Tracks of the New York City Subway
by Peter J. Dougherty
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Title: |
Tracks of the New York City Subway, Second
Edition | Author: Peter J.
Dougherty
Publisher: Self
Published
Date Published: September 1999
Format: |
Spiral bound, 11" x 8.5", xviii + 102 pp. with card
covers |
Ordering: |
See Peter's website.
This book has also been available at the New York City Transit
Museum |
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Incredible Detail for the Subway
Buff and Interested Tourist
Reviewed by Paul Matus
It would be hard to think of anything more New
York than its extensive and complex subway system. The intracacy of
the system is daunting to even the most experienced urbanite, not to
mention the casual visitor.
Over the
years, many maps, both official and commercial, have been produced which
have tried to simplify the task of navigating the system for the mere
mortal. But what of the person who wants to know more than
is provided by a route map of the subway? One who wonders where that
spur line goes to. One who stares out the front window and tries to
mentally plot the ins and outs of a complicated
junction.
For those for whom your standard
subway map is just not enough , nothing beats a track map,
one with every twist and turn, every switch and side track. Such maps are
hard to come by, and, even if you are able to find them, difficult to read,
usually being drawn for internal use by the electric engineering or
maintenance departments, not the casual
reader.
Now Peter Dougherty has assembled a
detailed, comprehensive and comprehensible book of all of the New York
City subway system's trackwork, and much more. One wonders who this New
Yorker is who undertook such a labor of love, and finds out that he is not
a New Yorker at all, but a Canadian.
The Origins of the
Book In 1975 Dougherty was doing a grade 10 project on urban
transportation for his Montréal high school. Naturally, he has commented
with a grin, he chose to do his work not on his city's famed Métro, but on
the New York subway system. He wrote to the New York City
Transit Authority asking for maps or plans he could use for his
project, and received, in a fit of uncommon generosity from the system's
operator, a huge envelope stuffed with information. Among these treasures
was a track map, 12 feet high and 4 feet wide, depicting the entire system.
Dating from just before Unification, the merging of New York's private and
public rapid transit in 1940, the map showed the entire system, revised to
November, 1967. Long after his project earned
him an "A," the map remained in Dougherty's imagination. Until the Fall
of 1995, however, he could think of nothing more to do with it. From then,
and continuing right up to the present.he worked on scanning and
re-drawing the entire map, and made it available online
at David Pirmann's
nycsubway.org website. Though the
online maps were well received, Dougherty was still asked for a printed
version (perhaps so it could be taken along on a railfanning excursion),
and this book is the result.

You want detail? This excerpt from the
mid-Manhattan portion of the track map book shows some of the level of
detail provided in the printed book. The printed version is sharper than
this scan. Tracks of New York City Subway.
Continued on
page 2
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