Railroaded: A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway
Fred S Naiden, Rutgers University Press, £21.97

BOB DYLAN’s “all night girls whispered escapades out on the D Train.” Billy Strayhorn told us to take the A Train and “Listen to those rails a-thrummin.”

Author Fred Naiden has his own story to tell about his life in the New York transit system. A porter, a motorman and always a rider, his new book Railroaded: A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway, tells that story.

As if to provide more context, Naiden also narrates a colourful existence as a tenant on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His life there was one that involved him and his wife working, wrestling with barely functioning plumbing and electricity and tenant organising. The characters he introduces are intriguing, unique and probably familiar to anyone who lived (or lives) in New York City without the benefit of a lot of money and a driver.

Railroaded describes a transit system in bad times and worse times subject to the whims of capital and the unconcern of those with the funding (if not downright hatred) regarding the maintenance and expansion of public transit. In his telling, the author provides a history of the system’s mostly private beginnings and its constant battles with governments unwilling to fund it appropriately while supporting construction of infrastructure that assumes the transit system’s dependability and performance.

Naiden’s participation in one of the transit workers’ unions gives him the ability to discourse on the factions within the union and the disputes between the unions. 

Like most unions, these factions often broke down along lines of jobs: bus drivers and subway conductors, porters and office workers, etc. 

They also often reflected political leanings (Naiden is/was a communist), racial animosities in the workforce and the city itself. Of course, the workers and their union were in constant battle with management, various politicians and bureaucrats, all of them determined to keep the union in the place they through it belonged.

Perhaps the most interesting sections of Naiden’s text are those describing the nature of a subway worker’s work. 

He describes cleaning restrooms and trains, keeping an eye out for passengers misbehaving and guiding a train through the darkness. His narrative tells of a worker killed in large part because of poor maintenance due to management’s lack of response and the wildcat work stoppage that took place in the immediate wake of the man’s death.

There are specifics regarding how to guide a train into a station so it stops precisely where the riders are cued to wait for an open train door and details regarding the dangers of the tollbooth attendants when they sold tokens and made change.

After reading some of Naiden’s stories, some readers might hesitate to go down the stairs to the platform again. Personally, I found that the details humanised the transit workers and those they serve even more.

This book is a great tale of the lives of working-class New Yorkers. The characters that move in and out of Naiden’s story are from many walks of life and even more places of origin. The each have a unique biography and perspectives formed by that past and by their circumstances. The search for work and the struggle to keep a job are elucidated, as are efforts to organise tenants and workers to defend their rights and gain power in their lives.

The struggles this daily life entails are told in an approachable vernacular, with humour and an understanding often present in the souls of those who live them. Throughout the narrative, his language is simultaneously proletarian and clever, lucid and clear, like a good subway map should be.

Ron Jacobs’ latest book Reality, Resistance, Rock and Roll is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at [email protected].