New York City Is Getting Rid of Its Iconic Orange and Yellow Subway Cars

After half a century, New York City is retiring its iconic orange and yellow subway cars. This year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) will begin phasing out the R46 trains and replacing them with newer, sleeker models already running on some of the city’s lines.

“Old train cars break down six times as frequently as new cars, so replacing them is more than just a matter of aesthetics,” says MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber in a statement. The decision will help “[make] the system more reliable and dramatically upgrade the passenger experience.”

The MTA recently bought 435 R211 trains—including 80 “open gangway” trains, which allow passengers to move between cars—to replace the older models, which many New Yorkers have grown attached to.

The first R46 trains hit the tracks in the summer of 1975. The 75-foot-long subway cars (marketed as “the finest in the world”) were equipped with rubber floors, fluorescent lights and plastic seating—a departure from older subway cars, which featured rattan seats. The R46 interiors were designed in a “conversational” style, with seats arranged both in long rows and two-person benches.

“The change that’s happening now with this new sort of move away from the kind of conversational to the long-bench seats, and actually more standing room, feels a little bit seismic for people because it is,” Concetta Bencivenga, director of the New York Transit Museum, tells the Washington Post’s Karla Marie Sanford.

As of October, 696 of the original 754 R46 cars were still in service, per the Washington Post. Some commuters are lamenting the model’s coming retirement, saying they’ll miss the cramped two-seater benches.

“Riding the train with girlfriends and sitting smushed together in the back-to-back ‘love seats’ will always have a place in my heart,” Timmhotep Aku, a 45-year-old New Yorker, tells the Washington Post.

Other riders are mourning the loss of the distinctive warm colors of the R46 cars.

MTA is phasing out the subway cars with the Tang seats. I'm gonna need a minute pic.twitter.com/4xXQFW1iSB

— Justin Brannan (@JustinBrannan) December 16, 2024

“One of the things that is interesting about the orange and yellow seating is that it was a departure for our system,” as earlier models had been decorated in cooler colors, Jodi Shapiro, curator of the New York Transit Museum, tells Hyperallergic’s Isa Farfan. The warm tones of the R46 reflected the “environmentalism and a return to nature” in the early ’70s.

The R46s are the oldest cars in the MTA’s fleet, and they’ve “reached the end of their useful life,” according to a recent MTA report. The R211 cars will be equipped with more accessible seating, brighter lights, security cameras and better signage.

Most of the newer cars won’t actually arrive until 2027, so the R46s won’t disappear right away. As Bencivenga tells the Washington Post, the older trains have become icons of the city.

“If you came on this [train] with no other identifying information, … you would very likely be able to surmise that you were in New York,” Bencivenga says. “In the real world, there are very few experiences nowadays that will kind of invoke that sort of visceral reaction, right? When you step on board, you’re like, ‘Yep, got it.’”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.