Why the New York subway has numbers, letters and three histories

Visitors usually notice the labels first. Some trains are numbers, some are letters, and a few of the letters share a track with others for miles. It looks arbitrary until you know that the system is really three systems wearing one uniform.

Three companies

The Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the IRT, opened the first line in 1904. The Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, the BMT, was the second private company. The third, the Independent Subway System, the IND, was built and run by the city itself. For years the three operated side by side, each with its own lines and its own idea of what a station should look like.

That ended in June 1940. Over a period of twelve days the city bought the two private companies, the BMT and the IRT, for $326 million, paid for with municipal bonds at 3 percent interest. They became the BMT Division and the IRT Division of one city-run network, and the IND, which the city already owned, became the IND Division.

Numbers and letters

The numbered services, 1 through 7, are the old IRT lines. The lettered services belong to the BMT and IND. The labels survived the merger, and so did a lot of habits. A rider who learned the system in Brooklyn thinks in letters; one who grew up on the Lexington Avenue line thinks in numbers.

The same split shows up in HelloSubway, where the 1 through 7 sit beside the lettered lines. The letters cover a lot of ground, from the long 8th Avenue trunk to the G, which never goes into Manhattan at all.

Same name, different station

This was the part that surprised us while building the game's data. New York names its stations after streets, and streets repeat. There are several stations called 14 St, and several called 59 St, and they are not always connected. On the 7 train, 82 St-Jackson Heights and Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue sound like neighbors, and they are, but they are about 600 meters apart and not the same stop.

Sometimes the opposite is true. Fulton Street looks like several stations on the map, and since the Fulton Center rebuild in 2014 it works as one linked complex. Court Square on the 7, E and G is the same story, three separate stations that were joined by passages.

One line, many services

A single physical line can host more than one service, and a single service can run over several physical lines. The 7 train is the clearest to follow: it runs from Flushing-Main Street in Queens to 34 St-Hudson Yards in Manhattan, 22 stations, and it does not share its route with anyone for most of the way. The A train is the opposite, a long 8th Avenue trunk with branches at the far end.

If you want to practice

New York names are good typing practice for a particular reason: they mix numbers, dashes and long compound names like "Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue". The difficulty rating in this game counts keystrokes, so long names push a line up the scale even when the station count is modest. Start with the L train, which is comparatively short, and work up.