Trainspotting

Sometimes my students in the back row who seem to be busily taking notes are taking anything but.
Last week amidst the crumpled letters, wadded gum, and spitwads of our biology lab floor detritus I found this on a sheet of notebook paper, notes for entering the underground switching yards of a subway junction on the J, M, Z line of the MTA. 

The boy may have graffiti on his mind but it seems as likely the kid is just generally fascinated with trains themselves, their underground tunnels, the dungeon aspect.

I had one tutoring student in 2004 who had a similar fixation.  There was a pile of warning lights and a MTA safety vest by his front door.  “Your dad’s?” I asked him.  “No, mine.  Kind of a hobby.”   (He also had badges and other uniform elements.) For Christmas that boy asked for a blueprint of the Brooklyn switching yards.  He could quote you how often trains ran on the 1 line, both Peak and Off-Peak hours.  For math practice I would make up problems for him to calculate the total weight of all the passengers put together during rush hour and at midnight, or to estimate how many minutes it would take a worker to hang service-change flyers in all the stations of the 4 line (''Express stations or the local too?"  he'd ask.).   In his spare time  he downloaded old retired numbering schemes, i.e. the 1970’s train names when the lines had double letter names (did you know there used to be a BB line, NN line and a MB line?).  Once a year his mom would take him to the MTA Rodeo where transit drivers could win prizes by competitively driving buses and trains around a course at a yard down by Coney Island.
The handwriting on the note is interesting.  The idea of verbatim copying makes this fellow seem like an Irish monk, duplicating scrolls to propegate his train culture (Click larger.)

A large number of good links for the subway-curious is here, esp the history links along the right side of the page.

See also bulletin board for transit workers.

Comments

[Peter]

Differentiation. I can hardly spell that large-school ideal, and you're making up train problems for this kid.

[Victoriya]

casual dress shoes

[Leroy]

Mr. Genest, I was the one who made that thing. It's ironic that anyone would look what's inside crumpled paper, but you never know what you could find.