New York City Transit’s Efforts Towards Central Control: A Progress Report

New York City Transit (NYCT) began the process of centralizing control in the 1950’s. Individual interlockings were tied together into groupings in the master towers and the process was slated to continue all the way to a single master tower, the Control Center. Unfortunately, the business cycle plays large role on infrastructure, and these efforts stalled during the city’s financial crisis of the 1970’s. With the implementation of the Subways Capital Program in 1984, NYCT began a process of rehabilitating interlockings on the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) until a State of Good Repair was reached in the 1990’s. Some high profile incidents moved the agency to bring in industry experts, and their conclusion was that NYCT needed central monitoring and control to effectively move its 6,000,000 passengers per day. At the time of this study, NYCT had a simple Command Center with radio and telephone communication to field crews, and a rudimentary train location system on the IRT. As will be seen, NYCT is in the final design phase of full central control for the entire system and wants to provide an update on its progress, lessons learned, and some of the concepts the project team has developed.