The tunnel does actually extend past the station for about 400 feet, until Avenue H, but opening this up for tail tracks would necessarily remove the U shaped platform and make the station more difficult for passengers to navigate. This layout also doesn’t leave any room for storage tracks past the end of the station, so trains constantly have to be moved in and out. This is the only station at the end of a physical line that doesn’t have an island platform, which means that riders entering the station have to pick which platform to wait on for the next train. The station has two side platforms, although they are connected at the southern end, forming a U shape. The lack of this third track on the Nostrand Ave line means trains either have to make every single stop along the line (which had it been extended to Kings Plaza or Coney Island would have been somewhere in the realm of 13 stations in a row with no express service) or trains would operate in a skip stop pattern (see the BMT Jamaica Line post for more details on how this works) which can be unpopular with riders and logistically difficult to schedule.Īnother bottleneck on the Nostrand Ave Line, although this would have been negated had the line been extended, is the inefficient terminal design of Flatbush Ave-Brooklyn College.
This two-track set up goes against the IRT’s typical modus operandi with lines in the outer boroughs, which usually have a middle track that can carry express services into and out of Manhattan during rush hours. Secondly, the line only has two tracks, and has no provisions to be widened to three or four tracks. Because of the increase in service that a Nostrand Ave extension would bring to the line, Rogers junction would have to be rebuilt as well, which adds huge cost and complexity to any possible extension. This junction restricts how many trains can move through it at any given time, and is a major bottleneck to this day on the (2)(3)(4)(5) trains. The Nostrand Ave Line merges with the Eastern Parkway Line at Franklin Ave-Medgar Evers College, at a point called Rogers Junction. It was restricted, like many other never-realized extensions, by fiscal crises in 19, the burgeoning car culture of post-war America, but also by more practical considerations. The line would have had two tracks added to it, in order to allow both freight and subway trains to use the line.Įxtensions to this line never happened. One interesting proposal from 1919 would have had the IRT trains using the Manhattan Beach Branch, a now demolished branch of the Long Island Railroad that paralleled the BMT Brighton Line to Coney Island. The proposed extensions usually follow one of two routes, either turning off Nostrand Avenue and onto Flatbush Avenue, and continuing to Avenue U and Kings Plaza, or continuing along Nostrand Avenue to Sheepshead Bay or Coney Island. There have been a surprising number of proposed extensions to the line, dating all the way back to when the line was first planned as part of the Dual Contracts, and as recently as 2016. It was built as part of the Dual Contracts, the period of most rapid expansion to the subway, when the city signed a number of contracts with the two private transit operators, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (BRT) and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT). The Nostrand Ave Line was built in 1920, but what exists today was never meant to be the whole line. A guide to the lines we’ll be traveling along, starting in the bottom right in Brooklyn and heading north
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