AB Standard (New York City Subway car)
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The AB Standard was a subway car of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company and its successors.
These cars were commonly referred to as BRT Standards or BMT Standards (for their operator BMT after 1923). The car and shops departments referred to them as AB-types or 67-foot cars. Operating crews called them Steels to distinguish them from the BU cars wooden elevated cars.
[edit] Letter designations
With 950 cars, the Standards were the largest unified fleet of equipment on the BMT.
Over their service life, the BMT Standards carried a number of letter designations depending on the configuration of the cars. Originally, all the cars could operate singly, and were dubbed A-types. Variations of door operation hardware and configuration with non-motorized cars saw some of these cars refrred to as AA or AX cars for a limited period of time.
When a large portion of the fleet was made up into semi-permanently coupled three-car operating units, they were designated as B-types if all cars carried motors, or BX-types if the middle of the three cars was a trailer. In their final years of operation, most of the BX units were converted to B-types by substitution of a former A car for the trailer, and a number simply had the trailer removed to form a two-car unit, called a BT (for "Twin").
[edit] Fleet
One hundred motorized cars were ordered every year from 1914 to 1922 and an additional 50 trailer cars in 1924. Cars 2000-2599 were built by the American Car and Foundry Company and the remainder, motor cars 2600-2899 and trailer cars 4000-4049 by the Pressed Steel Car Company.
[edit] First Use
The first use of the equipment was not until early 1915 when several units, equipped with trolley poles, operated on the Sea Beach Line prior to its formal opening as a subway line on June 22, 1915. From that date, they operated regular subway service.
