Transport: Subway Jam

As well as being one of the noisiest and most crowded in the world, the New York subway system is also the safest. Over its 230 miles of track bed, 8,755 electric trains clatter daily on split-minute headway, carrying well over 1,500,000,000 passengers every year, more than three times as many as ride each year on all the big U. S. railroads put together. Until this week no subway passenger had lost his life in a train crash in more than two years. Then one morning a closing car door caught a woman’s hand as a local train started to move out of an east-side station. An excited passenger jerked an emergency stop lever. The train jammed to a halt. Into the rear of it banged another local that was coasting into the station. Toll: two deaths, injuries to 50.