New York’s subway system has seemingly gone from bad to worse over the last few weeks. Earlier this month, a nursing-school student missed his graduation after getting stuck on a stalled train for nearly three hours before being evacuated. (In a heartwarming moment, strangers and friends on the train staged a makeshift ceremony for the young man.) And on Monday evening, an F train full of passengers lost power and was stuck underground for at least 45 minutes. The loss of power meant the train had no lights or air-conditioning (though a passenger noted the A/C in the car was broken before the train stopped moving), so the cars, according to people who were onboard, got incredibly hot and steamy.
One passenger, Michael Sciaraffo, documented the ride extensively in a Facebook post. Passengers opened the train’s windows and pried the doors open as much as they could — about “three inches” — to let in some air. People began removing shirts and pants to try to cool down, he said. At one point, someone wrote, “I will survive” on the steamy windows, PIX 11 reports. After half an hour, another train pulled up behind the broken train and slowly pushed it to the next station where it took another ten minutes to clear the crowded platform and get the passengers — which included elderly people and pregnant women — out safely. “The feeling of remotely cooler air felt amazing compared to how it felt on the train,” Sciaraffo wrote. “I never enjoyed the dank, smelly aroma of a train station more in my life.”
Later in the evening, the MTA tweeted that F train service had resumed with delays. The train involved was taken out of commission.
