MTA refuse rigs collect 90 tons of garbage each day
- ️Mon Mar 28 2011
Some trains are built for speed. Some for comfort. “The Southern” was built for garbage.
When someone tosses fast food into a platform trash bin – or tosses a takeout carton of spaghetti at another rider, as one woman did recently – it winds up on The Southern, one of the eight MTA refuse rigs that is more freight train than subway.
The Southern has three uncovered flatbed cars linked together, each car bearing rows of metal mini-Dumpsters on wheels; two battered stainless-steel passenger cars that have been gutted and converted into bare-bones crew rooms for a team of cleaners and a brassy horn that could wake the dead.
“It’s basically a big tugboat,” Randy Richardson, assistant chief officer of stations, said as the garbage train rolled out of the 38th St. yard in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Thursday night and headed toward its first stop.
The NYC Transit division collects some 90 tons of garbage a day from an endless tide of refuse left behind by 5 million daily riders. The trash has been at the center of a recent straphanger debate over the merits of banning food and drink in the subway, which was triggered, funny enough, by a food fight.
A video was posted on YouTube featuring an angry teenager scarfing down the rare spaghetti takeout meal. Between bites, she trades insults with a sour-faced older woman seated on the other side of the car. It’s not clear how the dispute started – but it ends before dessert.
The teenager throws the Styrofoam container of food at the other rider. Sour Face was more than ready to rumble. It might have gone a few rounds, but a man seated nearby jumped up and separated the combatants.
Some riders say they’d support the ban if it meant a cleaner system in which they are no longer outnumbered by rodents. Some saw it as an infringement of their rights. Everyone else wondered why the hell anyone would eat on the subway in the first place.
The crew on The Southern, meanwhile, has a job to do.
The train rolled out of the 38th St. yard at 9:30 p.m. carrying 108 empty metal bins.
Church Ave., just after midnight, was a typical stop.
The cleaners – Kenneth Nerjes, 55; Tim Geary, 60;Joseph Evans, 58, and Clarence Miller, 61 – lined up at the door as the train rolled to a stop. Doors opened, and they strode purposely onto the platform.
Two men unlocked platform storage sheds while two others rolled empty bins off the flatbed, swapping them with the full containers that are put on the train. It took two minutes.
“We go out like paratroopers,” Geary quipped. “We jump out and do what we have to do. We don’t dillydally.”
The workers can’t linger in a station because the “road” is always behind them, a term used for the series of trains to the rear that are scheduled to arrive at 20-minute intervals.
The crew didn’t get a hero’s welcome from riders, who quickly realized this is not a train they can board.
“I get cursed out. I get the finger. I’ve even been mooned,” motorman Curtis Bullock said. “People have been waiting 20 minutes for a train and then we come in. We break a lot of hearts at night.”
By 5 a.m., The Southern has collected garbage from nearly 40 stations. The train and its crew headed back to the yard in Brooklyn. They’d go home, get some sleep and be back that night.
Another day, another 90 tons of garbage.
Originally Published: March 28, 2011 at 4:00 AM EDT