Typetanic Fonts

On January 9, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority - MTA will be officially retiring the “R32” train cars, ending a series of farewell runs organized by the New York Transit Museum that started last week. This caps over a half a century of service on the subways since they were delivered in 1964. Advertised as “Brightliners” for their then-novel use of stainless steel, and sometimes known colloquially as “ridgies” for their corrugated bodies, if you've spent any time in New York in the past sixty years you've probably encountered one. I only lived in New York for about four years, but I quickly fell in love with these old dinosaurs—stubborn relics of the old city that continued to endure while I watched 57th Street’s stately old storefronts come down to make way for pencil-thin towers filled with hundred-million-dollar condos. Now at the end of their 58-year run, the R32s have become unreliable with age, frequently causing delays or running with broken air conditioning (a feature only having been added during the cars’ 1989-90 overhaul). However, I'll still remember them fondly as a rare link to a bygone era of an ever-changing city.

Fonts used: LaFarge by Typetanic Fonts, Name Sans by Arrow Type, and Söhne by Klim Type Foundry.