The subway’s forgotten borough entered the 21st century Tuesday, as the first set of new R-211 train cars entered passenger service on the Staten Island Railway.
The cars — a variant of the R-211s that have been running on the A line in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens since last year — replace the half-century-old R-44 cars that have been traversing Staten Island since 1973.
“These are our subway cars of the future, brought to our riders on the Staten Island Railway,” MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said Tuesday at the railway’s St. George Terminal.
“People have been telling me, and I think we all hear it, that Staten Island sometimes feels like an outsider within the five boroughs,” Lieber said. “But I’m here to tell you that the team at MTA always has Staten Island front of mind.”
The first five-car set of new R-211s entered service after the morning rush Tuesday. The cars are expected to run for a 30-day trial period before additional R-211 cars are put into service on the line. The MTA has ordered a total of 75 Staten Island-capable cars from manufacturer Kawasaki.
In recent years, the current R-44 cars have been averaging fewer than 75,000 miles between breakdowns.
“These cars are the oldest cars in the entire MTA network,” acting NYC Transit President Demetrius Crichlow said of the outgoing R-44s.
“When you talk about the amount of work that goes into maintaining them, and keeping them in service, these guys do amazing work,” Crichlow said of the Staten Island Railway’s workers. “But there’s so much more that we could be doing for our customers.”
Staten Island’s R-211 cars — known as the R-211S variant — are configured to work with the borough’s unique signaling system, an artifact of the line’s history as an independent heavy-rail route. The cars are otherwise identical to the R-211A cars operating elsewhere in the subway system.
The the first five-car set of the new train cars arrived at Staten Island’s Clifton Yard nearly a year ago, and have been undergoing testing since then.
