This is turnstile No. 602 in Fare Control Area R238, at one of the entries to the Grand Central–42nd Street subway station. It looks about the same as every other one in the subway system, but it has a special distinction: It’s probably the hardest-working turnstile in the city. That “probably” is owed to some quirks of record-keeping on the part of the MTA — MetroCard swipes and OMNY taps are counted separately, among other things — and the agency can’t absolutely confirm it, but based on the best available data, this is the stainless-steel king.
Its busyness is not hard to figure out. This turnstile is at the bottom of the escalators as you come down from Grand Central Terminal, directly ahead, the literal path of least resistance. Its three arms — known as the tripod — spun forward more than a million and a half times in 2023, recording 831,500 swipes and over 759,000 taps, and presumably made about the same number of turns as people exited. That’s about 3 million turns per year. (Or, to be precise about it, one-third turns, back and forth.)
Our turnstiles are made by Cubic, a company that builds a lot of fare-control systems and has a contract for our forthcoming gates, now in the test phase to replace the old spinning turnstiles. They’ve all been retrofitted in the past few years to accept OMNY, the new contactless payment system, and some have had their electronics replaced over the years, but they are very durable machines. Andrew de Thame, a senior program director at Cubic, tells me that they are built in Tullahoma, Tennessee. (The MTA has a mandate to buy American.) They are obviously built to last, and, he notes with some pride, have vastly outlived their design expectations: “One of the testaments is just how many sheer cycles they do without failure, without maintenance,” he says. “I mean, those things can turn hundreds of thousands of times without a maintainer even needing to do anything.” He points out that the pressure required to pass through the tripod is quite light. “It’s just so well-balanced mechanically that the load on it is very low, and when you use it, it spins very easily. It’s not like you are pushing hard or anything to make the turnstile rotate. The simple actions of the solenoid and the fact that you just don’t have a lot of wear on components there — that’s really what gives it such a great life in the system. Some of those turnstiles have probably been out there over 30 years now.”
Inactive, but evocative.
Photo: Christopher Bonanos
No. 602, in fact, is one of them, and if you look closely at it, you’ll spot one detail (missing from the turnstiles installed later) that amounts to a ghost in the machine. Down at about knee level, on the right side as you enter, it has a little notch covered by a flap engraved with the words TOKEN RETURN.
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