Single Subway Car Enjoys Relaxing Long Weekend Upstate

Godspeed, little guy!

A determined little subway car was seen going fully off the rails this weekend, maybe fleeing the city grind for greener upstate pastures, as you do during sweat season; maybe being "retired" at a "farm" upstate; maybe just being carted back to its parents after breaking curfew to take an unsanctioned joyride. The sighting both excited and baffled witnesses who encountered the car cruising down I-87 on the back of a flatbed truck, a world away from its natural habitat.

Emma Whitford, a local reporter and Gothamist alum, spotted the rogue car—pristine and unmolested by bats or rats or urine—around 1 p.m. on Monday, near Lake George, New York: Immediately, she and the three other city residents in the car with her screamed and "whipped out [their] phones." The subway car was headed south, Whitford reports, presumably to NYC; seeing it out there in the wild "felt a little emotional" for her, a reminder of the natural "subway car life cycle, from points north to the bottom of the Atlantic."

"There I was, zooming back to NYC after a weekend on a forested lake in the Adirondacks, and a shiny new subway car was making the journey, too," Whitford recalled, wistfully.

Whitford wasn't the only one who saw the runaway train go by. Redditor BHaze726 caught it trucking along I-87 "about 200 miles north of NYC," likely traveling—as some commenters pointed out—far far faster than any subway car you've ever ridden on in your life. (The speed limit on I-87 is 65 in New York, whereas the stalled F train you've been sitting on forever hasn't moved in half an hour and probably never will again.)

Inquiring minds demand to know all the subway's secrets, and so we asked MTA spokesperson Shams Tarek what this maverick was doing so far away from home. According to Tarek, it was "a new R179 car being delivered to us from the factory in Plattsburgh, NY," where some subway cars are born. Subway deliveries come into NYC by truck, and the MTA says that 200 of 316 new R179s—used primarily on the J/Z line, but also on the C—have arrived so far. Another model, a subway model of the future, is under construction in Yonkers, Tarek said.

So there you have it, a transit mystery solved. If you spot any more of these untarnished silver beauties out on the open road, please send photographic evidence, and please make sure this song plays in the background of any and all vids you take:

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