Villainous vandals have smashed so many windows on No. 7 trains over the last six months that the MTA may be forced to cut service on the line due to a glass shortage, said MTA sources with knowledge of the matter.
A video shared online Wednesday night shows a train at the Vernon Blvd.-Jackson Ave. station with its windows smashed up.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said crews found three cars with shattered glass around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. A total of 39 windows were smashed on the train, said a transit source.
They found another cracked window on a conductor’s cab on the No. 7 line’s Main St. terminal in Flushing, Queens just after 8 p.m. that day.The incidents were just the latest in months-long smashing spree that’s resulted in no arrests.
MTA officials said crews found 32 different broken windows on trains that rolled into the No. 7 line’s terminals in midtown Manhattan and Flushing between May 1 and June 28. That was a 16-fold increase from the two broken windows crews found on the line during the same period last year — despite a drastic dip in ridership due to the coronavirus pandemic.
When subway windows break, workers pull the entire train from service for repairs. Officials said each window costs roughly $500 to replace.
One source said the MTA has exhausted its supply of spare windows used for train cars on the No. 7 line and the agency’s glass vendors are having trouble keeping up with the destruction.
NYPD sources said cops do not believe the windows smashed Wednesday were part of the larger trend of vandalism. The MTA has a policy in place for crews to send every report of a broken window to the police, said agency spokesman Tim Minton.
This time of year, drunk Mets and Yankees fans are usually the cause of most broken subway train windows, said a transit source.
“In the 1990s we would take the old Redbird trains and put them in service to Yankees games because the glass was really easy to replace,” said the source. “We would have a whole car with like 20 windows broken.”
With baseball stadiums operating without fans during this summer’s pandemic-shortened season, fan hooliganism has been ruled out as a cause for the recent vandalism.
Crews at rail yards sometimes install quarter-inch thick plexiglass windows to keep trains running. But those are a temporary solution, and fresh tempered glass is eventually needed for the windows.
With Tom Tracy
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