Pretty sure PATH was doing something similar even in 2015 - 2017.
I remember multiple times being annoyed by a short train that would block a station for 10 minutes in the late morning. Police would get off, go upstairs, then come back with presumably money. Maybe I was mistaken why they were there but that was always my impression.
I am sort of surprised they stopped picking up cash this way since it always struck me as smart because no one could necessarily know when they were coming, could vary pick up times, advantage of grabbing money and disappearing into the tunnel.
> struck me as smart because no one could necessarily know when they were coming
But a train is a big, unique thing, and it takes very predictable paths. There are so many ways to track a train. Insiders in the rail company giving you tips, lookouts reporting from the place where the train is parked usually or at trackside, disturbances in the timetable of other trains. Attaching tracking equipment by insiders or intruders.
> could vary pick up times
Why is that an advantage for trains? Can’t any armoured truck do the same?
That's interesting to hear since many years ago I took PATH trains at all hours of the night and never saw such a thing. There's a lot fewer PATH stations (13) than NYSubway (472, which I believe is the most stations on such a system in the world) so it might be easier for PATH to use overland money trucks, especially in NJ.
I never saw the movie, but I saw the actual money train in action two three times in my 20’s. Probably about 3:30 AM - having spent all my money at a bar forced me to take the subway instead of a cab.
Disappointment at first because you saw a train coming, and then realized it was a no-passenger work train. And then it stopped and a couple of guys with long guns got off and stood guard while a couple of others would go and get the money from the booth. Totally cool to see.
I believe there was an attempted robbery sone time in the 80’s or 90’s. The train just pulled out of the station, leaving frustrated criminals, who then shot up the heavily reinforced token booth to no effect.
(Not mentioned in the article is that they collect garbage from platform trash bins the same way.)
In London I always prefer the underground to a cab after a night out.
The car is driven by someone tired yet in a hurry, on busy roads with (usually) lots of turns. There's not much space.
Way outside the peak times, the train is spacious, brightly lit and there's almost zero risk of an accident. 10 minutes walking at either end is probably a good idea after N hours in a bar.
And in London, the Underground closes down altogether overnight, except for some lines running on Friday and Saturday nights. (And that Night Tube service is a relatively recent innovation, starting in 2016.)
It is amazing in general and I hold to the idea that London has one of the finest public transportation networks in the world.
Lived there 5 years and eventually I came to the analogy that the buses were like red blood cells running through the streets distributing people. The metro trains and even taxis formed a sort of almost circulatory system for the city, with the humans being little cells being carried at varying speeds through different veins and vessels.
And I think the health of a city sort of depends on its circulatory system. Where I come from the system doesn’t cover the city adequately and that creates pockets of inequality, problems, low access to the centre. London is highly productive because of its excellent circulatory system.
These people haven't lived in NYC. Even at 10 pm, I'd prefer a cab. I had to travel at 8.30 pm from lower east the other day and I was keeping my heart in my throat for some reason. Not that every ride is like that but some of them make a few of my hairs go gray with all the rowdy elements and fucking hyper autistic crazy people on it.
This was my first thought as well! I've never seen it, but I had a VHS tape with a preview for it at the beginning that I watched regularly, which I still remember.
Wesles Snipes: we're not going to rob the money train
Woody Harrelson: why not
Snipes: because, we're... we're cops
I recall renting this on laserdisc when I was teen and being thoroughly entertained. I'd be surprised if it doesn't hold up as the popcorn flick it's always been.
It's a fun watch but as an adult watching it you definitely notice a lot that could have been done better. The first hour or so is kind of a go-nowhere time waster relative to the main plot.
Atlanta, having a much smaller transit system, has (or had) what looked like an oversized airline food service cart that was moved by regular passenger service between stations. In K-Mart "Blue Light Special" fashion, it had an amber rotating light on top of a pole connected to the cart. IIRC, there were always two armed employees operating it but otherwise the whole operation seemed rather relaxed. Most stations only had kiosks to vend transit tickets. The ones with manned "Ride Stores" might have had a more secure procedure for moving cash in and out.
True they do always seem to be doing track work. But I at least appreciate that they’re proactively doing it, rather than letting it get so bad that they have to shut the system down for months at a time like the Washington Metro.
Hold up. The metro card side of the story doesn't make sense. Why would it relocate to Maspeth Queens, a place that is right in the middle of the transit desert not reachable by subway at all. It's the exact opposite of 370 Jay. Nothing goes there. Is it just cheap parking for armored vehicle lot? Does it have anything to do with the MTA owned non passenger tracks which do go through there? And why was it considered so much more cumbersome to collect fares off the metro card machine compared to the booth sales? So many unanswered questions.
I do wonder if armored trains might be part of special scenario plans related to high value visitors to the UN. Think of it as a modern track 61.
Basically the money train was a dinosaur with operational issues. They moved to armored cars. My guess is that the transition reduced the number of station agents required and reduced shrink, but increased NYPD overtime. (MTA lost the transit police in the 90s)
> Once the MetroCard vending machines came into the picture, it took a lot longer to collect all the money from a given station than it had from just the token booths, and the money train would sit for long stretches as passenger trains backed up behind it. Also, you can’t do money-collection runs at night if you’re doing track maintenance, and these days the MTA is always doing track maintenance.
As more of the network moves cashless, there's also less money to collect. As a regular commuter, I haven’t used cash on the MTA for a couple of years.
When tokens were used, every subway fare resulted in a piece of metal that had to be picked up. At 4.7 g each and about 4 million rides a day, that's nearly 19 metric tons of metal daily for processing, which takes up a lot of space as well.
After tokens were phased out in 2003, then by 2006 you're only dealing with paper cash and coins in MetroCard and booths, mostly just picking up paper bills and spitting out coin change for larger transactions, from the small minority of people paying in cash instead of a credit card. So I'd expect the volume to have become comparatively tiny, and much less frequent than daily.
(Plus since you're dealing with standardized cash rather than bespoke tokens, it might use local banks distributed across the city, rather than a centralized hub.)
You still need to count sort, pull damaged and counterfeit tokens and do cash operations.
So the station management would count their tills, empty machines and prep the bags. They have a time deadline, and when the money train arrives they just roll the whole ensemble into the train. When the tokens went away the volume probably turned into a few sacks.
The volume is huge and the manpower for the armored cars would be nuts. You’re probably talking a detail of 200 police alone for a couple of dozen armored cars.
Cash operations work similar to this without the train. Usually there’s a regional depository bank with a contract with the Fed who centralizes money processing for many banks. I had family who worked in one in the 90s, it was pretty nuts. They would palletize the cash and ship out on tractor trailers. As the business has shrunk, the armored car companies have taken over and they are pretty bad at what they do as they aren’t as regulated.
All this really helps to highlight why municipalities are really trying to get away from cash for transit, parking, etc. It's not cheap or easy to handle at scale and, at some point, the answer to people who want to keep using cash is a shrug.
Ehh… once you have a process it isn’t that expensive. The driver is similar to retail - you can charge more.
Parking and tolls are great examples. EZPass and the various parking solutions are expensive, but they make it easier to boil the frog. That makes it easier to do one shot deals like sell revenue bonds.
The failure of the government to implement digital cash and establish a system where Visa/Mastercard/etc effectively tax all commerce is ridiculous.
Hauling all those coins and tokens up the stairs to street level by hand would have been a huge pain. Many MetroCards are sold in stores, so the MTA doesn't have to handle the cash at all.
For one year Ticketmaster sold Metrocards for the MTA. Ticketmaster didn't like the business because the MTA didn't allow them to overcharge the customers. Ticketmaster just got a 2%-3% commission, the MTA's bulk discount. They had to charge for shipping at their cost, and could not attach ads.
This reminded me that even my 67 year old mom stopped using cash money altogether. I think COVID was het final push.
I will always remember a video about a bus driver who was robbed by an idiot with a shotgun. Risking years of jail time for a few hundred euro.
Well no more robbery in the digital currency age.
Saw both the movie and the real thing multiple times. Subject of numerous a heist fantasy… even today though, the MTA guys collecting money from the machines are escorted by NYPD conspicuously showing their firearms while giving you the eye. The attitude remains.
At least one of the actual trains is in the collection of the NYC Transit Museum (a decommissioned subway station near Borough Hall in Brooklyn), and at least intermittently on display on the tracks downstairs.
I remember multiple times being annoyed by a short train that would block a station for 10 minutes in the late morning. Police would get off, go upstairs, then come back with presumably money. Maybe I was mistaken why they were there but that was always my impression.
I am sort of surprised they stopped picking up cash this way since it always struck me as smart because no one could necessarily know when they were coming, could vary pick up times, advantage of grabbing money and disappearing into the tunnel.