entered service on April 13, 1957, starting to replace most of the IRT "high voltage" type cars. The R22s ran in service for most of their service lives on the IRT Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line painted in green livery. Cars 7513, 7509, 7516, 7654, 7675, and 7686 were used as an automatic test train, which ran in revenue service on the 42nd Street Shuttle starting in January 1962. The experiment ended on April 21, 1964, when a fire partially destroyed the Grand Central shuttle platform as well as car 7740. Cars 7509, 7513, and 7516 were not in use at the time; thus, they were not damaged in the fire, but the cars never returned to revenue service. In 1973, car 7509 was converted to the 64 feet (20 m) test car XC375, which operated on various IRT lines until April 1982, and scrapped on July 12, 1996.

A train of R22s was featured in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a 1974 film about the hijacking of a downtown train. At least two different R22 cars portrayed Pelham 1 2 3. As it enters 28th Street station, the head car is labeled 7339. However, in an early scene at Grand Central, 7339 is seen on the express track across the platform. Later, after being cut from the rest of the train, the head car is labeled 7434.