To set the mood, the New York Transit Museum is located in a defunct train station- and you can tell.
Although your GPS will lead you to the front doors of a building, follow the signs around the corner to the nearby subway stairs- this is the entrance to the museum!
Tickets are checked upon entering, but they can be purchased at a teller’s booth if needed for $10 per adult or $5 per child- honestly a really good deal! I was able to get a voucher for free tickets through my local public library, so I had to chat with the teller to get an appropriate ticket to enter the museum before I was allowed in.
The first floor of the museum is largely photography based, with the walls being plastered with photos and descriptions. I found this pretty uninteresting, but if you’re up for a lot of reading, there’s a ton of information in here about subway construction.
Further into the museum, there are some more tactile exhibits- I think they have every turnstile the NYC subways have ever used! I had some fun walking through these, just to test them out, and I thought it was neat to see how cheap the fares used to be since they’re pretty expensive these days.
There are a few panels about fare dodgers, so its nice to know that nothing really changes! The collection of “slugs” actually reminded me quite a bit of the DeFaced exhibit from my visit to Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum.
This museum put a particular emphasis on the Redbird train cars, which were in service between 1959 and 2003. I can’t say that I was familiar with these cars before my visit, but I sure am now.
Further into this floor, there are two MTA bus replicas built into the floors for people to pretend to drive, or just to take a quick rest on one of the seats. I wasn’t too interested in these, so I moved on pretty quickly.
The real draw for this museum is their collection of vintage subway cars on the lower floor. These cars are parked nose to tail with one another, so it’s easy to move through them quickly- some are even attached to one another.
These cars are restored to how they would appear in their heyday, and visitors were invited to explore the cars to their heart’s content. I noticed that a lot of the older cars had a padded wicker seating, which I couldn’t imagine trying to clean these days!
Some cars had seating arranged almost as if they were a conversation area, which seems nuts to me from a modern perspective.
I particularly enjoyed looking at all of the old advertisements that were left in the trains- it felt like a real time capsule! The old subway maps were also fun to look at, since you could almost see the train tracks being built.
The gift shop is also fun to visit. They, of course, have the classic New York subway map themed items, but they also have a few Brooklyn specific patterns, and even a few vintage ones!
All in all, I spent about two hours in the Transit Museum, the majority of which I spent exploring the vintage train cars. For ten bucks, it was definitely worth the trip!
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