The Gateway subway station religiously avoids right angles, making it an irresistible target for abstract photography.
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Gateway Abstractions
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Christmas in the Subway
CAF car no. 4322 in the subway between Gateway and Wood Street. Someone put a lot of effort into decorating it: all the interior lights were replaced with alternating red and green, all the poles and grip rods were covered with spirals of electrical tape, and stick-on Christmas decorations were all over the windows. Whoever is responsible should get a raise and a promotion. In fact, whoever is responsible should be in charge of Pittsburgh Regional Transit.
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Horne’s Christmas Tree
As seen from the entrance to the Gateway subway station.
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Trolleys in Gateway Station
A two-car Blue Line train comes in from Wood Street and heads out under the Allegheny to North Side; a Silver Line car departs for Wood Street. You can see the video at full resolution on its Wikimedia Commons hosting page.
The video is obviously hand-held. There are some very sophisticated video-stabilizing algorithms in our video-editing software, but the parade of identical square windows in a moving trolley makes them panic and jiggle the picture all over the screen, so we give you the video without stabilization.
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First Avenue Station
Above, the First Avenue subway station (which is an elevated station, but it’s on the part of the line we call the “subway”) from First Avenue. Below, a CAF 4300-series Blue Line car comes in from the Panhandle Bridge.
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In a Streetcar
The interior of a 4200-series Siemens car. These were the “LRVs” (for “light-rail vehicles,” which is better than “trolleys” or “streetcars” because it has three more syllables) that were ordered in the 1980s when the subway was built, and then refurbished to match the new 4300-series cars from CAF.
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Gateway Station
Architect Rob Pfaffman gave us just about the most whimsical subway entrance old Pa Pitt has ever seen, and he has been places and seen things. The whole station is unique, above and below the ground. There are no right angles, or at least very few. Yet from a practical point of view, nothing is confusing, and the station works very well for its intended purpose, which is to get us into a trolley quickly.
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Steel Plaza Subway Station
Steel Plaza was designed in the 1980s, and its architecture is an interesting combination of Brutalist and Postmodern styles—the two most prominent materials are raw concrete and polished granite. It was built as a junction station, where the main subway line met the spur to Penn Station, which is not in regular service these days. In the picture below, the main line is on the left, and the spur is on the right.
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Wood Street Subway Station
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Red Line Car in Gateway Station
A 4200-series Red Line trolley arrives in the Gateway subway station.
