The subway has been a part of the New York City landscape for over 100 years. On October 27 1904 the first underground train left the City Hall station.Today over five million people ride the NYC subway every day. Thats almost 2 billion passengers a year.The subways current route extends to over 1300 kilometres has 468 stations and over 6000 cars.Each car can carry almost 250 passengers at speeds of almost 90 kilometres per hour. The trains weigh as much as 400 tons run along the tracks 24 hours a day.Each car begins in Brazil where workers weld its body a 23-step process done almost entirely by hand. The roof alone requires 3500 spot welds.Then workers in Hornell New York assemble the subway car also mostly by hand.Each car takes almost 90 days to build. The factory in New York works on two subway cars per day with almost 800 employees working two shifts.Each car has over 11000 parts and 4000 parts are typically fitted in a single day.An ingenious African-American inventor Granville Woods pioneered a power distribution system that is still used by the New York Subway and around the world. Most people know it as the third rail where electricity is transmitted to the train by a sliding shoe that maintains contact with an electrified rail.The tracks of the New York City subway are made from 12 metre lengths of carbon steel just six centimetres wide.Geometry trains ride the rails non-stop taking laser-guided measurements of the tracks. Any track more than two centimetres out of alignment requires a repair.   ... >>