You can’t buy this at Home Depot.
Beneath the streets of Manhattan, one of the MTA’s giant diesel-powered work trains is reclaiming the No. 1 subway line from the sea.
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The six-car “pump train” has made it to about 2,000 feet shy of the South Ferry station as of Thursday afternoon, its back car on muddy tracks, its nose plunged in about 4 feet of brackish water.
Farther down the line, the water gets deeper and deeper, reaching all the way up to the tunnel’s ceiling as it nears the tip of Manhattan.
In the station itself, the water drowns the platform and extends to the top of the stairs leading to the mezzanine.
The pump train is pumping out all that water “back to the Hudson River, the harbor, back where it belongs,” said Maurice Peck, a train service supervisor in the work train division.
First is the “pump car.” It has a diesel engine that, fired up, sounds like a tank rolling through a village in a World War II movie.
It has three pumps that descend through its metal floor to the submerged tracks.
Each pump removes 1,500 gallons of water per minute.
The water is then channeled through three “reach cars” — gutted passenger cars, each with an 18-inch-wide metal pipe, painted battleship gray and bolted to the floor.
Between the reach cars, the water flows through four smaller fire hoses linking the sections of metal pipe so the train can turn.
The hose runs to the top of a flatbed car, winds upward through the ventilation shaft, and emerges out the sidewalk grate on Greenwich St. at the corner of Battery Place across from Battery Park.
The water rushes a few feet along the curb and down into a storm drain. “Millions of gallons going back to the Hudson River, back to where it came from, back where it belongs,” says Peck.
Behind the third reach car, and the flatbed car, is the diesel locomotive that pushes the entire apparatus to its current location between the Rector St. and South Ferry stations.
The pump train arrived near the Rector St. station at 5 a.m. Tuesday and has been operated by Hydraulics Department workers like David Zboinski and Tommy Dropp since then.
“Everyone is working around the clock. Workers. Management. Nobody’s standing around,” Dropp says.
Workers are catching sleep after long shifts in crew rooms, “on a chair. A bench. There’s some cots. Anywhere you can,” says Dropp, who lives on Staten Island with his wife and three children.
“I haven’t been home in four days,” Zboinski says.
The pump train was custom-built out of some old subway cars, possibly Redbirds from the 1980s.
The first car, with the monster pumps, is stainless steel, but the others are yellow like all nonpassenger work trains used by the NYC Transit division to haul construction materials to work sites, collect garbage and carry out a litany of other dirty jobs.
The pump train was cobbled together at the 207th St. car equipment shop to be deployed when the tunnels flood.
This particular train was working in the same area after 9/11, Peck says, pumping out floods caused when the towers collapsed and busted out the city’s guts.
Each car has an American flag decal, pasted on during that recovery period.
Even with this history, the flooding the MTA faced after Sandy stands out.
“This is unprecedented,” says Zboinski, a 19-year transit veteran.
To get to the pump train, workers descend 30 metal steps from an emergency exit hatch on a Battery Park walkway. It’s pitch black. Total darkness.
They then walk along a narrow concrete catwalk along the single track of the old South Ferry loop that goes to the old South Ferry station.
That track, heading north, intersects with the two tracks leading to the new South Ferry station.
It is at this Y juncture where the pump train is in action.
The smell of diesel fumes is strong and the noise nearly deafening. When the pumps aren’t working, the only sounds are dripping water echoing through the concrete tunnels and the distant hum of large fans, placed above sidewalk vents down the line to suck out some of the fumes. The submerged South Ferry station is still a few days from being reclaimed, but Zboinski, Dropp and their co-workers are getting closer every hour.
“We want to get this water down. We want to get it off the track,” Dropp says, and then turns to fire up the engine again.
