Wiring

Now this is how a skyscraper should look. Powerful. Direct. Pointy. None of the new fangled designs with their space age materials compare. Prince Charles agrees BTW.

I am fascinated by the visible wiring everywhere in the New York subway - I mean, does it serve some purpose? Here is what Arthur says: "This question reminds me of when we were trying to put the police radios down in the tunnels of the London Underground. Somebody important (can't remember who) said the London Underground was a victorian rail system run by a Victorian organization.

"In other words a worn out antiquated system run by worn out antiquated people. The other thing I learned was that LU had very little information about what was actually down in the tunnels. In modern engineering, we call this "configuration control", which is the business of understanding how your equipment is configured. This can be challenging when you have a large system spread out geographically with many people working on it. People have to keep accurate records or you pretty quickly lose control. Apparently, it was not uncommon for crews to go into the tunnels at night (the window of opportunity is very short from about 1:00 to 5:00am) to do installations or repairs and discover that the equipment or layout of the equipment that they went to work on didn't match the drawings and they didn't have the right parts to make the repair or the new equipment wouldn't fit where it was planned.

"So to answer your question, I suspect most of the wiring is associated with signaling, that is, determining where trains are (sensors in the tracks) and controlling the "points" or switches and also the safety control systems that can stop a train that runs a red light. There's probably also various communication links between the stations.

"But it's also possible that as new systems are installed, which probably use far less wires, the old stuff is just left in place. Maybe you could reach out of the window and snip a wire to see what happens?

"And one last thing which I thought was a pretty neat piece of trivia. When the fiber-optic boom hit, entrepreneurs were looking for ways to run major fiber trunk lines across the UK and somebody realized that just about the only pieces of land that provided continuous access over long distances were the rail lines. So they all leased space along the sides of the rail lines. "

God bless.