Replaced 1987 Number built 450 | Constructed 1957-1958 Number in service (16 in work service) | |
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Similar R21 (New York City Subway car), R15 (New York City Subway car), R17 (New York City Subway car) | ||
The R22 was a New York City Subway car built in 1957–1958 by the St. Louis Car Company for the IRT division. The cars were a "follow-up" or supplemental stock for the "A" Division's R21s and are identical to the R21s. They were the last single cars built prior to the R33 World's Fair cars in 1963-1964.
Contents
Description
The fleet had two-paned storm door windows that could be opened by dropping down the upper window, though cars 7515-24 had single drop sash windows instead. Those cars also had Plextone-painted interiors and pink-molded fiberglass seats.
The R22s were the first cars to have sealed beam headlights.
History
The R22s first entered service on April 13, 1957, starting to replace most of the IRT "high voltage" type cars. The R22s ran in service for most of their service lives on the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line painted in green livery.
Cars 7513, 7509, 7516, 7654, 7675 (the interior of which Bernhard Goetz's vigilante action was filmed in), and 7686 were used as an automatic test train which ran revenue service on the 42nd Street Shuttle starting in January 1962. The experiment ended on April 21, 1964, when a fire partially destroyed the Grand Central Shuttle platform as well as car 7740. Cars 7509, 7513, and 7516 were not in use at the time; thus they were not damaged in the fire, but the cars never returned to revenue service. In 1973, car 7509 was converted to the 64-foot (19.51 m) test car XC375, which operated on various IRT lines until April 1982, and scrapped on July 12, 1996.
Retirement
Though a very dependable fleet, the R22s, being single units, were not rebuilt, but replaced in the mid-1980s by the R62s and R62As. The last train made its final trip on December 30, 1987, on the 5 service with a solid consist of R21s.
The following R22s are preserved or in storage:
Several R22 cars are either preserved, in work service, or in storage:
7486 is currently at the 207th Street Yard. The car was stripped and was to be reefed, but is now awaiting scrapping.
16 R22s were converted to R71 rider cars after retirement, but were replaced with R161s (R33s converted into rider cars) in the mid-2000s and eventually reefed.
In popular culture
A train of R22s were featured in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a 1974 film about the hijacking of a subway car, seen in the film as number 7339, on a downtown 6 train.