Public Employee Press

Three years’ work in three months
Local 375 members repair A and C line subway signals quickly after January fire

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

It was a commuter’s nightmare.

When a signal room fire destroyed the “mechanical brains” of the Chambers Street subway station on Jan. 23, New York City Transit announced that full service on the A and C lines probably wouldn’t resume for three to five years.

“This is a very significant problem, and it’s going to go on for quite a while,” said President Lawrence Reuter. But as he spoke, the agency’s engineering staff was already busy at work. The civil service team quickly came up with a solution. Within about a day, the Local 375 members patched together a provisional but safe signal system that allowed partial service on the A line.

Working around the clock, about 30 in-house design and technical workers — with the help of blue-collar employees in Transportation Workers Local 100 — managed to restore full service on the A and C subway lines by mid-April.

“It would have been impossible to return the A and C lines to full service without the expertise of the in-house technical staff,” said Claude Fort, president of Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375. Like the subways, their signal system is a century old. “It takes a staff with a special knowledge and long experience to keep it running,” Fort said. “Our workers knew what had to be done to repair it promptly.”

“Our members worked 24/7 so commuters were inconvenienced as little as possible,” said Behrouz Fathi, chair of the local’s chapter at New York City Transit. Salvatore Tomasulo, an Associate Railroad Signal Specialist III, was among the Local 375 members who responded to the emergency in January and worked on the early part of the project to restore service.

“When our signal engineers arrived the Firefighters were still dripping wet,” Tomasulo said. “With the fire damage, there was no way to send the trains through the tunnel with signals.” Initially, the signal system worked with people underground communicating by walkie-talkie. But workers soon patched together the provisional system with temporary wiring and cables.

Meanwhile, a Local 375 design team at 370 Jay St. in Brooklyn pored over hundreds of drawings that needed to be updated for the new signal system. The fire had gutted a kitchen-sized relay room, which Tomasulo described as the “mechanical brains” of the signaling system at the Chambers Street station.