Stephen Mallon in MARE

HIER IST ENDSTATION by Martina Wimmer
German to English translation provided by Google

For almost forty years they were a part of the traffic arteries of New York duration of movement. Now at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the old subway cars are laid to rest - as artificial reefs for marine life.

Down there, where they lie, it's quiet and cool. No one who lives there knows their names: R26, R28, R29, R32, R33, R36. More than 2500 cars of the decommissioned New York subway are laid on the seabed to eternal rest, on the east coast along the American continent, from Delaware, and New Jersey, down to North Carolina, Georgia and Virginia. Gutted and windowless they fall down, the hardest workers in the mobile world to the new base, where they are now for ever to serve another population.

Depending on the type, the car is 50 to 65 feet long, three meters wide and 3.70 meters high, they are "luxury apartments for fish", as Jeff Tinsman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency in Delaware, has all contrived to say. A "Win- win situation, "wrote the" New York Times "in May 2011 on the unusual measure. The old cars are now artificial reefs that contain asbestos, which is difficult to dispose of land, but in the water, the state Environmental Protection Agency , harmless. The subway operator is therefore a much cheaper option, the getting rid of a good 40-year-old scrap. And the sea creatures take shelter and benevolent Tern mussels form and need solid ground to flourish. Since 2001 the project has run, to date there has been a 400-fold increase in biomass says Tinsman.

Myths are made of steel to the larder of the fish. When the R32 on 9 September 1964 pulled in for the first time in the Grand Central Station, a 20-member band played in uniform. The series was the first, the outer skin of stainless steel was a classic, fluted horizontally, bright silver, which they called the New York "Bright Liner".

The front car of the former couple's maiden voyage is at the New York Museum of Transportation, two others at an airport in Brooklyn, police forces use it in order to practice terror threats in the subway. A few hundred of them are lying in the sea. Others cars down there wear another part of the history of the city, they had decades of service, as the name attribute. "World's Fair" called a few cars from the series 36 constructed from 1963 to 1964 by the St. Louis Car Company, to go to on line 7 people to the World's Fair Flushing Meadows in Queens, where a progressive faith-and future-happy America 51 millions of visitors with the slogan "Peace Through Understanding", presented a few months before the war in Vietnam escalated.

About 1000 cars on the ocean floor shine in vermilion, the "Redbirds", named after the graffiti-resistant paint, which they have been applied in the early 1980s - the beginning of the end of an era in which in the city their wild anarchy not only on subway cars acting out.

New York's subway network is the longest in North America and one of the largest and oldest in the world. More than 6400 wagons are in use every day, 1.6 billion passengers were transported in 2010. Once you've been in this city, the subway trip will send you home with memories, the smell, the Gerappel, the squeaking and screeching of the brakes when she enters one of the 468 stations. The noise they caused it lies above the recommended by the World Health Organization limits, but who has traveled to New York City to be healthy?

Rather, because of the pictures of the many films that tell the city's story. Hardly anyone gets away without the subway as a performer from - with Gene Hackman that mimics a bull in "French Connection" drug dealer on the train, alongside John Travolta also known as Tony Manero, the bringing in "Saturday Night Fever," a night journey to reason , next to King Kong, who angrily throws with cars around, or next to the "Warriors" on their odyssey through the city. "The Taking of Pelham 123", the classic of all NYC subway films, in which Walter Matthau in a hostage raid free subway passengers in nerve-sapping 104 minutes has been remade two years ago, this time with a terrorist goes Travolta, Denzel Washington plays the savior. The city, knowing the power of pictures, maintains a separate department to meet the requests and desires of the film and TV productions.

Who wants the old moans and groans of the "Bright Liners" on location experience, has a few years time. Abut 200 of them remain in use until 2017, except for the C-line of Washington Heights, Brooklyn. If they are sunk in the sea also, then they would be for a second time, the last of their kind. The program was halted in 2010, due to lack of suitable materials. Younger coaches who were driven to the sideline, are processed with too much plastic, which makes removal of the interior too expensive.
Next, they say, off the east coast, a decommissioned U.S. Navy destroyer will be sunk.

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