MTA Staten Island Railway
on the SubwayNut
on the SubwayNut
What is the MTA Staten Island Railway? Is it a regular subway line? is it a railroad? It’s complicated! In reality, it is a bit of both. The SIR operates two different services (along the same route), choose the Express or Local, visit the line’s stations and decide for yourself:
The Staten Island Railway, as it exists today, is a fully-grade separated rapid transit line. The SIR runs along its own private right-of-way, completely severed from the National Railroad System since 1985 as the North Shore Line was slowly abandoned and all freight service to St. George was discontinued. This means it operates outside of normal FRA rules under special waivers. The line today is reported to the National Transit Database as “Heavy Rail” – like the NYC Subway or BART – not Commuter Rail.
Today the railway uses the oldest “subway” cars in operation, modified R44 subway cars, due to different signaling requirements on the SIR. All R44 cars were retired from the NYC Subway in 2011. New R211S cars are currently in testing and scheduled to replace the current R44 fleet throughout 2024.
The Staten Island Railroad has always been directly connected Ferry Service with the train line providing a feeder route for passengers to transfer to the Staten Island Ferry to reach Manhattan. Railroad service to Staten Island began on the line from Tompkinsville (an original ferry landing) to Tottenville in 1860 and was the first time Cornelius Vanderbilt – who became a railroad tycoon under the New York Central Railroad, and richest man in the word – was involved in railroads.
The ferry and railroad were in receivership in 1880 before the line was leased to a new company called Staten Island Rapid Transit Railroad (the question of subway/elevated or regular railroad was complicated even in the 1800s) and partnered with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The full route extended to a new ferry terminal in St. George in 1886, the route trains use to this day. In 1905 the City of New York assumed operations of this ferry, now the Staten Island Ferry as part of the conditions of Richmond County and Staten Island becoming a borough of the City of New York in 1898. From 1860 to 1948, the railway also operated a ferry connection in Tottenville at the other end of the line to Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Operations continued under a private operator until 1963.
Historically, there were 3 different railroad branches on Staten Island. Currently only the Tottenville Branch is in operation, with the North Shore Branch only meeting the Tottenville Branch at the St. George Station, and South Beach Branch diverging just south of Clifton. The entirety of the Staten Island Railway was electrified using third rail like the BMT in the 1920s as part of a proposal to build a subway tunnel from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to Staten Island, with the idea of turning the Staten Island Railway into an extension of the subway with one-seat ride service via Brooklyn into Manhattan. The three lines were grade separated in 1937, with the final sections grade-separated in the 1960s, continuing the transformation of railway to above-ground rapid transit line. Passenger operations remained like the railroads with the line using its own fare structure with distance-based fares collected by conductors on board trains (and conventional railroad ticket offices at stations).
Post-World War II, the Staten Island Railway was nearly abandoned. In 1953, Mounting losses led the Baltimore & Ohio to abandon passenger train service on the North Shore Branches and South Beach Branches do to competition from cheaper city-owned buses. In 1954 the B&O petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to abandon the Tottenville Branch and all passenger rail service on the island, but the City of New York instead decided to subsidize the line.
On July 1, 1971, operations were taken over by the newly formed Staten Island Rapid Transit Operating Authority with the line fully purchased by the city of New York (freight was still handled by the B&O Railroad) this same year. In the 1970s new R44 train cars were introduced (with some LIRR cars temporarily operating on the line just after the MTA takeover since the railway was in such rough shape). The R44s replaced the ME-1 cars that had operated since 1925.
Most stations on the line were rebuilt starting in 1985 giving today’s railroad a very distinctive 1980’s look with colorful railings, little domes above staircases and lots of light blues, pink, orange colors on platform fences. Signage is the same as the subway white text on black with a white line at the top of the sign.
The line like the rest of the NYC subway has very poor accessibility with station’s being subjected to the same “key stations” process in the 1980s and 1990s as the rest of the subway system. These renovations didn’t make stations accessible with just 4 accessible stations from 1993 until 2017, with the only elevator at St. George (the other 3 stations had ramps built). The first intermediate SIR stop to receive elevators was New Drop (in the same frosted glass style as the rest of the subway system) which opened on September 19, 2023. So unlike the MTA commuter railroads, the Staten Island Railway, like the New York City subway system needs lots of work to improve accessibility.
The SIR’s transformation into more of a subway line than a commuter continued after the MTA took over operations in 1971. Fares were still collected by the conductor (including the conductor giving change, like a commuter railroad) along with subway tokens accepted on board until MetroCard Gold was introduced on July 4, 1997, when the line became fare-free south of St. George with passengers needing to pay to both enter and leave St. George.
Had the MetroCard technology allowed (the technology in 2023 doesn't) the conductor to carry-around a portable MetroCard reader for riders to swipe on-board fare collection might have continued. The early 1990s technology made this not possible. In the early 1990s – I remember watching the conductor collect and hand-out free transfers riding Staten Island Railway as a 5 year-old around 1994 – free paper transfers to and from Staten Island Buses were accepted on board trains (something not done, except in very limited circumstances on the subway). SIR trains also have Staten Island bus maps posted on all subway cars, with an SIR strip map, including travel times between stations, printed above the bus map. These are a legacy of the fact that until 1993 the line was operated as part of the New York City Transit Authority's Surface Transit Division (that exclusively otherwise operated buses) until it was transferred this year to the Department of Rapid Transit.
The subway map didn’t include the Staten Island Railway (except for the first few stations starting at St. George in the same blue with a dash format as PATH, Metro-North, NJ Transit and the LIRR) until the introduction of “The Map” in 1998 when the Staten Island Railway was introduced onto the lower left corner of the subway map with an inset. This same map introduced a map of the MTA Commuter Railroads (LIRR and Metro-North) on the opposite side of the map. Today the Staten Island inset is the only part of the subway map (after the connecting service bubbles were removed for key stations) to include bus connections. On today’s subway map there is no label for the Staten Island Railway, it is just a blue line on the map in the same color as the A train.
So is the SIR a subway line? I don’t have a good answer. In 2001 it was absorbed further to be part of the division of Subways under MTA New York City Transit. This was primarily done as a budget trick to avoid bringing further attention to the fact that the SIR is the most subsidized (outside of Access-a-Ride paratransit) MTA service. Its employees though are still in their own union, separate from the subway, may qualify for railroad retirement (my internet searches failed on figuring this out). Its ridership data is still reported to the FTA and National Transit Database as its own agency, the “Staten Island Rapid Transit Operating Authority dba MTA Staten Island Railway.” The MTA Staten Island Railway still posts its own jobs and hires and fires its own Train Engineers and Conductors with just some higher-level administrative tasks done at headquarters by the MTA New York City Transit Department of Subways. It’s employees I believe report to the same HR headquarters in Brooklyn Heights at the beginning or end of their employment.
The line also has different styles of Help Points and its police force is different than the subway’s. The SIR had its own police force until 2005, when its offers joined the MTA Police Department. The MTA police department is a railroad police department formed in 1998 to consolidate the former Long Island Rail Road Police Department, and Metro-North Railroad Police Department. It is patrolled separately from the rest of the NYC Transit System which has its own special division of the NYPD.
